The core motivation underlying the whole concept of marketing is to build trust in an entity by a targeted community with the use of this ancient technology called words.
The story that is accompanied with the release and roll out of a solution/feature/product to a community needs to be coherent and consistent to the context members in the community is familiar with. A well crafted story will be easily processed and digested in the limbic brain of the community member, thus truggering off the desired set of hormones/emotions.
Lagging awareness of the underlying context, a mis-crafted message will cause cognitive dissonance in the prefrontal coretex of the community member resulting in a mild level of adrenaline release in the reptilian brain. This effect will serve to erode instead of build trust. It is important to spend time understanding the context/worldview a community holds to identify the “problem” you want to solve within that same community before crafting up the story to communicate how the solution will solve that specific problem the community is facing.
Thus the importance of doing ethnographic research as well as always maintaining a clear understanding that the purpose of any organization (for-profit/non-profit) lies not within its four walls but within the community it intends to serve. It also highlights the importance the need to be awary of employing a one-size fits all marketing story without thorough research into variance across all communities being served.
External references
- The Essential Drucker, Peter F Drucker
- Permission marketing, Seth Godin
- Purple Cow, Seth Godin
- Sapiens, Yuval Noah Harari