<\/p>\n
\u201cJust tell a story\u201d may be one of the least useful pieces of marketing advice ever given.<\/p>\n
It tells you what<\/em> to do, but nothing about how to actually do it.<\/p>\n One campaign can tell a story that makes you realize something. Another makes you feel understood. Another makes you identify with a person or tribe. Another simply overwhelms you.<\/p>\n We call all of these \u201cstorytelling,\u201d then wonder why marketers struggle to use storytelling deliberately with the appropriate match to the market.<\/p>\n A better question is:<\/p>\n What should happen inside the audience when the story works?<\/strong><\/p>\n That gives us four useful engines of impact:<\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n The Discovery Engine produces:<\/p>\n \u201cOh. I didn\u2019t realize that.\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n Its job is to move the audience from one understanding of reality to another.<\/p>\n The customer thinks the problem is X. The campaign introduces something that does not fit. Tension builds. Then an explanation reorganizes everything that came before it.<\/p>\n Imagine a business owner who thinks weak advertising results mean weak copy. They rewrite the headline, change the bullets, hire another writer.<\/p>\n Nothing changes.<\/p>\n Then the campaign introduces another possibility: the copy is struggling because the offer gives the writer little persuasive material to work with.<\/p>\n Suddenly the previous failures look different.<\/p>\n That reinterpretation is the engine.<\/p>\n Discovery works when customers misunderstand the problem, don’t know why something keeps happening, or haven’t encountered the mechanism behind a solution.<\/p>\n The danger is fake revelation. If you promise a startling discovery and reveal something ordinary, the engine stalls.<\/p>\n A genuine discovery changes the audience’s perception.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n The Empathy Engine produces:<\/p>\n \u201cThat\u2019s exactly what this feels like.\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n Here, the customer may understand the problem perfectly well. They don’t need someone to reveal it. They need someone to demonstrate that they understand the experience of living with it.<\/p>\n Compare:<\/p>\n Running a small business can be stressful.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n with:<\/p>\n You answer customer messages during dinner because every unanswered message feels like money leaking out of the business.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n The second works because it contains recognizable experience.<\/p>\n Generic pain language produces little empathy because it could describe almost anyone. Precise details suggest the marketer has entered the customer’s world.<\/p>\n This engine is powerful in markets involving persistent frustration, anxiety, pain, risk, or exhaustion.<\/p>\n But greater suffering does not automatically create greater empathy. Push too far and recognition disappears. The customer stops thinking, \u201cThat\u2019s me,\u201d and starts thinking, \u201cThis is melodramatic.\u201d<\/p>\n Empathy depends on accuracy.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n The Connection Engine produces:<\/p>\n \u201cThese are my people.\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n Some brands become powerful because people want to identify with the characters, attitudes, values, or worlds surrounding them.<\/p>\n The story asks:<\/p>\n Who behaves this way? What do they value? What do they refuse? What does being one of them say about me?<\/p>\n Character can function as compressed positioning.<\/p>\n Show someone repairing their motorcycle in a garage at midnight and you communicate one set of values. Show someone stepping from a chauffeured car into a private club and you communicate another.<\/p>\n The person carries the positioning.<\/p>\n This is especially useful for lifestyle, fashion, luxury, automotive, community, and creator-led brands.<\/p>\n But brands often confuse character with costume. They copy a group’s clothing, slang, photography, or music without understanding the values underneath those signals.<\/p>\n Audiences detect cosplay.<\/p>\n Connection comes from coherent character, not borrowed decoration.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n The Spectacle Engine produces:<\/p>\n \u201cWhoa.\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n Scale. Speed. Sound. Beauty. Motion. Danger. Novelty.<\/p>\n Spectacle works directly on perception, which makes it attractive to advertisers. Bigger cinematography, better effects, dramatic editing, celebrities, exotic locations.<\/p>\n Something is happening: attention.<\/p>\n But attention is not necessarily persuasion.<\/p>\n Spectacle is strongest as a multiplier.<\/p>\n Attach it to Discovery and the revelation becomes dramatic. Attach it to Empathy and suffering becomes visceral. Attach it to Character and the person becomes mythic.<\/p>\n But spectacle multiplying an empty idea still leaves you with an empty idea.<\/p>\n You get the commercial everyone remembers without remembering the company.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n Imagine selling a sleep product.<\/p>\n A Discovery campaign might begin:<\/p>\n You may not be waking up tired because you’re sleeping too little.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n The story reveals a supported mechanism and changes the customer’s diagnosis.<\/p>\n An Empathy campaign begins at 3:17 a.m. The character is awake, staring at the ceiling, calculating how many hours remain before the alarm. Recognition does the work.<\/p>\n A Connection campaign builds a world around people who treat sleep as part of serious performance: disciplined routines, deliberate recovery, carefully designed environments. The product becomes part of an identity.<\/p>\n A Spectacle campaign turns falling asleep into a sensory transformation: noise collapsing into silence, harsh light disappearing, chaos becoming stillness.<\/p>\n Same product. Four completely different creative briefs.<\/p>\n That is the limitation of saying, \u201cLet\u2019s tell a story.\u201d<\/p>\n More importantly: which response?<\/strong><\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n The engines are not mutually exclusive. Strong stories often combine them.<\/p>\n But that does not mean every campaign should use all four equally.<\/p>\n A campaign might use Discovery as the primary engine, Empathy as support, and Spectacle as an accent.<\/p>\n The important thing is knowing which engine is carrying the weight.<\/p>\n Many campaigns fail not because the execution is weak, but because the engine is wrong.<\/p>\n If the audience misunderstands why a problem occurs, empathy alone does not answer the real question.<\/p>\n If customers already understand the problem but feel ignored, another elaborate explanation may miss what they actually need.<\/p>\n A lifestyle brand can make the same mistake by emphasizing features when the purchase is about identity. A weak proposition can hide behind spectacle. I’ve seen that often.<\/p>\n \u201cGood storytelling\u201d is therefore an incomplete standard.<\/p>\n The better question is:<\/p>\n Good at producing what?<\/strong><\/p>\n Before constructing the narrative, decide what needs to happen inside the audience.<\/p>\n If they need a new understanding, think Discovery.<\/p>\n If they need to feel recognized, think Empathy.<\/p>\n If the purchase is tied to identity, think Connection.<\/p>\n If the challenge is creating sensory force, think Spectacle.<\/p>\n \u201cTell a compelling story\u201d is not wrong.<\/p>\n It is simply incomplete.<\/p>\n Before your next creative brief begins there, ask the harder question:<\/p>\n Which engine are we building?<\/strong><\/p>\n RW<\/p>\n .<\/p>\n .<\/p>\n .<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" \u201cJust tell a story\u201d may be one of the least useful pieces of marketing advice ever given. It tells you what to do, but nothing about how to actually do it. One campaign can tell a story that makes you realize something. Another makes you feel understood. Another makes you identify with a person or […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[4,7,6,21],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-411","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-copywriting","category-email-marketing","category-internet-marketing","category-storytelling"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/richardwinser.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/411","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/richardwinser.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/richardwinser.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/richardwinser.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/richardwinser.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=411"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/richardwinser.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/411\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":421,"href":"https:\/\/richardwinser.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/411\/revisions\/421"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/richardwinser.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=411"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/richardwinser.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=411"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/richardwinser.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=411"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}1. The Discovery Engine<\/h2>\n
2. The Empathy Engine<\/h2>\n
3. The Connection Engine<\/h2>\n
4. The Spectacle Engine<\/h2>\n
One Product, Four Engines<\/h2>\n
Most Campaigns Need a Primary Engine<\/h2>\n