The startup founder's guide to marketing narrative
How Salesforce, Tesla, and AirBnb are doing it, and how you can do it too
This tweet from Brian Chesky appeared on my timeline a few days ago.
The thread is super-interesting, a vision of world travel as increasingly local, with more stay-for-long vacations, work-from-anywhere trips, and perhaps more mindful, even environmentally better travel.
But there’s also one more thing this narrative is good for: AirBnB’s bottomline. As people go for longer trips and stay in one place, Chesky’s company becomes so much better at organising that for us as opposed to traditional hotels and resorts.
Which is also why he’s spearheading this narrative: He and AirBnB want this to be true.
For the next year or so, at least until another, more powerful narrative arrives for AirBnB, the company will make sure you hear this story. You’ll hear this in their marketing, in PR, in magazine stories, in investor calls, on TV appearances, everywhere. And in time, even if this were not true, AirBnB will have made it to be true, at least for the people who wish to believe. And that would be enough.
This is how narratives take hold, becoming self-fulfilling prophecies.
People remember them, repeat them. And fortunes are made.
In September last year, David Sacks, the founder of Yammer and one of the original PayPal mafia, published an essay on how founders should think about marketing. He titled it Your Startup is a Movement. It’s one of my favourite marketing essays.
Sacks writes:
"The best founders talk eloquently about their mission and the change they want to make in the world. They speak about something larger than dollars and cents. They articulate a vision of the future that attracts adherents. They create a movement.
If you want to understand how Tesla can become the most valuable car company in the world without needing to spend a dime on advertising, while its competitors futilely buy ads, or why 170000 people pilgrimage annually to Dreamforce for the opportunity to be sold Salesforce products, the answer is that the founders of these companies have created a movement.
Obviously, it couldn’t happen if they didn’t also make great products, but marketing is the amplifier of all their other efforts. If sales is like hand-to-hand combat, great marketing is like having an Air Force."
The essay is detailed, and Sacks goes into specific action items for founders in how to build a narrative and wield it to their advantage.
But one of the most important points, and one which I think will always be relevant for founders is his call to attack the status quo.
What does he mean by that?
Over to Sacks again:
"Your startup has an opponent, but it’s not your competitors; it’s some version of the status quo. You need to name this enemy. Marc Benioff convinced the world that software was the enemy. He articulated an 'End of Software' mission, and created a NO SOFTWARE logo and a phone number to go with it: 1-800-NO-SOFTWARE.
At my company Yammer, we identified our enemy as a rigid org chart that trapped information, stifled dissent, and created bureaucracy. Our description evolved, as we were constantly searching for better ways to articulate the problem. The more vividly you describe the need for change, the more obvious the need for your product will become.
Inevitably, as your startup becomes more successful, it will attract competitors. Don’t fall into the trap of seeing copycats as the enemy. Treat them as validation that the world is moving to your point of view. When a legacy car company introduces a new electric car, Elon (Musk) welcomes them to the market. The real enemy is fossil fuels."
This last Friday at office, I was asked by a founder about helping him build his company’s strategic and marketing narrative. He had been following Andy Raskin, he said, and he knew broadly what he wanted to do. But he needed help with the story.
Even 2 years ago, this would be the farthest thing from founders' minds. But founders have now realised that narratives can be huge differentiators in crowded markets, brand moats that can be difficult to cross for new competition.
I know at least one founder who uses the narrative word almost every time she talks to her branding team, and is very much at work constructing a story for the product and company she is building.
But not everyone is convinced.
One immediate pushback I get with some founders is that all this narrative building, category creation stuff is for the US, and irrelevant to India. The contention is that the US market is more receptive to such myth-making. This is patently wrong.
For example, here’s a screenshot essay I shared on Twitter about how Freshworks built up its narrative.
Here’s another time I noticed how Ola’s Bhavish Agarwal has become exceptionally good at constructing narratives around what he wants to sell.
Okay, cool. But how do you do that, you ask. Good question. I love Andy Raskin’s 5 point framework, which goes like this:
Name a big, relevant change in the world.
Show there will be winners and losers.
Tease the promised land.
Introducing features as magic gifts.
Present evidence that you can make the story come true.
And here’s how I actually applied this framework once.
But remember that there’s no correct answer. Because we all work in different markets and make different products, there’s no one-size-fits-all model. The best way to approach it is using case studies and examples like above, and adapting your idea to the framework available.
Finally, don’t ignore the distribution part. You’ve created a great story that people will be interested in, inspired by. Great. But how do you get it to reach as many people as it can? This is where the founder comes in. Propagating the narrative is the founder’s job, no one else’s. There’s a reason all the above examples I gave involve the founders getting loud about the story.
Because if the founder isn’t telling the story, no one will pay attention. And this is what all of this is about: Attention.