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When my father died, over twenty years ago, it took us well over a year to sell his house.  I found piles of junk mail each time I visited the empty house.  Most went into the bin but one caught my eye, from Hotel Chocolat, a business I had not heard of.  I ordered Easter Eggs for my niece and nephew, HC put me on their mailing list and thereafter I received brochures throughout the year.  I bought Easter Eggs from HC for many years but gradually the brochures disappeared.  Their sales migrated online and into High Street shops.

Back in the good old days, if you went on holiday for a week, you’d return home to a knee-deep pile of what we fondly called junk mail.  Most of it would go in the bin but when we opened the mail, we'd typically find a colour brochure and a very long sales letter.  You’d look at the pictures in the brochure and read the sales letter for some reason.  The brochures have been replaced by websites and long sales letters with various online marketing techniques.  Indeed, the long sales letter is still alive and well and living online.  You will have clicked through from an email, most likely, and read it just like we used to do around the fire in the old days.

Another thing we did way back then was fill out and post coupons.  Coupons were in the junk mail but also in newspapers, magasines and leaflets (perhaps thrust into our hands out on the streets or picked up in shops.  Usually, there would be a code somewhere in a corner of the coupon.  When the trader received your completed coupon, they used the code to identify where you found the coupon.  Then they’d send you whatever you’d ordered and add your name and address to the junk mail list.

This is called direct marketing.  You measured the impact of various publications through the coupon codes and calculated the return on investment in each advertisement, wherever and however it was published.  These days this approach is automated online.

Most traditional marketing vehicles still exist, eg posters, TV, radio and cinema ads.  These were and are expensive.  You can’t attach coupon codes to them (at least not easily) so their effectiveness cannot be measured.  This is called brand marketing and aims to familiarise potential customers with the business.  A famous example is John Lewis Christmas ads.  They clearly believe these ads increase footfall but there is no way of proving how effective they are.  Despite the lack of information, larger businesses with huge advertising budgets believe brand marketing is effective. 

It's tempting to attribute art to brand marketing but in reality, both direct and brand marketing use art.  It is present in the sense that all marketing content originates as a work of imagination.  But art operates at a deeper level.  Business owners are people with vision who through marketing seek to communicate their vision.  How they express their vision is the challenge of any marketing campaign.  The direct marketer quantifies the relative effectiveness of 2 or more approaches but those approaches originate in imagination. 

An accountant or a financial advisor might not think of themselves as artists but they must convey what they stand for in their business role.  There is a reason why they do what they do and they have a vision of the change they want to see.  This is what they need to convey to be recognised by their market.  Science assists our artistic expression of what we do.

This is the first in a sequence of posts about Business storytelling.  The second post will be The Art of Entrepreneurship.  If you would like to try out a business-related story and receive feedback from me plus other business owners, please comment below and we can sort out details.

Minerva has returned from her time lost in a labyrinth and has offered to prepare the illustrations for this sequence.  She's promised me she'll go easy on the owls.  I wonder how long that will last?