StickyARC
StickyARC
Preface
The CAC Crisis
Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you know that the shit has been hitting the advertising and marketing fans lately. Thanks to a global trend towards greater user privacy protections in the form of the GDPR, Google killing the third party cookie, and most recently, the iOS 14 update, it’s getting harder and harder to find and target the right audience.
People are confused. Some marketers are even considering giving up. Maybe you're one of them. They're spending down huge budgets and not getting results. It can feel really heartbreaking, especially for small businesses. To many people, it seems like the four horsemen of the Facebook-pocalypse have been unleashed.
In Enter the Dragon, Bruce Lee famously describes his kung fu style as the art of fighting without fighting. In a similar vein, we’re going to suggest something that may shock you. In fact, swallow your coffee before you read the next sentence, because . . . the first thing you have to do to master Facebook is: Forget about Facebook.
Say what?
Now that iOS users have the ability to opt out of app tracking, they’re doing just that — in droves. In fact, mobile app growth platform that people give apps permission to track their behaviors just 25% of the time, severing a major data artery that the ad industry has relied on for years.
Facebook, once the advertising lifeblood of many businesses, is getting harder and harder to crack. The result? Ad spend goes up, Return on Ad Spend (ROAS) goes down, and Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC) goes through the roof. You don’t need us to tell you that’s bad news.
We’re going to tell you something shocking. You’re going to need to forget Facebook (or your advertising channel of choice) for a little while.
In this new world order, creative is king (or queen). Story is now the most important tool you can wield to stand out in a loud, crowded, and sometimes impossible-to-navigate space. But we’ve observed that most people don’t understand the intricacies of how story works and why. They’ve cut their teeth on metrics, numbers, and purely quantitative techniques. They’re used to a sea of stats and quantitative data, and so they’re starting to drown because they need to learn to swim in an ocean of story.
That’s exactly what we’re going to show you how to do: How to tell the stickiest story around, one that will cut through the noise and act like a persuasive dog whistle to reach your audience.
Holding Out for a Hero
Clearly, you can’t control what Google, Apple, the EU, or anyone else decides to do in terms of limiting your ability to target an audience. But you know what you can control? Your story. In fact, it’s the piece of your strategic puzzle that can have the greatest impact on your CAC.
Telling the right story to the right people is how you organically foster a following. It’s how you build your list. And you cannot survive in the modern digital economy without one. Read that again: You cannot survive without a following. Literally no brand can be successful without an ever-growing audience of enthusiastic, social media sharing, content generating, love-to-love-you fans. Even if your audience only grows by a few fans per month, that’s enough growth for some brands survive and thrive.
Compelling storytelling is literally the best and only CAC-lowering way to attract an audience and get them to care about you. It’s how you’ll build that crucial following you need. Stories are, in a word, everything. Think about the last time you binged a whole series in one weekend on Netflix. Why did you do it? To be a better person? To have an excuse to lay on the couch all day? Because you couldn’t get enough of those sexy hard facts? No, of course not! You did it because you were invested in the story. You identified and empathized with the hero (or heroine). You needed to see how they’d overcome their challenge and succeed. It mattered to you. That’s true whether you binged a fictional story or a documentary. Frankly, documentaries that aren’t wrapped up in a story are pretty boring.
Take The Thin Blue Line, the award-winning film by celebrated documentarian Errol Morris. The true story of a gross miscarriage of justice, Morris argues that Randall Dale Adams was wrongfully convicted of murdering a cop in Dallas County, Texas. But the film wasn’t placed on more top 10 lists than any other film of 1988 because it offers a dry presentation of the chain of events, or a dull recitation of facts.
Instead, it uses dramatic recreations and interviews to wrap the facts of the case within a gripping heroic story structure, complete with a wrongly accused hero, a seemingly insurmountable challenge, and a squad of villains in the form of a corrupt justice system. The story is presented in such a compelling way that the movie was instrumental in exonerating Adams the year after it came out. The point here is, he or she who tells the best story wins, every single time. That’s true in filmmaking, it’s true in criminal prosecution, and it’s true in marketing.
🧠 Story matters very much to your brain. In fact, neuroeconomist Paul J. Zak an emotional connection to a good story causes the brain to release oxytocin. Oxytocin feels good, and increases a sense of trust. Who wouldn’t want their brand to be associated with a trust-inducing feel-good chemical? Plus, as Zak points out, “Narratives that cause us to pay attention and also involve us emotionally are the stories that move us to action.” You know . . . like clicking . . . and converting. And surviving.Picture this: You’re a monkey. Your survival depends on your ability to swing from tree branch to tree branch high above the forest floor. If you mess up, if a branch breaks, if you choose wrongly — splat! — at best you’re just a flattened monkey burger. At worst, you’re still alive and waiting for the hyenas to come feast on your monkey flesh. To further complicate matters, you’re a little... shall we say, husky. To put it bluntly, you’re a chunky monkey. And that means if you want to live, you’ve got to be pretty discriminating when it comes to the branches you’ll entrust with your life.
With stakes that high, you’d better believe you’d start spotting patterns. Which types of branches break the most? Avoid! Which trees are certain to hold your weight? What works? What doesn’t? You’d begin telling yourself stories about the future: If I grab that branch, I’m a goner, remember what happened to Great Aunt Chippy? Oh but look over there... that’s my path to safety, friends, glory, and bananas. Yessireeee, Bob.
Guess what?
This isn’t just some silly story we made up. An ancestor of yours was doing pretty much (almost exactly) that very thing. Turns out our craving for story isn’t some modern adaptation on the part of our brains to eBooks or movies or technology. It’s part of our DNA. The medium of delivery changes; the brain remains the same.
🧬 It's true: Once upon a time — nine-ish or so million years ago — there was a chubby hominid primate called Oreopithecus Bambolii. We’ll call him Oreo for short. Oreo lived peacefully among the treetops in what is now the Tuscany region of Italy. Life was simple and bucolic, with no predators to trouble him.
But because Oreo was rather full figured for a tree-dweller — weighing in at roughly 90 pounds — he couldn’t just swing mindlessly from branch to branch like his more svelte primate cousins. To get from Point A to Point B in one piece required a bit of forward thinking, just like your imaginary chunky monkey alter ego. Failure to plan could result in a one-way ticket to Splatsville, so Oreo had to carefully weigh his options and clamber very s-l-o-w-l-y through the tree canopy with great caution and care.
To survive, Oreo developed a sense of self and his relationship to his surroundings. He learned to imagine the outcomes of his choices. Essentially, Oreo told himself stories — about himself. And Oreo the Proto Storyteller is an ancestor of ours, one we share with chimpanzees, orangutans, and gorillas. He lives happily ever after through the modern primate family., Frank Tallis summarizes the profound effects of Oreo’s DNA on our modern day story-craving brains:
The special circumstances that favored the evolution of sophisticated self-awareness might have simultaneously necessitated the evolution of narrative intelligence. Consequently, self-awareness and narrative intelligence overlap to a considerable degree. We have a natural inclination to think of ourselves—our past, present, and future—as an ongoing story.
Master the right story, and you'll win hearts, minds, and souls. It's biology.
Just the Facts, Ma'am
You know how you’ve avoided your Aunt Marge’s Thanksgiving for the last 4 years? Or the fact that you refuse to talk about politics with your parents anymore? Or how about the time you had to block that friend who thinks the Earth is flat? Look, you tried. You really did. But you had no choice: No matter how many facts, statistics, logical arguments, and actual proof you helpfully provided, it fell on deaf ears. People simply refuse to listen to reason.
You probably blame a number of factors for this sorry state of affairs. Aunt Marge is narrow-minded. Your parents are stuck in their ways. They listen to That Awful News Channel. Maybe your friend isn’t all that bright. It’s the fault of that a-hole [insert politician’s name here]. Maybe so. But guess what? That’s pretty much the same sort of thing they say about you. You can’t both be right.
Or can you?
Here’s the thing. When you try to convince someone to change their mind about something, your natural inclination is to bombard them with facts. How could they possibly deny the incontrovertible evidence that your way is the right way? Confoundingly, it never seems to actually work.
But then again, how well does that approach work on you? Has anyone ever changed your mind by subjecting you to a recitation of numbers, facts, and statistics? Think about it. We’ll wait.
Turns out the real barrier to progress here isn’t your stodgy Aunt Marge, your dim-witted former friend, or even that fake news channel. Nope: The enemy of persuasion is cold hard facts. Facts are boring. They’re dry. They’re forgettable at best. But at worst? They feel like an assault on who we are. When someone counters our deeply held beliefs with a recitation of facts to prove that they are right? It’s insulting. And it’s the opposite of compelling.
So are we saying that it’s impossible to ever compel someone to think or do something? No! The simple rule is this: If you really want to win hearts and minds (and conversions!), attract them with your captivating and compelling content instead of beating people over the head with your superior knowledge of facts.
Think of you and your brand as a master storyteller sitting around a campfire. The trick is to attract people to join you around the fire by telling a story that draws them in — instead of telling them that it’s 72% warmer around the campfire.
Every time you are tempted to “persuade with facts” instead think “attract with stories,” especially when it comes to your communication with your audience.
Stanford marketing professor that stories are remembered up to 22 times more than facts alone. You probably won't remember that fact. But try to remember this part of her advice on winning hearts and minds:
When data and story are used together, audiences are moved both intellectually and emotionally. When telling a story, you take the listener on a journey, moving them from one perspective to another. In this way, story is a powerful tool for engendering confidence in you and your vision.
She's hardly alone in this assertion of the power of story. Renowned cognitive psychologist maintained that stories and narrative are much more powerful vehicles to communicate, explain, and convey the meaning of human experience and thought than any logical or legal argument could possibly be. As such, they’re also the most powerful way to persuade and inspire your family, friends... oh yeah, and your target audience.
We’re not saying that you should spin a yarn of fictional tall tales. Of course you can (and should) plant facts and truth within a good story, but they must form an essential part of the narrative in order to be memorable or persuasive.
🍼 Case in point: two very different types of messaging centered around avoiding unwanted pregnancy. One group watched a news program created by the National Campaign to Prevent Teen Pregnancy. It was replete with facts, interviews, and harrowing statistics. The other group watched an episode of teen drama The OC, in which two characters go through the gut wrenching consequences of an unplanned pregnancy. Women who saw the news program remained entirely unchanged in their previously held views on birth control. Women who watched the fictional story, however, reported that they were more likely to take steps to prevent unwanted pregnancy.You can't please everyone
Men, on the other hand, had a different opinion. Before we dig into the male’s take-aways from the OC episode, we need to revisit some more neuroscience.
🧠 Researchers at McMaster University learned this by scanning the brains of participants using fMRI. They gave them short, action-oriented headlines like “Surgeon finds scissors inside of patient" or "Fisherman rescues boy from freezing lake." Then, they asked the participants to depict the stories of the headlines using either speech, gestures, or drawing (like in a game of Pictionary). No matter what form of storytelling the participants chose, the study found “the brain networks that were activated were the ‘theory-of-the-mind’ network, which is affected by the character's intentions, motivations, beliefs, emotions and actions.”We already know that a narrative has resonance when it aligns with our beliefs — and we can see ourselves in the shoes of the other person. That’s empathy. Do men not have empathy? Do they have less empathy? No. In some cases, they simply have diverging beliefs from women.
Interestingly, the men who watched The OC episode were less likely to want to use birth control than before they watched the program. Researchers chalked that up to the fact that the men reported not being emotionally invested in the characters.
That’s an important point, and also a very good lesson about how your message needs to resonate with your target audience, and may not persuade those outside your intended group. And that’s okay.The truth is, we are all invested in our own beliefs. That’s one reason dog whistle politics work. The dog whistle speaks to and reinforces who people already imagine themselves to be. Yeah, we know, dog whistle politics are kind of evil. But, it’s effective for a reason. A particular group of people hears the specific, tailored message that’s intended for them (no matter how wrong-headed or reductionist that message may be) while it flies under everyone else’s radar.
❓ But what if you could harness that dog whistle’s power for good? Instead of appealing to humanity’s worst urges and fears, how might you use the power of story to tap into and inspire positive emotions? To attract and hold attention with your gripping narrative? To help people imagine a way to be better, to do better. To skillfully persuade them to try something new. To believe in something different — or at least give it a shot.Learning how to be heard in all the advertising noise is pretty much a basic survival skill these days. And you’ve likely noticed that some people seem to attract more followers effortlessly, while others scream and shout themselves hoarse as onlookers ignore their efforts.
Is it magic? A crapshoot? Those darn fickle customers? Did the companies basking in all that customer attention go to the crossroads and sell their souls? No! Of course not. (Well, maybe some of them did make a deal with the devil, but we promise that you won’t have to.)
You just want and need what everyone else is fighting for: attention. And there’s only so much to go around. At this point, we're going to ask that you, dear reader, stop thinking about customer acquisition in the same tired way everyone else does. Instead of fighting for attention by any means necessary, strive to be so attractive that your audience will be magnetically drawn to you and, specifically, your story.
So how can you do that? How can you become irresistible? How can you make sure your whistle brings all your dogs to the yard? How can you get out of your own way and stop mistaking boring, off-putting, forgettable, and sometimes infuriating facts for stories? And more to the point: How can you do that and lower your CAC in the process?
What to Expect
In this book, we’re going to attack this burning question using science to understand — and influence — customer behavior. Not only that, we’ll show you how much easier it is to attract customers by transforming your funnel or flywheel into something we call a “Sticky Story ARC.” If you're familiar with sales or marketing funnels, it's similar to one of those funnels that draw in an audience and get them to stick around. It's like that... but much stickier.
The “ARC” in our Sticky Story ARC stands for Attract, Resonate, and Compel. Each word corresponds to its own section in this book:
In “Part One: Sticky Attraction”
We’ll delve into the Sticky Economics (“Stickynomics”) of how to Attract customers and lower CAC by showing you how to understand and prioritize their unique and pressing challenges.
Then, in “Part Two: Sticky Future”
You’ll learn how to differentiate yourself with a sticky promise that will show your audience you’re the key to the better future they’re longing for. This promise is your Sticky X-Factor: the heart and soul of a story that will Resonate with your audience and ignite their curiosity to learn more.
Finally, in “Part Three: Sticky Reason To Believe”
You’ll learn how to Compel your audience to take a chance on beginning a relationship with you.
Put that Sticky Story ARC together and you get a sticky flywheel that generates lower CAC, higher LTV, and a larger following of dedicated fans. By the end of this book, you’ll also have a way to show your stakeholders and team that you have a rock-solid plan to create and test a Sticky Story that will stand out and be remembered in a world full of noise.
But first, let’s get one thing out of the way . . . .
Sticky is as Sticky does
You’ll notice that we use the word “sticky” a lot. We love the concept of stickiness. Why are we so obsessed? Well, when a message sticks, it’s bookmark-worthy, memorable, and easy to share — as close to unforgettable as you can get. Stickiness is the ultimate level of attraction. Your followers stick around. Eyeballs are glued to screens. Butts are firmly adhered to seats. Dry facts, on the other hand, slip through our story-driven brains. Facts are slippery unless carefully cemented using the power of sticky stories.
But we’re not naïve. The word “sticky” or any of the associated science won’t solve all your problems. Anyone handing out silver bullets is is probably peddling snake oil. You should also know that we aren’t claiming you'll be able to establish some Absolute Quality of Stickiness. The Sticky ARC only allows you to prioritize your best ideas. No offense, but if you don’t think critically and put in the hard work to craft and improve your ideas, we can't help you. As the old maxim goes, “garbage in, garbage out.”
That said, we believe that there are some concepts we can all learn that might make all of our marketing lives a little (or a lot) easier. And the Sticky ARC will 100 percent help you hone and prioritize your idea roadmap.
Like an actual story arc, each part of our Sticky ARC works together, like puzzle pieces. They inform one another, and as such none of them can exist or make sense without the other. In fact, once you figure out and test your sticky Reason to Believe (“RTB”) at the end of this book, we encourage you to go back to the beginning and tweak, iterate on, and improve your Stickynomics again (and again), getting that CAC down even lower each time.
And now . . . on with the show!
Part One: Sticky Attraction
Channeling Facebook
At some point you’re going to spend time and money to reach your audience through inbound and/or outbound marketing channels. We’re not going to get into the nitty gritty of how to launch the optimal multi-channel go-to-market campaign. To keep things simple, we’re going to talk primarily about Facebook — a social channel most people are very familiar with. You might even have a profile and more than a couple friends on the platform. Facebook will be our punching bag for this next section. If you plan on reaching your customers through Facebook, this will speak to you directly. If you’re thinking of reaching your customers through other channels, think of Facebook as a stand-in for those channels.
Forget Facebook
Remember when we said you’re going to have to forget Facebook (or insert-your-favorite-GTM strategy). Here’s why you should put a pin in that thought. You need clarity. Because. They need clarity. From you.
To find clarity, it’s helpful to take yourself out of your day-to-day and suspend your own reality. Stop thinking so far down the road. Start thinking about the essential elements of storytelling. Spend more time deepening your knowledge of how your audience makes sense of the world. Understand them truly, madly & deeply. If you don’t know who they are now, you’ll be less likely to be the one to help them make sense of their future. You need to compel them to see a bright future — one with you in it. If you’re not in it, you didn’t stick.
Let’s jump back into the world of marketing, where the excrement is hitting the spinning Facebook fan. And, people are starting to come to grips with the new reality of acquiring the attention & trust of an audience (a.k.a. customer acquisition).
As one beleaguered entrepreneur on Reddit said:
“We're a small business advertising one product in a craft supply niche. Our product is the best on the market and is also competitively priced. Our brand has had a social media presence since 2014. This past month it just seems like FB ads are nothing but a giant black hole for us to throw money in.”
To make matters worse, more people are working, shopping, and building businesses online than ever. That means the price of attention is higher than it has ever been, and it's getting harder to attract the right audience. There’s definitely some decent practical advice floating around out there in terms of how to navigate the new Facebook waters. But while things like “optimize for purchases” and “simplify your ad structure” are sound pieces of guidance, you'll never ever get there without a Sticky Story. As we’ve seen, that’s just brain science.
The first thing you have to do in order to master finding and converting an audience is to stop fighting for attention and forget about converting an audience by tracking and optimizing for conversions, especially through Facebook or Instagram. Because when all you do is try to crunch numbers and obsess on the end goal, you lose sight of the method you need to employ if you hope to actually accomplish that goal. Or, to quote another great Lee line from Enter the Dragon: “It’s like a finger pointing to the moon. If you concentrate on the finger, you miss all that heavenly glory.”
The story is your heavenly glory that will point back to a lower CAC.
🌙 As you’ll soon understand, your real road to sticky CAC looks something like this:1. Forget conversion optimization
2. Win hearts & minds
3. Tell the right story that...
After you have the right story, you can think about conversions, Facebook, and Instagram again. But you may be shocked to find that you don’t even need to spend or optimize all that much after you nail down your sticky story. Some brands don't.
Most of the practice of conversion optimization, CAC, CPA, Instagram, Facebook, and all the nitty gritty of “how do I optimize my campaigns?” is built on top of the faulty assumption of, “if I convince people of the facts and benefits, they will convert.”
Persuasion by strong-arm convincing will never change previously held beliefs. Climate change. Politics. Pollution. Exercise. A new brand of coffee. It’s not simply a matter of persuasion through facts. It’s about reflecting the innermost desires of your audience so they can literally see themselves differently. That’s fostering empathy with a story. It’s about stirring the emotions. It’s more persuasive than trying to convince with facts and benefits!
A lot of digital marketers tend to approach storytelling (when they do approach it) with trepidation. They’re used to data and numbers, and storytelling seems like some strange uncrackable code. Some people even believe that the best storytellers have a crazy magical ability to understand what pulls the human race in and keeps them engaged — keeps them following along, on the edge of their seat. The magic ineffable superpower of people like Walt Disney, Steven Spielberg, and John Lasseter.
🚜 We know that brand storytelling has been around for a long time. We certainly didn’t invent it. The first example of corporate storytelling is probably The Furrow magazine, published by John Deere in 1895. It wasn’t used to sell Deere equipment (not overtly anyway); instead, it ostensibly sought to educate American farmers on new technology and how to become better businessmen. In other words, The Furrow was doing early content marketing.But we promise: It's not magic. It's science. Not Einstein-level science, but principles of human evolutionary psychology that anyone can understand to spin better yarns and pull audiences into their web. In short, you don’t have to be Stephen King to tell a sticky brand story.
Sticky Story Structure
Story over facts. Emotions. Empathy. Great, but now you’re wondering: “Where do I even begin?” It’s really all about understanding the right structure.
You’re probably familiar with the hero’s journey, especially if you’re a marketer (or former English major). The hero’s journey structure is the most foundational and beloved story structure there is. Every movie or book you love is a variation on the basic structure — Harry Potter, Wizard of Oz, King Arthur, Buffy the Vampire Slayer. They’re all heroic journeys.
Your users are the heroes of your story. You, your brand, and your company are supporting characters. Your hero has a challenge (a.k.a. the villain) and they want to defeat it. Your heroes long to be better at their job, have more fun, make more money, look better, smell better, be more adored by their significant other . . . . You get the idea. You are their guide. The challenge needs to matter. The intensity and urgency of the hero’s desire to overcome their challenge has everything to do with how intensely your audience of heroes will be attracted to your solution/story.
The most memorable stories — the ones we’re attracted to, return to, and remember — speak to our emotions. Stories that spark an emotional connection resonate deep in our minds. They make that delicious oxytocin we talked about. Our brains — the frontal and parietal cortices, to be specific — literally light up when we begin to form an emotional engagement with a story. When we can identify and empathize with the hero of a story — when we see ourselves in his or her challenges, struggles, and desires — a powerful empathetic connection reaches out through the noise and grabs us by the collar to compel us into action.When you focus on listing out facts rather than weaving a story, you stop making it about your heroes and instead make it all about yourself, and that’s when you lose them.
Think about it — Oreo was the hero of his story. His challenge was navigating the forest without crashing and dying. Imagine if you could go back in time and show him a story about a primate just like him, one who overcomes this challenge by using your Husky Boi Forest Flinger. He would be rapt. He’d empathize with that hero and hand you all his bananas to get his paws on that device. If, on the other hand, you barraged poor Oreo with a list of facts & figures about how many primates were saved last year with your device, he’d probably make like a tree and leave.
One caveat:
When we say that your customer is your hero, from a storytelling perspective we mean singular hero. Your story cannot be about a crowd or a group or a mass market of heroes. Otherwise no one will care.
That’s a literal brain chemistry fact.
🧠 In , scientists found that “The core empathy network including the medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC) was more engaged for events happening to a single person than those happening to many people, no matter whether the events were emotionally neutral or negative.” They concluded that the mPFC may be the actual neural marker that explains why we tend to feel more indifferent to the suffering of large numbers of people, yet respond with empathy to the suffering of an individual.To put that in Stickynomics terms, you can only get people to care about you when you give them one and only one hero with whom to empathize.
Let’s look at an example of a D2C product that is slaying the story game and amassing an impressive, CAC-lowering word of mouth following: Omsom.
Part One: Sticky Attraction
Killing it: Omsom
Omsom makes a deceptively simple product: starter packs for Southeast and East Asian meals. The D2C specialty food market is a crowded space; direct competitive alternatives include other D2C Asian food brands like Fly By Jing’s Szechuan seasonings and hot pot starters, Xi’An Famous Foods’ Hand Ripped Noodle Kits, and Huel’s Hot & Savory Vegan Asian Meals. Widen that circle and other competing alternatives include all home delivery meal kits with Asian options — or even takeout. One big reason a consumer might try any of these options is because they want to enjoy quality Asian cuisine at home. What really makes Omsom stand apart from the crowd is how well they weave a riveting story into their simple yet unique offering.
Picture this: You’re bored. You’re mindlessly scrolling through your Instagram feed. In between the cute kitten videos and posts of your friends’ vacations, you’re offered one product ad after the next after the next. They all tend to blur together: They look alike, they sound alike, and they all seem to be selling some variation of food, beverages, clothes, or makeup. But nothing grabs your attention enough to stop your relentless scrolling.
Until this:
In a sea of wan Insta pastel and muted tones, the vibrant orange stands out like a peacock in a flock of pigeons. You stop scrolling. Your eyes are magnetically drawn to the mouthwatering foods in the center of the screen. You glance up and read the copy: “Cook restaurant quality Asian dishes in under 30 minutes with Omsom dish starters.”
What? Is this possible? How could this possibly be true? Restaurant quality Asian food without hours of chopping and prepping and running around to a million grocery stores in a futile attempt to find every ingredient you’ll need? The path to this heroic culinary glory is helpfully and simply laid out for you at the bottom of the screen, with a combination of words and cute little graphics: Choose your favorite protein and/or veg + just: Rip ➡️ Pour ➡️ Fire It Up.
Woah.
Your eyes go back up to the array of temptingly presented dishes. Your tummy rumbles. You need to know more about this Omsom thing. So boom, you click to learn more. And before you know it, you’ve just purchased a Southeast Asian starter sampler. (We’ll get into why Omsom makes it so appealing and irresistible to purchase later on.)
Of course the above scenario assumes you’re actually in the Omsom target audience. If you’re more of a Hamburger Helper type of gal, you’ll keep scrolling until you find your dog whistle frequency. And who is that Omsom audience exactly? Well, the cofounders, sisters Kim and Vanessa Pham that they wanted to "give Asian-Americans access to a real deal taste of home and to show non-Asian Americans what it means for this category to be done right."
In other words, on the one hand, the product is targeting first-gen Asian Americans who want to recreate comforting and familiar dishes, as some of their messaging (“food that takes you home”) makes clear. On the other hand, they’re also targeting non-Asian Americans who strive to cook authentically within that culinary realm, yet who may be confused or intimidated by some of the ingredients.
But before you scratch your head and wonder how on earth they’re managing to target two such seemingly wildly different audiences, consider what these groups have in common. They share the exact same challenge: the struggle to cook authentic, high-quality Asian meals at home, quickly and easily. Slightly different heroes, same challenge. And as we’ll see, it’s all about the challenge. One thing Omsom does so well is manage to attract and speak to both groups without alienating either one by keeping the real focus on the challenge and the burning desire to overcome it.
Maybe you’re still wondering:
How exactly did they manage to turn simple meal starter kits into culinary catnip and stand out in such a crowded market?
Simply put, it’s exactly what we’ve been talking about: They do it through their story. A perfect little micro hero’s journey that allows Omsom's audience to see themselves preparing the dishes shown. And one reason it resonates is because, whether they’re aware of it or not, they’ve tapped into some behavioral science truths about sticky storytelling.
🧠 You see, not only are we attracted to a good story just for the feel-good fun of it; narrative is built into how humans make decisions about their future. We are all essentially prediction machines seeking to make sense of patterns. In his book Michael Shermer calls our brains “belief engines . . . evolved pattern-recognition machines that connect the dots and create meaning out of the patterns that we think we see in nature.”And stories are the ultimate in pattern spotting and meaning-making. This tendency began as a matter of survival: Our ancestors learned that things like snapping twigs or rustling underbrush could indicate the presence of a dangerous predator. That pattern spotting allowed us to predict our imminent future demise unless we ran for cover. And think back to Oreo the primate: He learned to spot the patterns of behavior that made forest navigation easy and safe by imagining future outcomes. He told himself a succession of stories starring himself as the hero.When a story is sticky, it aligns with the patterns our brain is already wired to expect — but it also extends the pattern in a more desirable way than we ever thought possible. A brand story sticks when it actually changes our future by changing how we imagine our future and our heroic role in it. It’s why you empathize with characters as different as Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz, Diana in Wonder Woman, and Luke in Star Wars. You identify with them, you imagine yourself overcoming the challenges they face, and you go along for the ride as they triumph and create a better future.
This is why these kinds of sticky stories are the most powerful way to draw an audience into your universe and build a larger following. You become part of their future story. It’s a “Sticky Future.”
The Omsom ad uses words (just 26 of them!) plus design to viscerally and graphically draw their audience of heroes into their better future. The story helps their audience imagine themselves as culinary rock stars, whipping up authentic and delicious Asian dishes to the amazement of family and friends. It lulls people with the familiar comfort of the hero’s journey story, pleasantly tickling the evolutionary pattern spotting tendency of the brain . . . then takes them along to a new and exciting future.
🍜 If you’re one of Omsom’s potential heroes, that breaks down like this:Like the Omsom target audience of heroes, your heroes must be able to see the pattern and parallels. See their own struggles and life challenges in your story. See their future unfold in front of them. And then see it happen in a way they never thought possible.
And that, dear friend, is how you begin to build a following.
Great, you’re wondering:
That’s all well and good, but how did Omsom actually get the message out? How did they make sure their audience would see it?
Did they start off by spending a small fortune on ads? Nope.
Did they pin all their hopes in one ad channel? Again: Nope.
Did they say “screw this” and just do billboards and TV spots like the frustrated Redditor we mentioned earlier considered? Again, nope.
Remember what we said about the dog whistle? Omsom built a following on the strength of their kick ass narrative, then they sat back and enjoyed the organic fruits of their labor.
The nutshell version of how that came together is this. Back in 2019 they were just another wannabe food startup under a different name, Oxtale. Their hook was a bit underwhelming and generic: “The new-gen household name for the rising global cuisine movement.” But they got some funding, joined an accelerator and spent 10 months figuring out their story. They clearly did the right kind of research to discover the underlying challenge of their audience of heroes and the Job people would hire them to do. Then they branded the hell out of themselves and launched in May 2020, locked and fully loaded.
Within a couple of months, they were featured in Tastemade, Vogue, Food & Wine, and the Food Network. Then they landed a Today Show spot and took off like a brush fire in a drought. In fact, Emily Chan, Omsom's Marketing Director, told the D2C Podcast that a whopping 90 percent of their growth has been organic and community driven, and she cites their unique storytelling on Instagram and their press coverage (which occurred as a direct result of their engaging brand storytelling) as the reasons for this.
That's the power of a really strong narrative. The truth is, we don't know exactly what Emily’s team was doing behind the scenes. Surely, they didn't just post a great brand on Instagram and everything else just magically grew from there. There was certainly an active effort to get their brand out there. But we can tell you that without their strong narrative, their efforts to get their brand noticed would not have resulted in that organic growth. When they launched their awesome site, it came complete with a really compelling brand and a fully realized narrative.
This story painted the perfect Sticky Future, one that fulfills an unfulfilled narrative and turns the audience into heroes in ways they couldn’t have imagined before. In fact, in the Today show segment, we learn that the Omsom investors warned the Pham sisters not to launch during a pandemic. But they said: No, this is exactly when to do it. This is the moment.
In other words, they took advantage of building forces — people couldn’t go out to eat, they couldn’t go to a million grocery stores. Even if they could find the ingredients, they probably weren’t going to be able to turn out a chef quality meal assuming they could find the time in between working from home and homeschooling. They saw that Sticky Future and they grabbed it. And they positioned themselves as authentic, first-gen Asian food experts to be the qualified and trustworthy guides on this journey towards culinary awesomeness.
And then they served up the sticky Reason to Believe (“RTB”) on a plate, so to speak. On their Instagram feed, they shared user stories showing regular people actually making this food. They showcased success stories. They highlighted collabs with famous chefs. None other than Chrissy Teigen’s mom created a Thai Krapow starter kit and recipe. Who in their JAM could possibly resist? We’ll walk you through how to create a Sticky Future and find your own RTB in a bit. First, we want to show you how to dig into the big challenge your audience of heroes faces so that you can better understand how to craft a compelling narrative that will reach out and grab their undivided attention.
The Why Of It All
We’ve been talking a lot about the importance of addressing your hero’s challenge. But so far, we’ve mostly focused on sussing out what the challenge actually is. While this is a crucial starting point, there’s no way you’re going to be able to craft a truly compelling narrative unless you also dig into the why.
The “why” is going to help you understand how your hero feels. The “why” is going to empower you to tell stories that engage the emotions. And when it comes to a memorable (read: CAC-lowering) story, emotion is your single most powerful tool to win hearts and minds. It’s no exaggeration to say that the “why” of it all is the essential key to harnessing the power of emotion and attracting your audience.
Remember, an emotional connection to a story releases oxytocin, the feel-good brain chemical. And identifying with the hero of a story can spark that emotional connection. In fact, research published in the indicates that when we experience a story, our brains hone in on the thoughts and feelings of the protagonist. That holds true regardless of how a narrative is expressed. Words, gestures, drawings — as long as a story is being told, our first priority is to care about and identify with the hero’s struggle.
🧠 Researchers at McMaster University learned this by scanning the brains of participants using fMRI. They gave them short, action-oriented headlines like “Surgeon finds scissors inside of patient" or "Fisherman rescues boy from freezing lake." Then, they asked the participants to depict the stories of the headlines using either speech, gestures, or drawing (like in a game of Pictionary). No matter what form of storytelling the participants chose, the study found “the brain networks that were activated were the ‘theory-of-the-mind’ network, which is affected by the character's intentions, motivations, beliefs, emotions and actions.”Studies like the one above illustrate that connecting with a character’s “why” literally lights up our brains. And when it comes to your messaging and the story you tell, if you want to light up your audience’s brains — if you want to attract and hold their attention — you’ve got to understand their challenge from all angles. You've got to know the “why.”
It’s common sense, really.
Imagine trying to identify with Luke Skywalker if you didn’t know what was at stake for the character. If Luke were just running around trying to rescue Princess Leia or looking for Darth Vader for no apparent reason, you’d probably never have even finished Star Wars. Even logical Mr. Spock has a challenge with an emotional underlying “why.” We identify with his sometimes painful struggle between the rational and emotional parts of his being. That’s why we care (if you’re in the Star Trek Audience of Nerd Heroes, that is).
Get the “why” right and you can win hearts and minds. Get it wrong, however, and you risk not only being ignored — you might piss off some people. Worst case, you’ll piss off a bunch of Moms...
👶 A 2008 Motrin ad geared towards new mothers had a particular challenge: back aches and pains from carrying their newborns in a baby sling.
In the video, a woman narrator implies that baby slings are worn as fashion statements. She states (with a whiff of sarcasm) that “supposedly it’s a real bonding experience” and points out that babies carried “close to the bod” cry less. “But what,” the narrator asks, “about me? Do moms who carry their babies cry more? I sure do!” That said, we’re told that she’ll put up with the pain because it’s for her kid, and “because it totally makes me look like an official mom. . . . and if I look tired and crazy, people will understand why.” The ad ends with the tagline: Motrin. We Feel Your Pain.
Thousands of moms — insulted at the snarky tone and insinuations that they carried their babies for fashion rather than out of love — begged to differ with Motrin’s tone deaf tagline. They took to the then-newish Twitter platform in droves to voice their feelings. Thanks to the internet backlash, the video went viral, but not for the reasons Motrin had hoped it would. Sure, Motrin got the “what” part of the challenge right: Moms who carry their babies (in slings or otherwise) can get backaches and other pains. But as for the underlying “why”? Clearly they completely screwed the pooch.You can avoid pissing off moms and sparking this type of PR meltdown by digging into your hero’s challenge from every angle. What are people trying to do? What do they desire? Why do they care? If Motrin had bothered to do this properly, they might have understood that moms would bend over backwards to show how much they love their children. That they carry their babies because they care for them, not because they want to appear trendy or justify looking “tired and crazy.” The challenge of carrying a baby in a sling without incurring backaches could then have been framed in a more empathetic light. Motrin may have then understood how to feature a truly relatable hero mom with whom their target audience would have empathized, rather than be angered by.
So how can you possibly figure it all out and pull off an Omsom level sticky story? (Better yet, how can you avoid another Motrin Mom disaster?) Well, begin at the beginning. You probably already have some idea of the challenge your potential audience faces. One way to think about it is that it’s the Job people would hire your product to do. So start by writing down a simple, basic, hero's challenge hypothesis; one that accounts for both the what and a basic why:
💡 Hero's Challenge Hypothesis Formula
My audience is trying to [do a thing] because they want [to be this person/feel this way]. Not being able to [do this thing] makes them feel like [the repercussions and feelings when they fail]. Therefore, people would hire my product to help them [do this Job] and [achieve this goal].For example:
🤱🏽 Motrin Challenge Hypothesis Formula
My audience is trying to carry their babies because they love their children and feel compelled to be caring mothers. Not being able to do this without pain makes them feel less able to fully focus on their newborn. Therefore, people would hire my product to be free from pain while carrying their babies and fully focus on caring for their little bundle of joy.Then, dig a little deeper. Write down everything you think you know, and everything you don’t know but need to find out.
That means thinking about:
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