How to Turn Your Narrative Into a Killer Marketing Message

Your narrative is an internal doc, so how do you use it in a marketing campaign? Here's a simple framework.

If you’re claiming a new category, you’re in the business of changing buyer beliefs. You’ve written your strategic narrative, but how do you take this new POV and turn it into a tactical marketing message?

The obvious play is to share your full narrative in a public artifact, like a blog post, pitch deck, or video. That can work, but a strategic narrative is an internal document intended to guide the business. It’s not a marketing asset itself.

Today I’m sharing a simple framework to turn your POV into a tactical message. It’s a three-step process I use with my clients:

• Identify the biases your buyers have today

• Decide which bias you must overcome now

• Create a contrarian message

Here’s how to pull this off.

Find the Biases Your Buyers Have Today

A good narrative is written for a specific audience. Likely it’s the person most involved in the buying process. But chances are, that audience has preconceived notions that work against you.

For example, I recently covered OpenAI’s narrative. As popular as ChatGPT is, it’s not a universally used tool. In late 2024, many people hold beliefs like:

• “If I use a tool like ChatGPT, my personal data will be made public.”

• “I don’t know what to use ChatGPT for.”

• “ChatGPT is basically the same thing as Co-Pilot, Claude, and Gemini.”

• “ChatGPT creates inaccurate results.”

Whether these perceptions are true or not is beside the point. What matters is that if people hold these beliefs, they won’t be likely to use ChatGPT (or use it successfully). But you can’t overcome all of these biases at once – you have to decide what’s most important to address now.

Decide Which Bias to Address Now

There’s always a temptation to address multiple biases at once by telling buyers everything about your solution. But if you try that, buyers will get overwhelmed and tune out.

That’s because of a concept called cognitive inertia. It’s the idea that pre-existing beliefs have a momentum of their own, and can’t be overcome all at once. If you want to change what buyers think, you have to break down those beliefs, one by one. And you must start by deciding which bias needs to be overcome first.

Cognitive inertia is what keeps buyers from letting go of pre-existing beliefs. Your job is to change that.

Here’s a simple way to do that:

1. List everything your buyers believe about your category, your brand, and your solution (if they don’t know anything, list that too).

2. Now, do the same exercise, but for the categories, brands, and solutions that you compete with.

3. Stack rank these beliefs, placing the beliefs that create the most resistance to buying from you at the top.

(Your approach will vary based on whether you’re introducing a new category, niching down in an existing one, or pursuing another category strategy).

For example, OpenAI might conclude that “I don’t know what to use ChatGPT for” is the most important belief to overcome right now. Once that bias has been identified, you can start creating your message.

Create a Contrarian Message

Now the fun part. Since you’ve identified the bias you want to overcome, now you have a clear “job to be done” for your marketing message. The good news is that since you’ve already written your narrative, you don’t have to come up with ideas from scratch. Instead, work through your narrative and look for concepts that could counteract that bias. You can then massage that into something more pithy you can use in a campaign.

Here are a few rules to keep in mind as you go through this process:

• Could a competitor say the same thing? The goal is to come up with something that your brand (and your brand alone) can say. Your message might technically fit the bill, but if a competitor could just as easily make the same claim, it won’t help you as much.

• Is it clear? You’ve heard it before: clarity beats cleverness. It’s great if you can do both, but if you have to pick one, always favor clarity. If you’re having trouble, ask yourself, “What are we really trying to say?” Then say that.

• Will it stick? This is where it gets tough. Creating a message that sticks in buyers’ brains means leaving out nuance. But better to be 99% correct and memorable than 100% correct and forgettable.

Here’s How Apple Does This

Here’s one of the cleanest examples of this approach executed well.

When the iPhone launched in 2006, smartphones were not yet ubiquitous. Most people thought smartphones were mainly for business users who wanted to check email on the go (the category leader at the time, Blackberry, was great for that).

Other biases existed then, too – many believed that iPhones weren’t worth the high price tag, the touchscreen keyboard would be hard to use, and they weren’t durable. But Apple didn’t address those biases. Instead, they decided to counteract the idea that “smartphones are only for business users”. To address that, they launched the “There’s an app for that” campaign, which showed how third-party apps on the new App Store would make life easier for everyday people.

The campaign checked all the boxes. Competitors couldn’t make the same claim (they didn’t have an app store). The message left little to interpretation. And my favorite thing is that Apple favored succinctness over being 100% correct. No, there wasn’t an app for everything. But the right idea came across - loud and clear.

Keep it Simple

When translating your narrative into a tactical marketing message, remember to keep things simple and build from first principles. Ask yourself, “What is the most important bias that needs to be changed right now?” and center your campaign around that. Leave the rest for later in the buyer’s journey or for a future campaign.