🎙️ This free edition of MKT1 newsletter covers Season 1, Episode 2 of “Dear Marketers with Emily Kramer & Friends” podcast. Listen or watch the full version of the podcast Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or YouTube. Plus read the full newsletter below for an even deeper dive on the topic.
Question: Dear marketers, I’m Mikayla Hopkins, Head of Marketing at Tracksuit. We do beautiful, affordable, always on brand tracking. Content is the heart of our marketing engine. So I've got a question for you, Emily & Friends, what is your best advice for telling a consistent story across channels?
Answer: Dearest Mikayla (& marketers), how did you know this is one of our favorite topics? From back in our Asana days, up until today, and likely long into the future, the Dear Marketers Co-hosts have used a method called “Perceptions” to organize and tell a consistent story. We were so excited to talk about storytelling and the power of “Perceptions” in this podcast. We also felt compelled to talk about grammar, dodecahedrons, and the Got milk? campaign from the 90s in this episode—even though you didn’t ask.
In this newsletter & podcast episode, we cover:
What is “story?” Is it the same as “brand”?
Why writing “perceptions” is THE best way to define your story—with some fun examples
How to run a perceptions exercise & operationalize perceptions
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Listen or watch the full version of the podcast on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or YouTube. And read the full newsletter below for an even deeper dive on telling a consistent story:
How to tell a consistent story, using perceptions to shape your narrative
What is story? Why does it matter?
“Story is really everything you say about your business. And that includes the stuff you say about your company mission, vision, and your founding story. It includes the stuff you say about your products. It includes the things you say related to thought leadership. It includes the things you say in ad copy. All of that together is your story." - Emily Kramer, Dear Marketers, Episode 2
Your brand and story is another product your company puts out into the world. You wouldn’t (well I hope not) create a software product without a clear idea of what you are building, why you are building it, and who it is for. So you shouldn’t do this for your company’s story either. And much like how your product needs to be differentiated, so does your story.
With this in mind, telling a consistent story starts by defining it. If you don’t know your own story, your audience definitely won’t either.
This may sound obvious, but so few startups define their story in a clear and usable way. And most marketers have different definitions of brand, story, and positioning, which only adds to the confusion.
To define some terms, story is a subset of your overall brand. It’s the through-line across all of your marketing “fuel” and the collection of all the things you say. And to be clear, your story isn’t just what you say about your product, that’s only one part. In fact, if you just talk about your product, you miss opportunities to reach customers at different times, across different channels. Your story includes your vision, customer stories, the problem you solve, market trends, etc.
“When you're thinking about story in a broad sense across channels, programs, activities, the first thing I would say is remember that your story is not just your product story. And I'm a product marketer saying that. So your product is amazing, hopefully, but if you only talk about your products, people are going to get bored pretty quickly. So think more expansively than that..” - Devon Watts, Head of Product Marketing & Partnerships at Mercury + Dear Marketers Co-Host
Craft “perceptions” to define your story
Growth marketers have KPIs and clearly defined “funnel” stages" as their north star. Content, brand, and product marketers also need a north star to ensure they tell a clearly defined story. That north star is "Perceptions”.
I first wrote about perceptions nearly 4 years ago, as one of my very first MKT1 Newsletters and my co-hosts and I have have been using perceptions since our Asana days 10 year ago. This framework stands the test of time, and it’s incredibly essential to marketing strategy.
Don't just start cranking out content, creative, and marketing assets if you haven't aligned on what your big picture themes are. Because I think that's a very easy way to just get into doing random acts of marketing that aren't cohesive or consistent.” - Jenny Thai, Head of Content at Vanta & Dear Marketers Co-Host
Perceptions are the key narratives you want your audience to associate with your company and echo back to you. They are the ideas you want to drive in your market. They are the foundational tenets of your story, guiding your marketing efforts to ensure a cohesive and repeatable message.
Perceptions can include your take on market trends, the reason your company exists, the problems your audience faces or their jobs to be done, your product philosophy, etc. If you refer back to the circle diagram above, perceptions encapsulate the orange part—they capture your overall story.
Once you’ve written perceptions, you can use them to plan campaigns, shape your messaging, and content roadmap. More on operationalizing them later.
Example perceptions
Before I explain how to set perceptions and use them day-to-day to tell a consistent story, let me share some examples.
Reverse engineering perceptions
We went back in time and tried to figure out what perception various companies might have been trying to drive when they put out campaigns—and we had a great time doing it (watch here).
🥛 California Milk Processor Board: Got Milk? - circa 1993
Hypothetical Perception: Milk is a staple—something you always need in your fridge.
Implies that running out of milk is an inconvenience and reinforces milk as an everyday necessity, not just for kids or cereal.
A response to declining milk consumption due to the rise of juice and soda.
I found this fascinating, and had ChatGPT make a graph to show this. And it’s a reminder to think about what market trends can guide your story.
Jenny Thai: "I think the perception is milk is a beverage for all occasions, including the ones that you aren’t thinking about."
Devon Watts: "Juice was really taking off back in the day? Soda was having a moment."
Emily Kramer: "Yeah, that’s exactly correct. Because perceptions are all about the moment. And so that was the moment—juice was having a moment."
🍏 Apple: Think Different - circa 1997
Hypothetical Perception: Choosing Apple means you are creative and forward-thinking
Differentiates Apple from IBM and PCs
Reinforces Apple as the brand of visionaries, designers, and creators
Alternative perception: Apple is for people who don’t care about grammar. Okay, that probably wasn’t the perception, but Apple did drop the “ly” from “differently” intentionally to show that they are a bit irreverent.
👨💻 Twilio: Ask Your Developer - circa 2015
Hypothetical Perception: Twilio is trusted by and built for developers
Suggests that developers are already using Twilio—and that you should involve them your eng team in key business and product decisions.
Positions buying Twilio as the preferred way to add communication to your product over building it yourself for developers.
Note: Perceptions shouldn’t just be used to make “taglines” or ad campaigns, they should be used across all of your content. Using these campaigns was just a fun way to reverse engineer some perceptions.
More hypothetical perception examples
Here are some additional hypothetical examples we came up with:
Riverside: Anyone can record a high-quality podcast.
Attio: Your CRM shouldn’t require manual data entry
Typeform: Forms don’t have to look the way they always have / they can be delightful.
Ahrefs: Web & SEO data don’t have to be a black box.
How to define perceptions
” Write perceptions from the perspective of the customer you're trying to reach because then it helps you think about where they actually are right now. Do they even think about you? If not, you actually have to create some awareness. Or if there is an existing perception about you, then what do you need to do to shift it to the new perception?” - Jenny Thai, Head of Content at Vanta + Dear Marketers Co-Host
Start with the end goal
Ask: “What do we want people in our audience to repeat back about our company?”
Remember that the majority of your content aka “fuel” needs to ladder up to a perception (with the exception of some sales enablement and SEO content).
Write perceptions from the prospect and customer perspective
Instead of “We are the best AI agent for marketers,” write: “DinoCo is the best AI agent for Marketers”
Writing them from this POV help you craft perceptions that align with real customer experiences and beliefs. It also helps you consider what level of understand your audience has about the market you operate in, the problem you solve, and the solution you offer.
Limit perceptions to 3-5 statements that are easy to remember
Too many perceptions lead to scattered messaging. Too few, gives you a one not story.
Each perception should be memorable-I like to summarize each one with an emoji to make it really stick 🍯.
The combination of perceptions should be something only your company can claim. If competitors could easily adopt the same set, they aren’t strong enough.
Run an internal exercise
Bring together leaders from marketing, product, customer success, and founders
Ask questions to generate a broad list of potential storylines
Narrow down to what’s most important (But, don’t worry about wordsmithing perceptions in the meeting, that never works in a group)
Finalize perceptions
After the meeting, marketing should write 3-5 perceptions and then get buy in on these
Once you have your ~3 perceptions set, you can add sub bullets for how you’d adapt the story for certain ICPs or prospects vs. customers.
Validate your perceptions: Can the team recall them easily? Will these resonate with customers? Are these feasible to achieve in the next year? Can we build content and campaign roadmaps based on these?
Share your perceptions cross-functionally
Perceptions should be included in your marketing strategy and your marketing decision dashboard (which is a summary of the strategic inputs you use to prioritize). Template available for paid subscribers.
Share how you arrived at these perceptions and how you’ll use content and campaigns to drive these with your company
”The combination of your perceptions should be unique to your company. No other company should be able to claim that combination. One individual perception could potentially be used by many other companies, but the combination should feel like uniquely your company or else your story is not going to seem unique.” - Emily Kramer
Questions to ask to determine your perceptions:
Here’s a list of questions I like to ask to help companies develop perceptions:
How will the world change if our company succeeds?
e.g. More developers will invest in cleantech projects as the barrier to get started will be easier for a startup like Tyba
What product decisions make us different?
e.g. At Asana, the product was built on the principle that all work needs a clear DRI (directly responsible individual), therefore in the product itself tasks can only have one owner. So the perception could be: Breaking projects into tasks with clear owners is how work gets done.
What market trends are we uniquely positioned to lead?
e.g. AI products are shifting from subscription based pricing to usage-based pricing. Metronome can drive this conversation and transition.
What's unique about your customers and people who choose to use your product?
e.g. GTM teams who use Naro have better alignment between marketing and sales.
What do you want your company to be remembered for?
Why do you exist? What gave your founders conviction in this idea?
What unique insights do we have about our customers?
For a complete guide to running this exercise, I have a template for paid subscribers. You can access it in our template library.
How to use perceptions day-to-day to tell a consistent story
Create “action plans” for each perception
After you define your perceptions, brainstorm the best ways to drive these perceptions in the minds of your audience. I find much better content and campaign ideas come from brainstorming around perceptions than any other method.
It can also be helpful to identify customer quotes, data, or industry trends that validate the perception—you can use this later in the content that ladders up to the perception.
Then define what campaigns, content, or programs will reinforce this perception
e.g. If the perception for Tracksuit (where Mikayla, who asked this podcast episode’s question) is “Brand is measurable”, create reports, tools, and benchmarks to prove it.
Set goals related to perceptions during annual and/or quarterly planning
” Think about perception as a product you're selling or something you're launching. What's the plan to launch this perception into the world? I find that some of the best marketing ideas come from this. Because you're working within a guardrail— the perception that you're trying to drive—but you're free to just think about tons of ideas within it. And so mapping that action plan for each perception often lends itself to way better content ideas than just ‘Let's make an editorial calendar.’” - Emily Kramer
Use perceptions to prioritize your content roadmap
Perceptions should be the foundation for content planning—not an afterthought.
In your content roadmap, add a field or column for your perceptions.
Select a perception for each item in your content roadmap or editorial calendar. This is a great check that each LinkedIn post, blog post, report, video, etc ladders up to a perception.
Balance your content mix across perceptions by ensure each perception gets the right amount attention (it can even be helpful to stack rank or put percentages on each perception to help you prioritize them).
Use perceptions to justify prioritization. If a request doesn’t fit into a perception, it’s likely not the top priority right now. Pointing to perceptions can help you say no to random marketing asks that don’t align with strategic messaging—which we talked about a lot in Episode 1 of Dear Marketers.
Remember: If a major piece of content or big campaign doesn’t reinforce a perception, reconsider if it’s worth creating.
Use perceptions in GACCS briefs
I’ve written extensively about my G.A.C.C.S framework. You should create these bullet point briefs for all work you do in marketing. Put them at the top of your docs, in your Asana tasks, in Slack when kicking off a project, etc.
GACCS stands for:
🥅 Goal – What is the objective of this campaign, piece of content, etc? What OKR does it ladder up to? How will you measure success?
👽 Audience – Who is the primary ICP? Secondary or tertiary ICPs?
🎨 Creative – What is the perception you are trying to drive? What is the medium or format? What’s your unique POV?
📺 Channels – Where will this be distributed?
🥩 Stakeholders - Who is involved? Who owns this? Who should review and approve?
Notice that under the first C for creative, you indicate the perception you are trying to drive!
GACCS briefs help you make sure your work aligns with your perceptions, which helps you tell a consistent story. But I also love them because (like perceptions) they help you avoid random acts of marketing, drive cross-team alignment, and make it easier to prioritize and evaluate content, campaigns, and initiatives.
When asking (or giving) feedback on marketing work, make sure the reviewer keeps the GACCS bief and perception in mind. They should give feedback if the content doesn’t ladder up to a perception effectively.
“[Perceptions are helpful for] giving feedback and stuff like that, right? Does this drive this perception effectively? It might feel like slowing down now, but I think it can actually help speed up execution once you're in it, because everyone's aligned on those perceptions and you can use them as a kind of a guiding light for the things that you do.” - Devon Watts
Final answer to this episode’s question: "How do you tell a consistent story?"
The best way to tell a consistent story is to write perceptions that are unique to your company and use those perceptions to prioritize your campaigns and content.
Remember: You can’t shift the perception of your company overnight. Make sure every piece of content, campaign, and message reinforces one of your defined perceptions.
”If you don't know your story, you probably won't be telling a good one. So know your story, spend time to actually define what you're trying to say. Zoom a level out. While it might seem like ‘I don't have the time to do that. I just need to jump in and write, or I need to create, or I need to make this video.’ But your work is going to be so much better if you take a couple of steps backwards in order to go much faster, with a much more clear sense of direction.” - Emily Kramer
More from MKT1 & Dear Marketers
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✂️ Templates & videos for paid subscribers - Available in our template library for paid subscribers only
📰 Additional reading from MKT1 Newsletter:
Original perceptions newsletter - spring 2021
Prioritizing work - fall 2024
The art of content roadmapping - summer 2022
GACCS briefs in MKT1 Newsletter & guest post Lenny’s Newsletter
🎓 New - Course recommendations on Maven:
I used to teach courses for marketers on Maven, and while I’ve taken a pause on teaching myself to focus on the newsletter, podcast, advising and investing, I still think there’s tons of value in taking courses from experts. So, I’ve curated courses from GTM leaders I trust and think my subscribers will love learning from. You can see a list of those courses and get $100 off here.
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