The Elements of Content Strategy - Erin Kissane [12]
Influence #3: The Marketer
Marketing is the practice of bringing products to market and persuading people to buy them. The “products” involved may be literal (eggs, laptops, ebooks) or metaphorical (ideas, experiences, political candidates), and the means may include techniques ranging from the obvious to the extremely subtle. Content strategy is not a subset of marketing, but marketing is one possible application of content strategy, and we derive many common content strategy methods and practices from marketing.
Most of marketing is, in turn, derived from rhetoric: the practice of writing or speaking to persuade. From the moment of its birth, rhetoric has been viewed with a certain amount of suspicion. Back in the fourth century BC, Plato compared rhetoric to the black art of cooking, which makes unhealthy food taste good and thus is (like rhetoric) a kind of deception. (Of course, Plato also suggested that his utopian republic would only succeed if everyone ate and slept on the floor and consumed only bread, nuts, and berries; meat, tables, and beds all led directly to doom.)
This cultural ambivalence about the arts of persuasion is nowhere more clear than in the world of marketing.
Rhetoric and persuasion, whether you want ’em or not
When we create content for businesses and other organizations, we usually need to do more than inform or entertain. In theory, there are exceptions—newspaper sites and so on—but for most businesses and institutions, online content is also intended to intrigue, to persuade, and ultimately, to sell.
Happily, this doesn’t mean that websites should be like direct mail. Sometimes “selling” is so subtle as to be nearly invisible, and sometimes it’s as straightforward as saying “we made this cool thing that you can use to do great stuff—would you like to buy it?” Mostly, it’s somewhere in between. And the principles of persuasion (rhetoric) and selling (marketing) are something that modern western civilization has down cold.
Rhetoric constitutes one of the three parts of the trivium—a big chunk of the old-school classical education—and is also a highly contested field of academic study. I will now oversimplify to the point of cartoonishness.
According to Aristotle, the three kinds of rhetoric are:
The rational argument (logos). Our widget will produce these benefits for your company, as you can clearly see from this table of research data which I have printed in six-point type. Ta-da!
The emotional appeal (pathos). Happy memories are the most precious things in our brief, sad lives. Won’t you buy this widget to make you some happy memories?
The appeal grounded in the speaker’s reputation or character (ethos). As a thought leader in the fields of both thought and leadership, I tell you: Buy this widget. You won’t regret it.
The principles of rhetoric are embedded in our culture of communication, appearing not only in marketing, but opinion columns, blogs, and, of course, political speeches—the latter being the original rhetoric, from the world’s original democracy.
In the language of marketers, “messages” are very high-level ideas you want to transmit directly into your users’ brains, and they’re created by combining what you need to say with a rhetorical approach—how you need to say it. These messages aren’t taglines; they’re for internal use and will act as scaffolding for your content, supporting and shaping the content you actually produce. (You may also hear them called “messaging,” but let’s avoid that invitation to the grammar smackdown.)
To see how this plays out, consider the messages that a flower shop in Brooklyn, an upscale hotel catering to business travelers, and a state university might assemble (if they were a little punchy and over-caffeinated) (TABLE 1).
TABLE 1: The three major kinds of rhetorical appeal as applied to hypothetical client situations. CLIENT
CORE