🔆 What's the new game you help your customers play?

TL;DR – Delivering desirable SaaS traction requires you to communicate an idea that doesn’t conform to our everyday ideas.

And Narrative Design is the approach to pay attention to if this is what you aspire.

In short, Narrative Design enables Product Marketers to tell a story people can’t ignore.

In that way, it enhances the power of product positioning. The core idea is to create a story that shifts the audience’s perception of your product.

In my view, Narrative Design paves the way for Product Positioning to be successful. It’s used way earlier in the buyer’s journey. But done well, Narrative Design and Product Positioning make you unbeatable when used together.

In that respect, I love Dave Gerhardt’s perspective (former VP of Marketing, Drift)

“Why a narrative design? Because stories are everything. There is so much noise and competition in any market/category today. Even if your product IS better, no one will believe it because that is what everyone is saying.

So you have to win by creating a STORY that earns you the right to then tell people about your product/service. You have to show them the future — and then how you can help get them there.”

What I love about Narrative Design is how it enables us to build a new reality (the new game) in the mind of our ideal buyer.

It creates tension between two worlds: the old game and the new game.
It’s an effective mechanism to hit the right nerve with potential buyers by pointing out how their traditional way of working (the old game) negatively impacts them because things have changed.
It provides the perfect platform to introduce a different approach to get out of the trap – by playing a new game, i.e., the new, right way to do things. And this is what you’ll ultimately start selling.

As you can imagine, Narrative Design requires you to take a stand – i.e., take position that you’re prepared to defend.

It is about communicating an idea that doesn’t conform to our everyday ideas, processes, and solutions. So it’s polarizing on purpose.

But that makes it so powerful to spark traction – it helps you create your category within existing categories.