S3: E4: Storytelling for Marketing Success

Transcript

Lucy Mowatt: Welcome to another episode of the Content Conversations Podcast. I’m delighted to share that we’ve got a great show for you today. I’m speaking to former journalist and content marketing specialist, James Gill, about the role of storytelling in marketing. During the wide-reaching conversation, we explore what storytelling is, the elements of a great story, and how brands can utilise it to great effect.

And I can only apologize to younger listeners for the frequent references to advertising from the 80s and 90s. So without further ado, here’s my conversation with James Gill.

Hi Gill, welcome to the podcast. Before we crack on with the full episode, could you give a brief introduction to who you are and what it is that you do?

James Gill: Sure. So my name’s Gill. I’m variously a head of content and have been for the last few years at content marketing agencies, digital marketing agencies here in Norwich. But my, my career started 20-odd years ago where I was a journalist, a lifestyle journalist. I was working in London at various websites and music magazines.

So I was, I was a journalist before moving back to Norwich about 10 years ago. And moving into content marketing through contract publishing. As you know, the media is in decline. There were fewer jobs, especially up in Norwich, in terms of lifestyle journalism. And so moved in as more and more brands wanted to create content.

They needed people who could create content. And so that was something I’ve been doing for a decade. And so I moved into content marketing, to create the the stuff that brands want to talk about themselves and their audiences and their subject matter. So that’s what I’ve been doing for 10 years variously and across lots of different channels and what have you.

I’m sure we’ll get into that.

Lucy Mowatt: And we’re here to talk about brand storytelling. So again, before we move into that, how would you define brand storytelling? And why do you believe it’s an essential aspect of modern marketing strategies?

James Gill: So I had to make two notes on this ahead of this, because it’s one of those giant questions that you kind of know intuitively, instinctively, but when someone asks you to detail it, you’re like, Oh, I don’t know. I’d say that.

So the first thing I think is that brand storytelling is two things. One, is it’s the literal story of a brand; a person or people started a thing X amount of time ago, they had a mission to do blah, they did or didn’t do it, the challenges and here’s where we are.

So there’s a literal story that’s brand storytelling, I think. But I’m mostly talking about with brand storytelling is the little bits of content and marketing that support that story, because actually, when we’re doing brand storytelling, you’re doing it through small stories. So you’re doing a social media post, you’re doing a blog, and they are not a chapter in the story or literal story, but they’re sort of supporting stories, short stories about that whole one, little fables, if you like. So that’s what I think that the two brand storytelling things are the very literal story of your company, your brand, and then the way in which you support that with smaller little units.

Lucy Mowatt: Great. And why do you think that’s so important in modern marketing?

James Gill: I think it’s important in modern marketing. It’s important in all marketing. I think you know, you look back at the history of advertising and into marketing. It’s all really just, it’s been learning. The key thing that we’ve learned embarrassingly late is that human beings are uniquely geared to like stories.

They help us remember things. Stories are far easier to remember than lists of facts. And we’ve been telling stories… stories existed, oral stories existed, before writing and, you know, you look at our, the world’s religions and you look at the media we consume, TV, etc. all of it is stories. Even when we’re looking at documentary things or, you know, we all wrap it up in stories. When we’re teaching kids things, all wrapped up in stories. Certainly in the last, I don’t know, 20 years we’ve got, hey, let’s, let’s use stories to talk about our brands and our companies.

And that might sound really obvious today in today’s marketing context. But if you go back 50 years, they just weren’t doing this. They were talking about products, possibly a bit about lifestyle. But now it’s like, ‘Oh, right, the pennies dropped. So we know we’re going to tell a story. What is that big arcing story? And then how are we going to tell the little stories within it?’

So I think it’s always been there as a really powerful tool. It’s just that we’ve only really kind of leveraged it of late.

And also just add that might be because there are so many platforms on which to tell stories now that in the past, you know, you go back pre-digital, there probably weren’t as many people… you’ve got movie trailers, TV ads, radio ads, that’s probably about it. Whereas now there are so many different ways.

And also, those things are also geared up for stories. In fact, you’ll tell me what’s the channel that has actual stories and Instagram stories. So you know, you’ve got literal stories.

Lucy Mowatt: And in your opinion, what are some of the elements that make a compelling story, whether that’s marketing or otherwise?

James Gill: So I recently did a workshop internally for the agency on storytelling, because as you know, I, I write fiction, I’m really interested in reading fiction. I thought, well, I, you know, as a professional writer, I thought it was about time. I’m gonna write, I’m gonna write a novel. So I sat down and just wrote a novel and it just didn’t work. It wasn’t working because I just told a story. But as I started to sort of research that it’s actually the, you know, the real structures and devices and ways to get the power of a great novel. It’s not just: sit down, start writing and hope for the best. There are structures.

Most people have heard there’s only seven types of story in the world. And, it’s not entirely wrong. So, whether you’re writing your brand story or a social post or an epic science fiction novel, there are elements that are going to be the same.

So, for example, the basic structure will be your character. Or an entity in terms of a brand, although brands often use a human being because resonates a bit more than a sort of an abstract concept like a company. So you have a character or characters, you have a quest, you have a mission, you have a journey to, to solve that problem or to reach that goal.

And then you have a resolution. You have the ‘so what’. And that’s kind of it, really. You can expand from that, and maybe we’ll get into that in a minute. But really, that’s the basic structure or the devices by which to tell a story. And you know, everyone listening to this will be thinking about TV they watch, movie they watch, books they’ve read. Even when they’re around a pub table, telling or hearing a story, the chances are the person doing it will, inadvertently without conscious thought, be doing that in that order. That’s what stories are. And again, it’s why it’s so deeply ingrained in us that we don’t always need to know and have a structure in our mind, but particularly when it comes to brand when it comes to strategy and so on, having a bit more of a structure. Consciously will help and ensure that we are making stories that work.

Lucy Mowatt: To go back and pick up on something you just alluded to you said about humans. How important is the human element? Because obviously a brand isn’t a person. How important is it therefore to have a human front and centre as part of your marketing storytelling?

James Gill: You could probably argue it each way. I think, instinctively, I feel like I want to say that people buy from people. We are social creatures. Primates are… we’re social creatures. We’re wired for that. We care more about what happens to a person. We don’t know a book or a table. So even if it’s an epic table, it’s come on an epic journey, it’s harder to relate and to empathise with that epic table than it is a person.

You know, another thing that we leverage is, for example, in charities, you hear about 10,000 people died in a tsunami. That’s sad, but it doesn’t move you like a photograph of one sad child, and that’s leveraging the way we resonate with people.

I don’t know why I always think about Hague club whiskey. They got David Beckham to be the brand ambassador. I mean, perfume has done it forever. You need a person, you know, ‘Oh, it smells really nice.’ And it’s 80 quid a bottle. I’m less inclined to buy it than if I see a picture of Johnny Depp standing next to it with the word Sauvage on it.

So I think, again, humans like stories. They are just kind of a natural lever for us.

So I think it’s hard. I’m racking my brains now to think of brands that have really been brought to life. Red Bull is a very good example of one. I think Red Bull has a really rich character as a brand.
And there are no human beings involved.

If you think about Google’s done that quite well, but on the flip side, you think about people like Steve Jobs, Elon Musk, Mark Cuban. These people are their brand. Their brand is what it is because of those people. So it’s certainly easier to do if you have the story of a person. But of course, also, it’s sort of obvious that all stories of brands are the stories of people because they don’t do it without people.
I suppose it depends on whether it’s multiple people and whether it’s one person’s mission, et cetera.

Lucy Mowatt: Yeah I’m just thinking about brands with mascots, like Geico in the States and things like that. They have created a brand mascot to tell their story. Otherwise it would be a faceless corporate entity, potentially, with no singular person leading it.

James Gill: Lurpac Trombone Man.

Lucy Mowatt: Oh, I love Lurpac’s Trombone Man.

James Gill: You know, they’re not a person telling a brand story, but you’re putting a human in there.

We anthropomorphise products and what have you. I’m thinking the M& Ms, right? You literally bring them to life because it’s easier to have a character and to tell a story that way.

Lucy Mowatt: GoCompare’s opera singer. Exactly. His name escapes me.

James Gill: And the Halifax guy.

Lucy Mowatt: Oh, Howard from the Halifax. Wow, we’re showing how old we are now. That’s really interesting. Moving slightly away from that topic, how important is it for the brand’s story to align with the core values?

James Gill: I don’t think it’s necessarily important because you can just tell fun little stories.
You know, create a story around something that’s more around the customer, sort of a story around delivering customers.

Increasingly, people are aligning, people want their products to align with their values. It seems to be a very sort of new millennium thing. I don’t know if there are many people who are buying, I don’t know, Pirelli thinking are they really ethical and sustainable? Are they really aligned with the way that I want my tyre companies to be? But we are increasingly so. So that’s important for certain things. We want our values to be aligned. The second thing I think actually, is that so many things are the same in terms of quality. You buy again. So Goodyear, Pirelli.

I don’t know any other tyre companies, but let’s say there’s another tyre company I could think of. Well, if they’re all amazing tyres, what’s the point of difference? Well, if one is an ethical and sustainable one, if that aligns with your values, then you’re more likely to buy from that one. That sounds very cynical of me, and that’s probably because I’m very cynical, but it’s a way of, of having a point of difference.

Lucy Mowatt: And in terms of distributing that story and that point of difference, what would be your preferred platforms? Does storytelling work on all platforms and all mediums, or are there particular platforms that it works?

James Gill: I don’t think anyone would be surprised with the fact that I think video is the best way of telling stories. I suspect that… you could Google this, I suspect more people watch movies on TV and in the cinema than they do read books.

That’s not to say, however, that you can’t tell stories in other ways. And again, it depends on whether we’re talking about that literal brand story. Because if the person who started the company is really, really charismatic and brilliant, what a fantastic medium is. Get them in front of a camera and just ask them questions about their company and their values and what have you. But if they’re not great, or if it’s a really big company that’s had a bunch of different CEOs and what have you, it’s a bit classic, a bit fragmented and actually not that compelling a story, you might do an animated story. You might use a voiceover. You might script a story.

So video still is greater at that, but you know, you can have a nice rich read on an about us page that sort of got in the beginning. And then there’s a few hundred words about, ‘In the beginning and then the challenges and then…’ again, I’m coming back to my structure.

There is what was the quest. I mean, Patagonia is a really good example. A really values-led brand and it’s the story of these guys, you know, on a mission to create sportswear in a void where there was no good… I think it was climbing… Maybe I’m wrong, but I think it was climbing where there was no good climbing wear, and so you’ve got this quest, this mission and you know, you can tell that on a page, but I think video. It’s just it’s so it’s all the senses, right? It’s visual. It’s audio and you could be reading as well. But again, I don’t think we should overlook other channels. I mean, I’m not a wild user of social media, but I can see that over the long term. It’s a great way of telling the tiny stories that support your larger story.

Podcasts, what a great way to show who you are, the character that you are in your story. So yeah, I think I’m trying to think if there’s anything that’s really rubbish if you’re trying to tell a story or tell little micro stories. Is there a channel that you really wouldn’t use?

Doordrops. I wouldn’t put a flyer.

Lucy Mowatt: If you have a bit of a brand story within your doordrop, it might make it more compelling instead of it going straight into the bin. Although, again, it depends.

James Gill: I guess. So it’s not so much about the medium is about adjusting your story to fit that format or that medium.

Lucy Mowatt: Actually, I was thinking about print and thinking about maybe print advertising. But actually it brings me back in mind to the Mad Men scene where John Draper is thinking up the creative for Kodak, and he builds this whole story around Kodak that then goes into print and how even in, like, a single one-page ad in a newspaper can tell a whole story.

James Gill: If you, if you’re near a computer on your phone, Google water charity adverts. I was doing this workshop on storytelling. And of course, you know, if you’ve got. A thousand words, you can, you’ve got lots of space to tell your story.

If you’ve got an entire website, you can tell your story. If you’re doing a 10-minute video, even a three-minute video, it’s a lot of space. But if you’ve got someone’s attention on a billboard for one second, three seconds, how do you communicate? How do you do an entire story? Because we know stories are powerful.

How do you tell a whole story? And water charities are very good at this, particularly visually. I believe you can tell a whole story almost just with one image.

Lucy Mowatt: Well, that’s the whole picture tells, paints a thousand words.

James Gill: Absolutely. But it can also give you the problem, the character and the solution in one image.

And I think there are other bits where you can tell stories in negative by the things you don’t include, but that are inferred by what’s not there. One of the water charities that I found, it was actually a recent one that was on the TV that made me think of it and then I went to research them, is there’s a little girl in Africa and she gives her mum or granny a glass of water and says she wanted to be the first one in the village to give her granny a glass of clean water.

It’s like two sentences and it’s a whole story. We know exactly what the story is. We know the characters now involved and the lives that they’ve had. We know what the quest is, what the problem was. We know the journey, a literal journey, of the delivery of clean water in the glass, but also generally to that place that didn’t have it before. I think that is immensely powerful. So on the one hand, you can read The Stand by Stephen King, it’s 1,100 pages telling a story. Or you can use two sentences and also tell a story. And I think certainly condensing it down.

Lucy Mowatt: There’s an anecdote. I believe it was about, Ernest Hemingway, who entered an advertising competition. They said, write the most compelling story in as few words as possible. And it said: For sale, children’s shoes, never worn. And that it tells this whole story in like six words.

James Gill: Yeah, and that’s it. I think we’re, as writers, so often are trying to make sure that everything is included. If you need to talk about that water advert, I need to say, it’s in Africa. I need to say they don’t have any water. I need to say that we gave them, you know, they installed some water, a charity donation happened and then a community did blah. It’s like you don’t need it to be so literal.

Lucy Mowatt: It’s the show and tell. Yeah, show versus tell. So that you are actually showing a lot of these things without even saying exactly.

James Gill: I think again, because we’re so geared for stories, our brains fill in what’s not there. An analogy being, you know, we’re so attuned to faces, we see faces everywhere in the cars, in rock formations on Mars, that likewise, we are geared for stories, you know.

You leave the house and you see a piece of rubbish on the pavement, let’s say an item of clothing and you’re immediately putting the story together. It’s a classic joke: why is there a shoe in the central reservation of the motorway? What’s the story? We’re so desperate for stories, we’re so attuned to them that we want to fill it in. We have fun guessing who had their foot out of the window as they passed Bristol on the M6 and their shoe fell off.

So again, we can be smart with it and I think also that there’s a value in that as well in being clever because people will enjoy something that’s slightly different, something that puts a bit of effort in our minds to do, but it’s not that much effort because it’s stories and we’re so attuned to them.

Lucy Mowatt: That put me in mind of Succession. How, actually, a lot of the time with Succession, they’re not holding your hand. You have to figure out what’s going on in all these crazy messed-up relationships. But as humans, and it’s one of the things we enjoyed about it was. Actually, we didn’t have our hands held. We had to sit there and think about it.

James Gill: it. Yeah, yeah, absolutely.

Lucy Mowatt: In terms of challenges, you sort of said that, in getting as much meaning across as possible, what are some of the challenges that you typically come across when developing stories for brands?

James Gill: So you have challenges. The main challenge, and this will resonate with all marketers, is that you come up with a good idea that’s next to the truth or is too true and the client’s not, not wild about it.

‘Well, we can’t say that about ourselves. We need to say this about ourselves because it’s so intrinsic to the brand values.’

If you get the wrong one out there, it’s worse than putting out a crappy social media post or even a crappy product. If you’re saying: ‘Yeah, we totally get behind euthanasia.’ That will kill your business, right?

I think there could be a lot of to and fro with content. Brand strategists saying, look, you guys need to get behind sustainability. So a brand’s core value might be sustainability. But they feel like they can’t necessarily be explicit because they’re scared of being seen as greenwashing, for instance. That would be a good example.

And the reverse. So the whole greenwashing thing, if it comes to brands may have ideas about the things that they want to put their name to. You know, Pride banners or BLM, things on social media… brand strategists might be like, ‘well, you gotta be careful that you actually deliver on that.’

So I mean, it’s such a big question. The challenges around it. I really enjoy a brand strategy and distilling values because it’s an interesting and fun exercise to do. Tracking back to the, to those missions, you know, what really is your purpose?

Because, of course, every business’s purpose is to sell stuff. But really there must be something at the core of it. You can also have values that you believe in. It’s important to nail those and have them documented. Maybe that’s part of it: having them documented can often be a challenge.

Also, they’re so nebulous as well. If you’ve got a boardroom and you’re selling in a brand strategy it must be so hard because it’s so emotional. You can’t get anything more emotional than values, really. It’s not data, it’s not artwork, which is hard enough getting signed off. Let alone, you know, a room full of people saying, our values are going to be , education, let’s say, or equality, or planet first. Or ethical trading or positive work culture those sorts of things. I think that’s, that’s difficult. It becomes hard to nail those down to get buy-in. It’s so vast, isn’t it?

Lucy Mowatt: It’s a huge topic. And it’s not just about the brand itself. How important do you think it is that customers narratives are included within brand storytelling and brand marketing?

James Gill: Good question. Again, my immediate response is I don’t know that it’s essential. I guess it depends on the product, but I know that it’s a challenge for brands to show the very end of their story. Right?

So you’ve got the quest and the journey, well, what’s the results then? What’s the, the ‘so what’ of your story. That’s a challenge a lot of the time.

Lucy Mowatt: Cool. And for aspiring marketers who are looking to enhance their brand storytelling skills, what advice would you give them from your own experience?

James Gill: So I, having written a novel that just didn’t work, I did a load of research. You know, it’s obviously all about what are the structures, how to structure a novel, how to structure what that looks like, what that framework looks like.

Personally, that has been immensely powerful to me. Taking that knowledge, that learning and putting it into the content that I’m writing, whether we’re doing strategy, brand strategy, content strategy stuff, or whether I’m literally just writing an about us page, or you’re writing a blog or a guide writing healthcare guides for 45 things to do to prevent arthritis, there are elements of the problem.

The characters, the journey and the resolution, I don’t need to explain that. I think it’s probably fairly evident what that would look like in a blog. So again, lots of it we’re doing intuitively and instinctively, but having it actually down in front of you to say, ‘Ah, right when I’m writing this article, I need to have the quest or the problem.’

And again, so I talked about the three stages of the story. You can break that down. So you start with the status quo, and then you have a problem that gets injected into the status quo, and then you have a promise. Or what’s going to be solved.

So the quest in itself is the suggestion of the promise of what’s going to happen. So if the problem is I have arthritic pain, the promise is that we’re going to help you manage that or solve that. If you’re writing a novel about that, or if you’re writing an advice blog about that. So then you have that quest. You go on that quest. You have the journey.

This is again from from fiction, but you could use it in your blog writing, is the surprise. So you go on the journey to solve the problem and the surprise is it was the wrong thing in the first place, or there’s some extra secret thing that’s revealed along the way so you can deploy.

Similar to that obstacle.

Now, of course, when we’re doing advice and guides kind of content, it’s all about obstacles because this stuff is solving them. So with arthritic pain, there might be elements of medication as an obstacle or access to health care is an obstacle. Other things can be obstacles.

So those are things that you’ll, you’ll see in fiction. If anyone’s watching TV, it’s like Lost or 24 there are always obstacles. What drives narrative is solving obstacles. Really compelling. We do love obstacles. Imagine Die Hard would be a different movie if he had shoes on. So the obstacle is having those shoes, amongst many.

You could add in another really great device into your story, which is a critical choice. Which is the moral dilemma. To add power. We’re sort of trying to up the stakes because that’s what really makes compelling stories.

You can follow these structures and they can still be boring stories.

Also, you know, the three-part story. So hopefully these by having these things in mind, you can develop a really compelling story. So you get your climax. Obviously, it’s the bit where we solve the problem or we’ve reached the end of the problem.

Then the bit on the back of it then is, of course, the reversal. So because you’ve had this problem that problem goes into reverse. So with the arthritis example, you might have it start to relieve pain. So if you follow these 45 steps, you will then start to feel the pain ease and your dexterity return. And so that’s the describing of the reversal.

And often, you know, the resolution and the reversal aren’t the same thing, but they’re sort of at the end and the resolution is do the following things and you might be able to do this.

So hopefully that’s a bit more meat on the bone of that three-act structure is that there are these elements again.

I’m hoping that people are listening to this game. Well, okay, you know, I’m writing a social media post. Chill out, mate. I’ve not got 1100 words, but you might be able to have a surprise in there. You might be able to use a surprise or you might have obstacles to up the stakes to make it a more gripping story that you’re that you’re telling.

So, yeah, again, hopefully that will hopefully that’s a good bit of advice. But sorry, just to round out the advice research. Stories from a non-marketing point of view, and that will translate into your marketing.

Lucy Mowatt: How important do you think practice is? And practice seeing stories and seeing an opportunity.

James Gill: Yeah, practice is always important. From my own point of view, what I started to do is see these devices in TV that I was watching, books that I was reading, marketing that I was seeing. And so by practicing it and learning it, you start to see it and then you start to deploy it more. Because you’re not just seeing a TV show or a TV episode, you are seeing there’s the quest. There’s the promise. I know now when I read a book, I’m always like, what’s the promise? What are you promising me? Crime novels are a fantastic example of this. In most commercial crime, the prologue, if not chapter one, will be a dead body. Boom. That’s the promise. The promise is, who killed this person, who is this person, and why did they kill them? And so, and then, and then you’re off.

And you start to see these things in the media that you’re consuming and the advertising and marketing you’re consuming. And that is your practice. As well as sitting down and writing, it’s about seeing it out in the world and then it’ll start to flow through into your own marketing content that you’re creating.

Lucy Mowatt: It’s certainly something that I keep in mind with case studies. With doing client case studies, thinking about what is the pain point that that client was suffering? How did the business help to resolve that? What was the journey that they went on together to resolve that problem? And what was the payoff?

James Gill: Case studies are a perfect example because they are, of course, little stories. So, and we start off with, you know, what was the brief? What was our plan? What was our approach? What were the results? But you can imagine adding a surprise. If you wanted to up stakes, you could say, well, we got in their GA and discovered that none of their pages were indexed. Shock, horror. And you know, we found this great insight. But there was an obstacle because they couldn’t get sign-off or it was a bad CMS or something.

So again, you can see how these little devices… just knowing these, what are they like 10 little bits I mentioned, dropping those into a case study. And suddenly you’ve gone from ‘a ‘the client asked us to please drive more revenue through their PPC campaign. So we set up campaigns in Google ads and Meta. And it drove a ROAS of 18%.’ I mean, slightly facetious, but you take my point, right? If you drop in surprises and the quest, even having that language, I find that oddly, for myself, having the word of the quest really makes me feel like whatever I’m saying in this social post, this case study, this whatever, it does have to feel kind of important. The word quest feels important.

Lucy Mowatt: It’s humanising as well. It’s not just, here’s some stats, brilliant. It’s about what’s the story, what is the human element to what happened? What makes your brand human? Whether it’s a client case study or your origin story.

James Gill: Yeah, and also you just made me think as well, often we’ll write a case study and, you know, you stick the results on the end. So, organic traffic went up 20 percent and this went up 25%. But also, what’s the reversal then? Because that’s the climax, if you like. So what’s the reversal? The reversal is they now drove X amount of revenue. Or they enabled them to do the following things. Or it grew the retainer. It’s the so what.

Lucy Mowatt: And actually stories do allow you to do that, I think, a lot more than just, you know, putting out an ad saying, hey, we’re brill. It’s like, well, why are you brill?

James Gill: So what? It’s funny, advertising is certainly not my central skill set, but I quite like the challenge of trying to write a story in ad copy. Obviously, you can’t do it in Google Ads anymore because it mashes it all around. But if you’re writing, as we were talking earlier, about a print ad, how could you write a Hemingway-esque story in the smallest number of words? That’s always a good challenge, and always seems fun to me.

Lucy Mowatt: Just touching back on that Hemingway story, thinking about emotion and getting emotional buy-in. How would you build that emotional buy-in?

James Gill: So values, we talked about values a bit, but ultimately it’s the quest. It has to be something that someone cares about. And I’ve often thought about this, that I find myself reading a book where the stakes are someone getting a job. Or you can read a space opera where the galaxy’s going to die. They’re both compelling stories, even though one is clearly you know, existential. And the other one is just about someone getting a job or not, or finding a boyfriend or not, or something. How do you make the quest compelling?
Otherwise no one cares.

Lucy Mowatt: I suppose that brings us full circle to audience. It’s thinking about what do your audience care about and then, and your strategy. Like, how can you align your customer’s values and what they care about with yours? And then brand storytelling sort of filling that gap.

James Gill: And that’s it. I think that’s why values are a great way of telling stories. Because, to your point, they’re emotional drivers. If the quest is… I’m thinking of like 80s shaving adverts. If the quest is to have a great shave, yeah, okay, that’s cool. I want to have a great shave in the morning. It’s not the same as Braun, I don’t know, reforesting the Amazon or something.

Lucy Mowatt: Or Gillette, the best the man can get. I remember that. I was a child when that advert was on.

James Gill: There you go. So I think, using values to fuel quests. But also values might not… you don’t have to always talk about sustainability or equality because the quest might be, say for antivirus, (I’ve worked with antivirus clients in the past) the quest might be to protect your computer. And of course, what you value is your privacy, your security. You value security. So you can track things back through products.

It doesn’t always have to be you know, just that: AVG and Avast for Business gets behind you finding the one. It doesn’t always have to be about the values or some deep emotional quest. It can still be about just protecting your computer or protecting your business.

Lucy Mowatt: Well, that, if anything, is quite emotional. I imagine anybody who’s had their computer hacked is quite emotional about that.

Well, that brings us to the end of the podcast.

So before we sign off, can you give listeners an idea of where to find you online where they can find out more about you?

James Gill: Best place to go is probably LinkedIn.

Lucy Mowatt: Probably worth saying your name is James Gill, not just Gill, you’re not Madonna with one name.

James Gill: I’m not Sting or Prince yet. So yeah, LinkedIn, you can find me on there, I’m James Gill and you can read my articles or send me some, some spammy message that I seem to get two dozen off every day on LinkedIn, like probably all of you do.

Thank you.