I have a habit of using catchphrases at work. Every month or so I’ll have a go-to slogan that I keep coming back to, boring my team to death with it.
We don’t launch features. We launch narratives.
This is my catchphrase of the month. 👆 It’s possibly an obvious one to any seasoned product marketer. But it’s super important. So I'd better clarify what I mean by it…
It’s shipping season at Pleo and we have a ton of new product features coming down the line. And when things get busy, there’s a risk that best practices might be abandoned in favour of just getting stuff out there. With this comes a tendency to focus on explaining the feature itself, skipping to the solution before introducing the problem - amplified by internal product language creeping into customer-facing copy.
Sure, some of your customers will get what you mean when you say ‘Hey, great news, we’ve just launched Feature X and this is how it works’. But these are likely to be your power users. The ones who have been nagging your support team for the past year, asking when the feature is coming.
For the most part, though, your customers likely won’t have a clue what you’re talking about. Your prospects almost certainly won’t. You’re selling them a solution to a problem they didn’t know they had. They need to be convinced of the problem first.
But more importantly, a new feature or product launch is a huge opportunity. It’s a chance to start telling a new story about your company - one that has a crown jewel of a product feature sitting at the heart of it, adding substance and proof to the story you’re telling. So every time you’re putting together your Go-to-Market plan, remember that you’re launching a new narrative, not a new feature.
Your explainer content of course needs to be absolutely on point. But don’t miss out on an opportunity to turn a product launch into something bigger that shifts customer perception about your brand.
At Pleo last year, when we launched our Invoices product in Germany, the emphasis wasn’t on how invoice management works - it was that you can now use Pleo for all of your business spending, not just your expenses.
When we offered Cashback to all of our customers, we were using that as the cherry on top of a much richer narrative about all the ways you can save money with our products (It pays to use Pleo…) Many months later, we’re still creating content about this topic.
That’s because this approach has the added benefit of relieving some of that launch day pressure. Your launch day for a new product is just the start of a narrative. You can give yourself months - years, even - to tell that story. It takes a long time to shift a perception, after all.
Cheers! 👋
P.S. Hope some of you got the reference of the blog post title...
Hi Rory,
Do you recommend any book/article/course that helps with building a narrative to shift customers' perceptions? Is there a particular framework for this?
This is a great point, and I think it finds a nice balance between selling the sizzle and the steak. Selling a narrative speaks to the broader use case of your product. And at the same time, using this to explain your features makes it natural to then go on to explain how people can use it.