Scott Robertson on Making the Customer the Hero of Your Marketing

Scott Robertson has spent 35 years in marketing and public relations, and his advice is refreshingly blunt: make the customer the hero, stop talking about yourself, and know exactly which emotion your brand is built to transfer. Most companies, he finds, cannot answer that last question.

His conversation with Richard Lowe, who was taught StoryBrand by his own coach, ranges across why surveys mislead, why marketers must own strategy instead of tactics, and why protecting brand equity matters, with Jaguar as the cautionary tale.

Scott Robertson is a 35-year marketing and public relations veteran, Certified StoryBrand Guide, and author of “Just Stop It: Your Survival Guide to Marketing Myths, Mistakes and Misgivings.”

He hosts the award-winning podcast “May the Best Brand Win,” and his client roster spans consumer and B2B organizations including Hewlett Packard, Warner Music Group, Taylor Guitars, and NAMM.

DISCUSS YOUR BOOK

Full transcript of the conversation follows.

Richard Lowe: Scott, tell us a little about yourself.

Scott Robertson: You and I met in the entrepreneurship community. As you know, entrepreneurs really struggle with marketing. It’s not completely their fault. My profession does a horrific job of educating people about what marketing is. Most people think marketing is advertising, or they think it’s sales, rather than what it really is: a process to build relationships and tell a story that’s all about the customer. Entrepreneurs really struggle with marketing. There’s so much bad marketing out there. It’s a plague. I’m hopefully one of the folks trying to make things better.

Richard: I know that for a fact. I’m an entrepreneur, and I’ve always struggled with marketing because I came from a tech background. Introverted. “Oh my God, I have to sell? I have to market? Why did I pick this career?” But slowly I got through that wall. People seem to know who I am, they know my brand, and it seems to work for the most part.

Make the Customer the Hero

Scott: Marketing is much easier than people think. Marketing is about listening to the market. It’s about giving customers something they need to complete their hero story. Where it gets twisted is that companies are much more comfortable talking about themselves. One of the most common problems I solve is getting the client out of its own message. I’m a StoryBrand Certified Guide. I use the StoryBrand framework to make the customer the hero of the story, not the brand. Once you do that, you’re speaking the customer’s language. You’re inviting them into a story they want to be in, that they’re already in, and that they desperately need help getting to that climactic scene where they win the day. Once you start speaking in that language, marketing becomes really easy, because now you’re just connecting people with stuff they already want.

Richard: My coach Jim Carling uses StoryBrand and taught it to me. It’s a great framework. The classic mistake everybody makes is “I do this, I do this, I do this.” Nobody cares unless they absolutely want that service and know what they want. My friend Royce Blake, a copywriter, really helped me with this: talk about the benefit first. What are they going to get from it? It’s always about what they’re going to get. It’s not about you.

Nobody Cares About Your Origin Story

Scott: Where it gets confusing is there’s this other message from marketing that appeals to a CEO’s vanity: “Oh, the market’s really interested in your origin story and your values and your mission and your political stance.” No one cares. Allow me to be the spoiler alert. I’m a 35-year marketer. No one cares about that. “But Scott, all these surveys say people really care.” They’re lying. People lie on surveys all the time. They couldn’t tell you the truth even if they wanted to, because they don’t really understand why they buy things. It’s much more emotional, much more psychological than most people give it credit for. Unless you study it and dig deep, you won’t become aware of why you buy things either. It’s buried within us.

Richard: I’m doing a declutter now and pulling things out thinking, “Why on earth did I buy this?” Even stuff from six weeks ago.

Scott: You told yourself a story. “I deserve this. I need this.” But if you ask people about that story, they don’t know why they buy sometimes.

Richard: I remember at a company I worked at, they did one of those engagement surveys. We got really low scores. What we realized was we were wasting hours on a stupid survey. So the next year, everybody answered it the way management wanted it answered. Management got back great improvement scores and stopped doing the survey, which is exactly what everyone wanted. The manager never caught on.

Scott: You don’t have to be in marketing very long to realize surveys are extremely fallible. Oftentimes it’s not that people are twisting their evil mustache and lying on purpose. They’re not connected to the truth. They don’t really understand what you’re asking.

Branding Is About Transferring Emotion

Scott: If you really want to know why people behave the way they do, you have to go deep. You have to make educated guesses about stuff you have no idea whether it’s going to be true or not. It’s super important that companies have these conversations at the messaging stage, at the strategic foundation stage. You’d be amazed how many companies just jump to market. I ask them, “What emotion is your brand based on?” They can’t answer me. I tell them there are 78 quantifiable emotional states their brand could be based on. Which one is it? They can’t answer. So they don’t understand what branding is, because branding is about transferring emotion. If you don’t understand what emotion you’re trying to transfer, what are you doing? A lot of people confuse the visual output of branding with branding itself. Graphic designers do this all the time: “All the stuff I create, that’s the brand.” Wrong answer. The brand is a decision about which emotion we’re going to evoke, a true North point for the compass where we’re going to point everything toward. If you don’t understand what it is to start with, you’re never going to get there. People bring me in later and say, “Why isn’t marketing working?” What emotion is your brand based on? Can’t answer. Don’t have a true North point. Don’t have a controlling idea for the marketing. The message is all about them, not the customer.

Talk About Failure

Scott: The third mistake I always correct: people don’t talk about failure enough. In StoryBrand we lean into failure. “Oh, Scott, I don’t want to be too negative.” Did you know that 89% of human thoughts are negative? We come out of the womb crying and screaming. We’re negative from day one and get worse. What drives behavior is fear of failure, fear of missing out. That failure message is incredibly important to create behavior. That’s why you don’t create these sunshine-and-roses websites: “This is a magical world of Oz where no one has any problems and everyone is smiling.” That isn’t reality, and the brain knows it, and it suspects you the marketer are full of crap when you do that. I don’t show up with a basket of cookies and sunshine and rainbows. I want to talk about the problems customers are having. Their fear. What it looks like if they fail, and what it looks like if they succeed. By doing that we’re telling a great story.

The Other Guy Blinked

Richard: One of my favorite books is “The Other Guy Blinked” by the CEO of Pepsi, probably from the nineties. He talks about New Coke and how Pepsi took advantage of it. Everything you just talked about, how Pepsi was in tune with what people wanted and Coke wasn’t. It’s one of the best books I’ve ever read on marketing. Quick read, hard to find because it’s way out of print. This was the Michael Jackson era when they hired Michael Jackson. The whole thing is a story.

Only 29 Percent of Businesses Survive

Scott: Marketing is a mess today, and for reasons that are entirely preventable: there’s no strategy to it. All these marketing firms selling tactics need to push things up and say, “I may get a check for my Google search ranking business or my Facebook ad business, but that doesn’t help the business live.” Only 29% of businesses are going to survive. That shouldn’t be acceptable to us as people who work with small businesses. We’ve got to get those numbers up. The marketing profession needs to step up and take ownership for the marketing function of the business. Not just one stupid tactic, not one arrow in the quiver. Who’s going to own the entire function and strategy? If we start doing that, we can do better for customers, better for businesses, and get that 29% number much higher. I hate that number.

Jaguar and Brand Equity

Richard: The new Jaguar commercial. Halfway through, they have this person who’s not smiling with a sledgehammer. How does that motivate me to buy a car? The sledgehammer is hostile. I’m not going to buy a car because of that.

Scott: They didn’t have to do any of that. There’s this thing in branding called brand equity, all the money and resources you’ve invested in building your brand. Jaguar has hundreds of millions of dollars in brand equity. This is the car James Bond prefers. Nobody has brand equity like that. Then they throw it all away based on the idea they want to be experimental and next-gen. What you should do is create a sub-brand. Jaguar Next, or Jaguar something. Do all your experimental stuff with the pink cars and the freaky ads under the sub-brand. Protect and preserve the brand equity of the 100-something-year-old iconic logo and imagery. You’ve gotten the market to memorize who you are, which is one of the hardest things to do. Then you throw it all away because some CEO has an ego trip and wants to take the company in a new direction. Completely irresponsible.

Richard: There’s Budweiser Light, Pepsi and Coke sub-brands. You want to go into that space, you think Gen Z is a thing, create another brand for them.

Scott: Pepsi and Coke aren’t going to mess with the iconic nature of their brands. They’ll create something else to the side and see how it goes. If it catches on, they’ll put resources toward it. That’s brand strategy, brand hierarchy. There’s a company called Interbrand that puts a dollar value on how much a brand is worth. Some of these dollar values are in the many billions. You have this asset worth billions. First do no harm to it. Learn more about Scott Robertson at robertsoncomm.com or connect on LinkedIn. Find Richard Lowe at TheWritingKing.com.

Quotable moments

Frequently Asked Questions

What is Scott Robertson’s central marketing principle?

Make the customer the hero of the story, not the brand. As a StoryBrand Certified Guide, he uses that framework to get companies out of their own message and speak the customer’s language, which makes marketing far easier.

Why does he say nobody cares about your origin story?

Because in 35 years of marketing he’s found that buyers aren’t moved by a company’s origin, mission, or values, whatever surveys claim. People often cannot explain why they buy, so self-focused messaging falls flat.

How does he define branding?

As the deliberate transfer of a specific emotion. He tells companies there are dozens of quantifiable emotional states a brand could be built on, and warns that most cannot name the one they’re aiming for.

What is the lesson of the Jaguar example?

Protect your brand equity. Jaguar had enormous accumulated brand value and, in his view, risked throwing it away chasing experimentation, when the right move is to test radical ideas under a sub-brand instead.