The Story Your Customer Tells Themselves
Last month my daughter came home from school and announced she needed a "real" backpack. Not the one with the cartoon astronauts she'd been carrying since second grade. A plain one. Black. No characters. She's nine.
I wanted to argue. I wanted to say that backpack is perfectly fine, it's basically new, your father and I didn't spend thirty-two dollars at Target for you to abandon it because some kid in your class has a North Face. But I didn't. Because I remembered being exactly nine years old, standing in a store in New Jersey, begging my mother for a pair of Keds instead of the off-brand sneakers she'd picked out.
It wasn't about the shoes. It was about the story I was telling myself: that I was the kind of kid who wore Keds. That the shoes would make me belong.
This is the thing we forget in marketing, constantly and repeatedly, like a goldfish forgetting it already swam past that castle: your customer is not buying your product. They're buying the version of themselves that uses your product.
The story comes first
Bernadette Jiwa talks about this beautifully. She says people don't buy what you make. They buy what it makes them. And she's right, but I think it goes even deeper than that. People aren't just buying an aspirational identity. They're reinforcing a narrative they've already started writing.
When someone signs up for Basecamp, they're not just buying project management software. They're telling themselves: I'm the kind of person who values simplicity over complexity. I don't need enterprise bloatware. I'm scrappy. I'm intentional.
When someone buys a Patagonia jacket, they're not buying waterproofing. They're saying: I care about the planet. I buy things that last. I'm outdoorsy, even if "outdoorsy" mostly means walking to the coffee shop in the rain.
Your job isn't to create the customer's story. It's to recognize the story they're already telling and make your brand a natural character in it.
Why most content gets this backwards
I've been in content strategy for fifteen years, and I'd say roughly eighty percent of the brand content I've seen makes the same mistake: it starts with the product.
Here are our features. Here's what we do. Here's why we're better than the other guys. Here's a chart.
Nobody wakes up wanting to read a chart. (Okay, some people do. Those people work in finance and they're lovely but they're not your whole audience.)
The content that actually works starts with the customer's internal monologue. What are they worried about? What do they want to be true about themselves? What story are they telling at dinner parties about the kind of professional they are?
I worked with a client once, a B2B SaaS company selling analytics tools. Their blog was wall-to-wall product updates and feature comparisons. Traffic was flat. Engagement was what you'd politely call "modest."
We spent two weeks interviewing their customers. Not about the product. About their jobs, their frustrations, the gap between how they saw themselves and how their organizations saw them. What emerged was a pattern: these people saw themselves as truth-tellers. They were the ones in the meeting who said "actually, the data shows something different." They were proud of that identity.
So we rebuilt the content around that story. The blog became about data-driven decision making, yes, but more specifically about the courage it takes to be the person who trusts numbers over politics. Engagement tripled in four months. Not because we got better at SEO. Because we got better at reflecting people's stories back to them.
How to find the story
This isn't magic. It's listening. But it's a specific kind of listening that most of us aren't trained for.
When I interview customers for brand work, I almost never ask them about the product first. I ask them things like:
- What does a great day at work look like for you?
- When you explain what you do to someone at a party, what do you say?
- What's the thing you wish your boss understood about your job?
- What's the professional accomplishment you're most proud of?
The answers to these questions are where the story lives. It's in the gap between their daily reality and the person they want to be. Your brand can live in that gap if you're paying attention.
A cooking analogy, because I can't help myself
My grandmother made the best dal I've ever tasted. She never wrote the recipe down, and when I tried to learn it by watching her, she kept saying things like "add spices until it smells right" and "cook until it looks done." Maddening.
But here's what she understood intuitively: the recipe wasn't the point. The point was the feeling of home. The dal was just the vehicle for the story she was telling her family: you are loved, you are fed, you belong here.
Your product is the dal. It needs to be good. Obviously. Nobody's coming back for bad dal. But the reason people choose your dal over all the other dal in the world is the story it lets them tell.
People don't remember your features. They remember how your brand made them feel about themselves.
What this means for your content
If you take one thing away from this essay, let it be this: before you write another blog post, another email, another landing page, ask yourself a question that has nothing to do with keywords or conversion rates.
What story is my customer already telling themselves? And how does my content show them that we're part of that story?
Ann Handley says everyone writes. And she's right. But the best writers aren't the ones with the fanciest sentences. They're the ones who understand that every piece of content is really a mirror. Your customer looks at your blog post, your email, your ad, and they either see themselves reflected back or they don't.
Make sure they see themselves.
Even if they're nine, and the story is just about a backpack.