My girlfriend and I started watching Daredevil on Netflix. After two days, we’ve nearly finished the first season.
But what I realized recently is that my girlfriend is probably not the target market for Daredevil. She’s not into superheroes or comic books, and she looks away whenever someone gets their skull bashed in.
And on the surface, that’s what Daredevil is all about: a comic book superhero bashing in skulls. Give that concept to a group of subpar marketers, and you’ll hear about needing to focus on men ages 16-35. Their advertising campaigns might include violent action clips thrust onto a limited range of comic book niche sites.
But what Daredevil really offers is more than violence: it has a good story. That’s the part that really hooks my girlfriend (and me). You can only watch fast-paced fight scenes for so long, but a good story can keep you hooked for hours.
Content marketing tends to be focused on the violence (or whatever else seems to be the most genre-specific detail of a product). It should focus more on the story.
Take, for example, a flower delivery service.
The “violence” of that industry would be the flowers themselves: the colors, the smells, the varieties. But that’s not what sells flowers. The story, the image of a man making up with his wife, is what sells flowers.
Because in truth, products and services do not matter, at least not on their own. How those things play into our lives, our stories, is what drives us.