For years, I was a freelance writer.
People would give me a brief. I'd churn out some words, get traffic, get paid.
And though everything I produced was well written, and people did find it genuinely helpful, I'd constantly look back at the final draft and think...
...well, you saw the subject line.
Fortunately, I got a regular gig at CXL, then Shopify, and eventually moved to Shopify Plus as employee 14 and the first marketing hire.
And that's when I encountered a problem I never had before.
Three actually:
Problem 1: "Cloud based SaaS" wasn't taken considered viable for "serious" ecommerce businesses.
Problem 2: Our product had significantly fewer features compared to our competitors.
Problem 3: Shopify Plus' feature set was nearly indistinguishable from the core product.
And when I asked our GM:
"What is the difference between Shopify Plus and the rest of the market? And what is the difference between Shopify and Shopify Plus?"
"That's your job to figure out."
::gulp::
See, before I got into marketing, I was a career actor.
For years, I didn't believe I had any business calling myself a marketer, and in this situation, I was completely out of my depth.
But if there was one thing I knew I could do well, it was "script analysis" which is how actors build characters and bring them to life.
So I went to work trying to find "the script" of what was happening in the market.
Customer interviews, sales calls, support transcripts, real-time social media monitoring, and around 20 notebooks of handwritten notes dissecting our competitor's message.
All to answer one thing:
"What is our character's motivation?"
What I found was absolutely everyone who was in Shopify's orbit valued disruption, scrappiness, and were unapologetically biased toward action. They also feared stagnation and being seen as "average."
That was our opening.
If we couldn't compete on features, we were going to compete on Narrative.
Now, where our competitors listed features, we listened for beliefs.
When they were caught up in what was happening now, we were showing prospects and partners our vision of the future.
And when our content had to go head-to-head on a topic, they'd present facts, and we'd share competing worldviews.
In my last email, we talked about how competing values let's you approach the same topic from wildly different angles.
What we didn’t talk about is the deeper tension underneath those values.
The Philosophical Conflict.
Forget about the topic for a second, and let's just look at a set of values, and how the philosophical conflict can shape the angle of the piece:
Speed vs Alignment
Take your pick; this set of competing values could be applied to a billion different business topics.
From it, the philosophical conflict becomes:
"Is it better to move fast and iterate later, or collaborate with others so everyone's voice is heard?"
This could be about:
- Launching a product
- Building a landing page
- Planning a content calendar
That question, "move fast, or collaborate," becomes the words beneath the words.
It’s what gives the writing meaning and moves beyond covering the topic… and starts shaping someone’s worldview around it.
That was the thing I didn't realize I was missing when I was only working off the big ole' keyword list, and something I truly believe played some part in Shopify Plus's early success.
So, if you’ve ever had that feeling—where the draft is fine, but you’re not—look for the question behind the copy. Odds are, the philosophical conflict is either missing…or it's omeone else's
Once I started writing from the philosophical conflict—not just around it—everything shifted. Intros got tighter, arguments hit harder, and I started saying stuff I actually believed in.
Before, I'd look at what I produced and shrug.
After, I'd sit back with a satisfied grin, with absolute confidence that what I wrote would have more of an impact than the next 10 pieces combined.
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This is just one of the principles we're going in-depth into in The Narrative Design Toolbox.
We'll look at how it's used in screenwriting to resonate with viewers and draw them into the narrative, and what we can do to find it in our own work.
I want to change the way you think about content.
If you’re already nodding along, you're going to love it.
