B2B Tech and the Imitative Fallacy. | Write On
Author: Kim Grob
When I was in grad school working on my MFA in creative writing, I learned about a concept that has stuck with me throughout my writing career. It’s the idea of the “imitative fallacy.” It sounds fancy and academic, but it’s really just a warning about what not to do when crafting a story. The argument goes like this: Just because a situation you’re writing about is chaotic, that doesn’t give you license to develop a chaotic plot structure. Just because a character you’re writing about is boring, that doesn’t give you the right to tell a boring story.
I often think about this idea of the imitative fallacy in the context of B2B tech writing. We can apply it like this: Just because B2B PowerPoint decks are riddled with jargon, that doesn’t give B2B tech writers license to write jargon-laden content. Just because some marketers might perceive their IT colleagues as emotionless, that doesn’t mean we should write emotionless stories for them.
And yet. As B2B tech content writers, we often receive briefs from marketers stating that tech audiences-especially IT folks-want nothing more than the facts. No storytelling. No creative hooks. Nothing that sounds like an actual conversation between humans.
But it’s simply not true.
One of my favorite books of 2019, Sorry Spock, Emotions Drive Business, by Adam Morgan, delves deep into neuroscience to debunk this misperception. “The role of emotion in how we pay attention and how we remember is physiological,” he says. “And this is a universal truth for all humans. There isn’t a target audience like IT professionals who are different.”
To capture the attention of IT pros-heck, to capture anyone’s attention in this busy, cluttered world-you need more than just logic. You also need emotion. The trick is to find the right emotion and to use it in a way that gets readers to stop and pay attention, to feel and think new things, and eventually to change their attitudes and actions. That’s where truly talented strategists and writers come in. Here are just a few of the ways they help clients push beyond imitative fallacies to create content that stands out and gets results.
Avoid thinking in stereotypes. Every department in the business world has its stereotypes. But if we think of all IT workers as introverted nerds with poor social skills, then we’re more likely to assume they want their content served up equally nerdy-without any attention to drama, emotion, or human connection.
Amass clear and detailed audience information. The antidote to stereotypical thinking is a deep understanding of the audience you’re writing for, backed by quantitative and qualitative data. Based on that research, you should be able to answer the following questions before anyone writes a word: What do we know about this audience as fellow humans? What are the burning questions they’re asking? What keeps them up at night? And what would help them to sleep better?
Find your emotional hook. Once you understand what your audience cares most about, the big creative challenge is to find a way to really bring it to life for them. For example, one of our senior writers, Lori Alcala, recently wrote a piece about IT security and opened it with a real-life story about a well-known hacking incident. Marketing fluff? Hardly. It was the kind of story that struck fear in the hearts of her readers.
Apply data-driven logic. Just as a “facts-and-only-facts” strategy won’t get results, neither will an “all-the-feels” approach. “You really need to know when to appeal to emotions, and when to get down to business,” says Lori. In the case of her IT security article, that meant providing cases studies, third-party research, and technical recommendations to illustrate how companies could fend off disastrous hacks like the one she wrote about in her intro. By the time readers got to the conclusion, she’d switched back to emotion to paint a bright, optimistic picture of what the future could look like.
Think beyond the white paper. Just because the vast majority of B2B tech white papers are boring, that doesn’t mean you’ve got license to create boring content. In fact, considering that there are so many dreary white papers in the world, it’s easy to stand out just by telling human, emotional, and thought-provoking stories that your audiences care about. And these stories shouldn’t always be told in 15-page documents. They might take the form of a podcast, an interactive microsite, or a quiz. Explore all the options out there. Find a novel and creative way to tell your story.
Considering that we spend our lives speaking human, it shouldn’t be so hard to translate business-to-business writing into a human-to-human conversation. But first, we have to convince everyone else that speaking in jargon is an imitative fallacy. After we’ve accomplished that, then comes the really, undeniably hard part: Finding the perfect balance of emotion and logic-and crafting a story that people actually love reading.
Originally published at http://www.writeonnetwork.com on May 18, 2020.
