The Best Marketing Book I’ve Ever Read & What It Taught Me
The best stories rule the world
We all have our favorites.
Favorite food. Favorite movie. Favorite band.
Even favorite child… (Don’t lie).
And today, I want to discuss a favorite of mine. Specifically, my favorite marketing book and what it taught me about the world of marketing as a whole and, more importantly, life in general.
The book I’m speaking about opened my eyes to an entire world that had been silently influencing my actions throughout my life.
All our lives, in fact.
And that book is called Winning the Story Wars by Jonah Sachs.
Spoiler Warning: While I don’t discuss all aspects of the book, focusing rather on what I gained from the book personally, this post will give away certain things from within the book — including, in my opinion, the main takeaway.
My Favorite Marketing Book: Winning the Story Wars
The book’s sub-headline is the following:
“Why those who tell — and live — the best stories will rule the future.”
While brief, these are powerful words that invoke a substantial task at hand for anyone wishing to leave an impact on the world.
Jonah Sachs believes that the mythmakers of the past — those responsible for the legends of Greek gods and goddesses, the tales of Abraham and Moses, and the many other religious stories in circulation — have been the most influential storytellers in society.
And in many ways, these original mythmakers did rule the future, as Sachs suggests.
Not in the literal sense — these mythmakers were likely not kings or emperors. However, their words have been one of the most influential forces that the world has ever had.
And while many interesting things have come from ancient civilizations, the ones that have lived on the longest and still invigorate our imaginations to this day are the myths and religious stories these societies created.
But this isn’t the case anymore — at least, not according to Sachs.
He explains that the role of the most influential storyteller in today’s world is now reserved for marketers.
The “Myth Gap”
The best stories rule the day. They always have and always will.
That’s the case made by Jonah Sachs, which is exactly why he says the most memorable things we have from ancient civilizations that still live on today are stories.
But Sachs doesn’t stop there.
He explains that today, there’s a “myth gap” — which he describes as a gap between the realities we, as human beings, are faced with and the lessons taught in the stories (i.e. myths) that have historically guided us when we are met with adversity.
The way Sachs put it, “a myth gap arises when reality changes dramatically and our myths are not resilient enough to continue working in the face of that change.”
We all live according to myths — which Sachs describes as being “the glue that holds society together, providing an indispensable, meaning-making function.”
They help define us, encourage us, and dictate our every decision.
By claiming there is a “myth gap,” Sachs is suggesting that religious myths no longer fill the need that many people are looking for when making their decisions.
Whether you personally feel this way, there is substantial evidence out there to prove Sachs’ point. While religious involvement has ebbed and flowed throughout history, there has been a substantial decline in religious organizations in recent years.
For instance, church membership (Christian and non-Christian) in the U.S. has declined 23 percent from 2000 to 2020, falling from 70 percent to 47 percent. Historically, church membership in the United States has hovered around 70–75 percent since the 1.
This means that for the first time in American history, the majority of American’s don’t belong to a church.
The New Mythmakers
With religious activity on the decline, there now exists a need for new stories to fill the gap that religious myths historically played in the daily life of millions of people who are now turning away from them.
Carl Jung, a famous psychologist, noted as early as WWI that myths “are what is believed always, everywhere by everybody; hence the man who thinks he can live without myth or outside it, is an exception. He is like one uprooted, having no true link with either the past, or the ancestral life within him, or yet with contemporary society.”
In other words, a mythless society is a disorganized and dangerous society.
And who should take on this task of creating modern myths for modern people?
According to Sachs, marketers have already taken up the mantle.
And it’s no surprise. As Sachs notes in his book, marketers “were uniquely suited to accept that role because they had the tools to close all gaps that religion, science, and entertainment had left open.”
Here, I quote Jonah Sachs verbatim so that you can read his point in his own words:
The stories marketers tell have always done the work of myth in providing explanation and meaning. Every new product launch, from liquid dish soap to the iPad, has been a new practical explanation of how to live an ever-changing modern life. The explanations update as fast as the circumstances of our lives do, sometimes even faster. And from it most primitive days on, marketing has been about allowing a product or service to confer meaning on the purchaser…
And ritual? Well, of course. What’s the good of a marketing story if it doesn’t give audiences a way to live that story out? You might say that introducing a new ritual is the basis of every marketing campaign. Shopping has become the single ritual we universally share.
Sachs finishes with the following thought:
The Puritan values of thrift and modesty were smashed, abandoned for easy consumer credit, conspicuous consumption, and deep personal relationships with brands. In terms of epoch-marking changes, this has been as profound a shift as the atom bomb.
As you can see, Sachs makes a hell of a case to suggest that today’s marketers are the new mythmakers of society, providing consumers with an identity to live by, rituals to act out, and an aide for life’s many difficult and ever-changing decisions.
What It All Means
There is A LOT more information in this book that I highly suggest reading for yourself.
What I covered here doesn’t even get you to page 100.
But even this was enough to awaken me to something I had never given enough attention to — the importance of stories in our everyday lives.
While I knew that stories had the capacity to influence people’s lives, I never truly understood just how deep that fabric went in the human psyche.
Telling someone to do something “just because” never works. Even as kids, we always question the “why” behind what our parents and other adults tell us to do.
It’s not until we tell someone to do something by means of a story, highlighting the benefits received from taking one course of action over another, that people really want to listen.
Especially if the story highlights an ending that listeners want for themselves.
That’s where marketers come in.
Tell a good story that places the consumer as the hero and the product or service as a helping aid to get them where they want to go, and a marketer will have a good shot at influencing people into making purchasing decisions.
After reading Winning the Story Wars I became obsessed with how to tell a good, meaningful story and understanding why certain ones fall flat, while others change the course of history and culture.
I didn’t have to look very far for those answers, because Winning the Story Wars itself goes on to explain what makes or breaks a story.
However, if you want other reading sources to dive into the world of storytelling, here are a few other options.
- The Hero With A Thousand Faces by Joseph Campbell
- Man and His Symbols by Carl G. Jung
- Ego and Archetype by Edward F. Edinger
