Good marketing is about being clear. It’s about getting your point across very quickly, cut through the noise and it’s about using fairly few words to convey a sometimes quite complex value proposition.
Songwriters are excellent at doing just that. To use short, meaningful sentences to convey a complex and meaningful story or message to their audience. One fantastic storyteller who creates extremely relatable content, to use marketing lingo, that resonates with people from all walks of life and all around the world is the legendary Bruce Springsteen.
‘The Boss’ is a master storyteller who writes lyrics that addresses the full range of human emotions; hope, fear, anger, joy… and people all around the world can relate to his songs. If you, like me, are in marketing; you can without a doubt learn a lot from studying him and other lyricists.
In one of his songs, he is expressing to his loved one what he would be without her and his analogies are far from lovey-dovey, but still so very relatable:
“Without you I’m a drummer girl that can’t keep a beat.
An ice cream truck on a deserted street.
I hope that you’re coming to stay.”
If Bruce would have been a marketer, he could have opted to take the easy, already beaten path and gone for the straight up ‘I am lost without you’ power ballad way of explaining that he is lost and useless without his girl and that he wants her back.
Instead, he stretches his, and his audience’s, imagination and makes his copy way more interesting, intriguing and memorable by using the analogy with the drummer girl that won’t have much success in the marching band and the ice cream truck that is unlikely to get any business that day.
By going those extra few miles; Bruce’s marketing style wins. Every time.
And that’s how it’s done.
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