A black and white board. All the pieces, prepared for the encounter, are about to start a quest of high stakes, with only two possible outcomes: all or nothing. It is a journey of courage and strategy, of calculated risk and unexpected moves, that takes players deep into the mind of the other to conquer.
Although the world is infinitely more nuanced than the black-and-white geometry of the chessboard, in many aspects, marketing is very similar to a chess game. Here, the players also dance in complex choreographies, but the conquest is more elusive: hearts and minds of worldwide audiences.
All the pieces that create a marketing campaign sync to discover and understand customers, anticipate their desires, and afterwards make that one move that will change what becomes possible next. But while every piece is important, two stand apart: one that gives the game its purpose, and the other, unmatched in power, that can alter its course. In marketing, story is king. And for decades past and more to come, data is its powerful queen.
It could hardly be otherwise. As customer expectations for personalization rise, marketers rely on increasingly complex sets of data. Yet if everyone has access to similar information, the differentiator becomes what you can see that others don’t: the unexpected connection; the story worth telling. And the truth is, stories are worth telling, for they are engraved in our DNA and our history and hold the key to how we make sense of the world.
On a chessboard, if the king gives the game its purpose, the queen gives it extraordinary reach. So the strongest marketing is neither data-driven nor story-driven alone. Rather, story-first and data-powered.