Speakers say emotion and storytelling are keys to successful marketing

The Survey of Marketing class (Marketing 621) taught by Professor Paul Busch recently welcomed guest speakers Dallas Shipp ’03 and Nicole Morten Lamb. Shipp runs a marketing strategy company called 6 Shooter Marketing and Lamb owns the video production company Water to Wine Productions.

The class focuses on developing marketing strategies including product, pricing, distribution, and promotion decisions. The pair’s presentation connected those principles by speaking on the “Power of Video.”

Shipp and Lamb reinforced the idea that even though facts are important, the emotion and storytelling behind marketing can sometimes leave a more lasting impression. Shipp introduced students to the idea that people want to do business with companies they feel connected to. Through marketing strategies, including video, you can relay emotion, explain difficult concepts, and make a connection with an audience, creating that vital relationship.  His simple mantra “facts tell, and stories sell” summarizes that idea. As for videos specifically, he emphasized the importance of quality video advertisement by sharing that use of an effective embedded video typically increases customer conversion by 80 percent.

Lamb focused on how to go about telling your story. She creates video projects for weddings, businesses, social media, and for clients in many different industries. Her passion resides with storytelling and bringing her clients vision’s to life. Understanding that so much work goes into creating a business, her hope is to communicate that idea and the finished result through professional, creative, and engaging videos. Lamb showed students a few videos she had produced advertising for businesses in Downtown Brenham.

Students were also shown the current and typical written information found on the Brenham website. When asked to compare the two, students instantly felt more connected to the experiences and emotion depicted the video instead of the written advertisements. This demonstration proved that it is possible to be informative and get the point across without sacrificing creativity and connection.

Their approach to marketing and advertising disproves the idea that there is only “one silver bullet for marketing success.” They encouraged focusing on constructing the right combination of practices to achieve the best marketing strategy for each client.