B2B Storytelling: Why Your Company Needs a Storyline (Not Just Stories) with Dan Levy

Mark Evans: It's Mark Evans and you're listening to Marketing Spark. Today I'm excited to welcome Dan Levy to the podcast. Dan is the founder of Montreal Based Storyline, which helps DB companies get clearer about who they are, what they stand for, and how to tell stories that connect with customers. His work sits at the intersection of positioning, messaging, and storytelling. Three things that matter a lot if you want your marketing to resonate and your company to stand out. Now I'm a big advocate of positioning as a core part of a company's marketing foundation. If you don't have Clarity, crystal clear clarity about what you do, who it's for, and why it matters. It's hard to build messaging and do storytelling that is sharp, credible, and consistent. That's one of the reasons I was looking forward to this conversation. Dan and I also share a background in journalism. We come at storytelling with a similar lens, not as a buzzword, but as a way to find the angle, surface what matters, and make ideas more compelling. In this episode of Marketing Spark, we talk about what storytelling. Really looks like in B2B marketing, why companies need more than generic content and AI power claims, and how to think about messaging that reflects the real context customers are operating in. Welcome to Marketing SparkNAP. Thank you. Great to be here. Why don't we kick off with storyline? Obviously, the name of your company, but also your philosophy or your hypothesis towards marketing and storytelling. What do you mean by storyline? And why is it so important for B2B companies? As you said, I started my career in journalism. ⁓ I then branched, went over to the dark side, as we used to say, into content and communications and eventually into product marketing. And what I found working across different B2B tech companies, startups to scale-ups to publicly traded companies, is that really it all was about the story. The most synchronized successful, impactful go-to-market teams. And by that marketing, sales, success, and even into product to a certain extent were all really rallied around the same story that aligned teams internally, but then also helped them champion and help them resonate with their buyers and help their buyers champion them and champion the story within their organizations. Over time I ⁓ I realized it's not just about story or storytelling. I think those are super important things. There's a lot of hype around that right now. I think we a lot of people have seen that Wall Street Journal article that came out a couple months ago about the rise of the storyteller. And that's all great. ⁓ I think storytelling is its own thing. That's really about the craft. And the craft here is certainly a part of it. I care a lot about. But at the end of the day, we all have access to the same storytelling frameworks. We've all a lot of us have read Save the Cat or other screen writing books. I think this is part really looking through a journalistic lens, that it's not just about stories. There's lots of different stories. There's your product story, your founder story, your brand story. It's really about this overarching story or storyline. Really the story, the storyline that connects all these different aspects of your go-to-market together. Finding that overarching story that makes everything else make sense is anchored to your positioning, but helps you communicate that to the market through different messages. That's really where I have focused. I found that for B2B tech companies, being really focused and anchored to this overarching story just makes everything that comes next from messaging to campaigns to content to sales conversation just go a lot more smoothly. I hear you when it comes to the hype around storytelling and the different perspectives people have on what storytelling actually is. But let's take a step back in terms of this overarching story that you talk about. A lot of people would suggest that you're talking about brand positioning. Clearly identifying what you do, who you serve, why what you do matters to those people, and how you're different. In many engagements, that's where I start. Because if you don't have that in place, it's hard to do marketing sales, customer success, and everything else. What's the difference between this overarching story you talk about and brand positioning? Because that's something that there's a lot of confusion around. There is confusion around it. You've got brand positioning, you've got Product positioning. To me, the storyline is the thing that actually holds those two things together. So storyline fills a lot of gaps. I found that there's real gaps within B2B organizations in particular between brand and product marketing. Sometimes when people use the word positioning, they're talking about brand, which is a bit of a fluffy word that I think is really important, but I think it's just not well understood and therefore sometimes not well respected. becomes another way to talk about creative or the logo or maybe mission, vision, and values. So it's really high level company stuff that are actually important, so get me wrong, but actually disconnected from the product positioning, which is what do you actually do? And I think on the other side of the spectrum, you've got product marketers who worship at the altar of product positioning and they'll just say what it is you do, who it's for, who's your ICP, and that's all you need. All this brand stuff, this logo stuff, the tagline stuff. That's all fluffy. So what I've realized is it's not either or. And you really and when you're actually selling something, you're not just marketing it, you're not just building brand awareness, which is all really important, but you're actually having saled conversations. And those saled conversations lead to other conversations and accelerate deals and eventually close deals. The companies I work, they're not necessarily giant enterprises themselves, but they're trying to move up market. They're trying to sell to bigger deals to bigger customers, versus trying to move up market. break into the enterprise, you need the storyline that does speak to the bigger why, which I think a lot of people identify with the brand story or brand positioning, but that also very clearly communicates what it is you do, how it's different and how it's different from the competition. My definition of storyline is basically what do you do? How is it different? And why does it matter to the right people right now? So in that definition, you can traces a brand positioning, traces of product positioning and product marketing. I'm trying to us through those silos. And essentially what I found is that if you've got a storyline that bridges that gap, everything's going to be much more aligned and your deals are going to accelerate much more quickly because you don't have the brand people saying one thing, the product people saying another thing, your recruiters saying a whole other thing. Going back to the article in the Wall Street Journal that said that brand storytellers were the latest hot thing in marketing. When you think about it from the CEO's perspective and They're probably reading a lot and hearing from their marketing teams about storytelling, or maybe they're not hearing from their marketing teams about storytelling, but they realize that this is probably the biggest fad or the biggest trend in marketing. They go to their marketing teams and I'm saying simplistically, would say, we need to tell better stories. I read the Wall Street Journal and this article says that storytelling is important. Is that something that in your experience, a CEO would actually ask of its marketing team? And more important, would they Be confident enough to invest in storytelling. A lot of marketing for COs is a leap of fate and it's harder to correlate activity to outcomes. But do you think there's an appetite among leadership to leverage the power of storytelling? They're reading about it. They've been told that it's something they should do, but do you see it in action in real life? The thing I hear CEOs say is less we need to leverage the power of storytelling. It's more we need a story. Or we need a better story, or we need a clearer story. I come back to it's less about the storytelling, more about the story. I think storytelling, I think brand storytelling, again, that's my background. I did that for years and then it became and it was called storytelling, but then it was called content marketing, right? I I think that is still a powerful channel and is still a powerful way to get the story or the storyline across and out into the market. But I think when From my experience, when a founder or a CEO thinks about story, I'm thinking about one or two things actually. One is the founder story. It's a little bit about them, right? My founder story, and how do I get my founder story out? ⁓ and in those cases, what I try to get across to them is look, as the CEO, as the founder, your point of view, your perspective is definitely paramount, right? It's not the only input, but it's a very important input. But we need to put it together a storyline that's not tied to you, right? That's not scalable. Past a very early stage startup asking for fundraising. But the founder story at the early stage, not even series A, seed, pre-seed, maybe series A, with the found the founder's background, their credibility, how they came about this idea, all that stuff is an important part of the story. But I would argue is that as you scale, as you move up market, as you sell into bigger customers, that's just less and less important, right? The founder is not in those sales conversations. Now you've got enterprise, you've got AEs, you've got maybe SDRs, you've got, Solutions consultants, you've got a whole sales team, not to mention the whole marketing side of the house. The founder story is less important than actually your founder point of view, right? And how that point of view informs the storyline. So that's one way that I hear CEOs use the term story. What's my story and how do I get my story into the market? The other one is I would say more along the lines of how I think of the storyline, which is what are we trying to say here? Right. And for me, I'll it comes back to that question of what do we have to say? That's when I hear that, I'm okay, this person really gets it. And I'm gonna work with them because again, their input is super important, but also the rest of their leadership team, right? The sales leader, the marketing leader, the product leader. Sometimes there's a co-founder or two around. And and I can talk about other inputs to the storyline. That that that's an internal one. There's others as well. But that's where I think we're pretty aligned. And no, we need to have something to say. And it does follow from our positioning, right? Positioning is an input to that. But to me, Positioning is just not something you can bring to market, right? Positioning establishes the internal clarity around the strategy, but it's not really transportable in the way that a storyline is, where it translates into, again, sales collateral, marketing material, ⁓ actual conversations. So I've identified the storyline as this missing link or this gap between positioning and messaging, and storyline fills that gap. And I think that's where. The engagements I do where the CEO gets that. So they might not be able to define it that well, but they just have this sense that we're missing something. It's not the positioning. We know what we do. We know what category we're in. Yeah, we've got a marketing team who could maybe write decent copy. These days a lot of them figure they've got AI for a lot of the execution pieces of of the puzzle, which we can talk about as well. But they're missing the story, right? To me, when they say that, it's they're missing your point of view on. market on the customer's problem. You might have the what, but you're missing the how are you difference and why do you matter right now? And that's where we focus. You hear a lot about CEO, importance of CEOs, a brand presence, positioning themselves as thought leaders, having opinions on industry trends and where they think things are going. How do you marry point of view with storytelling? You have CEO, you want them to have a presence in the market place. Often they tend to be one of the most powerful marketing and sales assets that a company has. They may have a strong view on the vision and the mission and where the company's going. How do you marry that with storytelling and what marketing needs to do to achieve their goals? Maybe it's a good time to talk about the inputs into the storyline and a little bit about the process getting there. And I've talked about these internal inputs or internal sources if you want to extend the journalism metaphor, getting the point of view of certainly the CEO and the co-founders, if they're around, or the sales leader, the marketing leader, the product leader. But you also need to look at external sources, right? That includes your customers. So I'm a big believer in talking to your customers. Think. TLG type companies just get this inherently. But once you're selling into the enterprise, it tends to sometimes be a disconnect there. They'll tell me, we talk to our customers all the time. Look at our gong calls. No, those are not customer interviews. Those are sales conversations. Those could be a good input as well. It's not the same thing. And your customer lens, the competitive lens as well. So looking at what your competitors are out there saying, and not just your direct competitors in deals, but also adjacent ecosystem vendors that you might get confused for. Right. There's the ones you compete for with, the ones you get confused for, the ones you might actually compete with for mind share, but not so much for deals, looking at that competitive landscape and seeing where the white space is. All those things are different angles that help us arrive on the storyline. And then once we have the storyline, it becomes a matter of, okay, how do you get that out into the market? The founder, the CEO, certainly could be a really powerful channel. I would say maybe half of the companies I work with have a CEO who really wants to be fret front and center. Maybe you'd be a bit surprised, or I was a little bit surprised that especially once you get in a little bit later stage, sometimes post-private equity, when the either the CEO is not the founder, or some or sometimes they are a co-founder, but they're more the business person and it's really the product person who's more of the visionary. So it's not always the CEO, but I agree that could be a very powerful channel, especially on today on a channel like LinkedIn. Then your question around, okay, where's the storytelling come in? That's where some of the craft of storytelling comes in and where we definitely want to draw on. Their personal experience, their background. Hey, I just had a conversation with this really interesting CEO or CIO or CTO, whoever they're selling into in our space. And this is what I learned, right? Anchoring this content, because now we're talking about content and storytelling in their own personal story and their personal point of view and experience. Here's the most important thing. Making sure that whatever they're putting out there, whether it's a LinkedIn post or a keynote on a big stage, ladders up to that overarching story. I can't Stress that enough. And then the marketing team is the same thing. If you're the campaign, the customer market, the campaign strategist, PMM or brand or content, all these functions of marketing, which I think a lot of us are seeing consolidating now. I as l I I understand the need to optimize content for particular channels. Is it SEO driven, Sriven? Are you ultimately anchoring to a product launch so it's bit more product driven? All these different marketing functions. And channels have their own function and their own goals. But as long as that's ladders up to the overarching storyline, and what the founder is saying on LinkedIn or on a TED or whatever, or Web Summit ladders up to the storyline and what the product person says when they're presenting the product roadmap to either an existing customer or a prospect, that's the answer for how we make sure all these different stories line up. They all connect back to the overarching storyline. Looking at the development of storytelling in practice. So theoretically, this is what we should do. And we develop our storyline or brand positioning. And then it comes down to okay, so you're gonna talk the talk. Now you need to walk the walk. When back to my days as a reporter, we were inundated with news developments, press releases, and people that sources that we were talking to, what I was trained to do, and it and in time it came rather naturally, was to identify the angle, the storytelling angle. That's right. And what's interesting is that you could look at a press release, for example, and have one slant on it, but another reporter at a different publication could have a different slant based on their biases or their insights or maybe the editorial direction. So when we look at I think one of the things I find with marketers is that they don't have a very well trained storytelling lens. They look at the world around them. And it's a black and white world or it's a world where you've got three flavors of ice cream strawberry, chocolate, and vanilla. They're not really looking at the world around them. They're looking inward a lot of the time at either their company or their industry. Yeah, I think the other thing that sways a lot of them is data. They look at data and they think data's gonna tell them the story. And can. What I'm interested in from your perspective is that storytelling lens and how marketers can go from identifying really good stories that will and let's Call his fate here is that good storytelling is what resonates with the audience. It's things that educates them, entertains them, inspires them, makes them stop at a very fast moving world. Walk me to your take on that process where you identify the story, you craft it, bring it to market. So you hit publish, and then you scale it. What does that look like? What should that look like in the real world? There's a macro answer and the micro answer. And I could give an example maybe to make it a bit more tangible. Right. We're doing a version of that at the macro level in the actual storyline. I talked about in this case your different sources being the external sources, the competition, the customers, and the internal sources, like the different functions within a company. So that's how you get the storyline and you sprinkle in the brand story and you sprinkle in the product stuff and you get your storyline. Great. Now what you're talking about is okay, now we want to go start telling stories, right? Figure out what's our angle on something that's happening in the wider world. And the good news there is that your angle is now your storyline. Right. The storyline is your angle, right? It gives you your angle. Let me try to talk through an example. First of all, an example of a storyline, because again, I think this could be very abstract. I work with this company that's in backup and resilience, cyber resilience space. So they're really backing up these mission-critical SaaS platforms in the cloud. And they when they came to me, one of the first things that the CRO said to me was that we really have two businesses under one roof here. We've got our legacy business. Which is backing up Shopify stores, right? For e-commerce companies, mostly small and medium size. So often working with founders or small teams. And then we've got this emerging business, which is helping us move up markets where we're backing up platforms like Jira, GitHub, and Confluence, these software development, product development platforms. And here we're seeing that we're working with much bigger customers. We want more of these customers, but it's just a whole different ball game, right? Different Stakeholders, different jargon, different size. And so when the first thing the CRO said to me was, Look, I get your whole spiel about you need this overarching story. I just don't see how you skin this very hairy c to me, these are two businesses. We need two motions, we need two sets of stories and messaging. And he's, I don't want that because that makes my life much more difficult, right? To stand up two separate go-to-market motions. I just don't see how you're gonna reconcile this. Can you help us? And where we landed on the storyline. revolved around one word, which was shipping. You are an e-commerce company who's trying to protect their Shopify store and data from being lost. Or you're a CIO or a RevOps director at an enterprise. And by the way, not just technology companies, but one of the things that we saw was that almost every large enterprise is now shipping software, either internally or externally, really what you're worried about in the overarching problem we solve is not like data protection, which is where their messaging would revolve around before. It's really about operational resilience, right? Because when if these very mission critical platforms go down, if Jira goes down, the team just can't work, right? Right. If a Shopify store goes down, you literally can't sell. Right. The storyline became this idea of keep your business shipping, right? We help you keep your business shipping. So shipping it works for e-commerce, right? Actual packages, it works for keeping Shipping code, more importantly, we're elevating the problem that it's not just about protecting these platforms, because before a lot of their marketing and their messaging revolved around these particular platforms that they backed up. Now we're talking about, no, this is about keeping your business moving, right? Protecting your business and really elevating it to this business resilience and continuity category. That's just an example of a storyline. And I think you can see how that sort of works on a brand level, right? Keep your business shipping as a nice tagline in some ways. But it's also very intimately connected to what they do, right? And what they do for their customers. Yeah. Let me ask you a question here, just in terms of just pushing back on that a little bit. What happens in a case where, and I've run into this with clients, is that you come up with, you talk to customers, you talk to executives, you come up with a concept that you think is awesome because it marries what the company does, in this case, shipping. You present it to the client and You can't get alignment because they don't buy into it. Because everybody has biases and different approaches and slants. So how do you make sure that you get everybody on the same page, whether it's your brand positioning or your storyline? What are some of the keys to making sure that people feel like they're engaged in the process and that because of that, they can accept the fact that what comes out the other end may not be exactly what they want, but it's what Collectively has been created. So what you just described is 80% of the job. 80% of the job is the alignments, right? The 20% of the actual work and the creative stuff. That's the fun part. That's the stuff that comes easy or naturally to me, given my background and just like how my brain works. 80% of it is the alignments. I think part of that is born out of my process. What I don't do is what you'll see a lot of positioning consultants do or brand consultants is a workshop, right? Everybody in the same room for eight hours, facilitate this workshop. And then come out the other end and be like, voila, here's the answer. There's a few problems with that. One of them is super expensive to get these executives in a room for eight hours. But more pertinently, it just leaves the group think and it inevitably has people defer to the highest paid person or loudest person in the room. Often, not always, but often the CEO. Right. So we avoid that. My process is more journalistic. So I'm Steadfast about one-on-one interviews with all these stakeholders, right? In a sequential order, asking them the right questions, keeping my stakeholder champion, which is sometimes the CEO and sometimes it's more of the revenue leader, the CRO or the CMO, in the loop throughout this process, reporting back what I'm hearing, what I'm hearing from this person, where the gaps are, which is incredibly helpful for a CEO in particular. Because people aren't going to say to them, to their face in a workshop environment, which is inherently performative. What they're gonna say to me, an outside expert in a one-on-one interview. That helps, I think, protect the engagement. There's the fact that I'm also bringing in customer angles. This is what I heard from a customer. This is what I heard from this other customer. ⁓ but I'm looking at the competition. I'm seeing them say this and this, but nobody's really saying this quite the same way. It's not a long process. This could all happen within a matter of weeks. But the fact that there's time and space to look at the story from different angles, to triangulate between different people, to bring them along the journey. helps that. So when we get on that call, I don't know, three, four weeks in where I've done the interviews, I've done the resource search, it's not really a surprise at this point. A lot of that buy-in has happened. I do still tend to give a few potential directions for the storyline, right? I'll often start with the positioning and the positioning often is clear or maybe it needs to be tweaked. Once we have alignment there, that obviously needs to be solid. But then there's different ways to express that. Right. Keep your business shipping was not the only direction that I gave. But this is the one that everybody felt captured my best work, but what really capture the spirits of the business, how they talk about things, how the customers talk about things. But you talked about marketers ultimately being what I'm really doing through this investigative journalistic process is accumulating data, right? Most of it is qualitative data, but data points from the customer, from the market, from different stakeholders, and making a case for not what I think is best. But basically what the data and the process told me. These days we cannot have a conversation without talking about AI. The fact that it allows marketing teams to make things happen faster, not necessarily better, but faster. There's a lot of marketing going on, particularly around content. You can get a brand positioning statement. in seconds, rather than weeks or months. And it has made a life a lot more interesting. And I would argue a lot more volatile for people like you and I who not only compete against in-house marketers of the status quo, but the tools that are being used. So the question is where are we at in terms of the marketing landscape when it comes to AI and storytelling? My personal take is I feel like the pendulum is swinging back. There's some pushback against AI. The protest against job losses and the impacts of data centers, that economically, politically is having an impact. But I think that from a tactical perspective, I feel in my bones, and maybe biased because I'm an old school marketer, that human in the loop is starting to come back into the mix. Companies are realizing that if you want creative and authentic and contextualized marketing and storytelling, you have to have people involved. Now, it may not be as pure tacticians, it may be more as or curating storytelling and content. But I definitely feel there will be a line in the sand between companies that are solely AI powered and the ones that are hybrid, AI and humans. It's still very early days and there's lots of different views, but how do you view things? I like to say sometimes that I'm the guy you come to once you realize that Claude can't get your storyline, right? To make the distinction between storyline and storytelling, I do think That with the storytelling frameworks in hand, with your point, really good editing and curation, my journalism career was actually spent mostly as an editor. So I feel somewhat vindicated in that sense because I think having the strong editorial view and lens on this stuff, on anything that AI creates is just absolutely crucial for having anything valuable come out of it. But there's no doubt that AI can help with the storytelling, help with. Content marketing with content repurposing, taking something from one format, putting it in another. I was talking to a podcaster the other day. He's AI just changed my life because now I'm just like write a description and then write a promotional post and write this. Again, right? There, there's the kernel of the story itself. But I feel while AI could really help with the storytelling, when it comes to finding that storyline, again, AI can help as a research assistant and can help in that process as well, but it's not gonna do the work. of really the alignment work that we're talking about, right? A diverse and sometimes very friction filled team around a storyline. It's not gonna look at it from different angles. But if you give it inputs, it might give you like four different options for saying something. But those are rarely great. Right. They're a good starting point, right? They might prompt you to think about something you didn't think about before, but what you end up with is like completely different than maybe what you thought about in the beginning and what the AI said. But it's I I think you're right. The human in the loop thing, the AI plus human thing is really what's emerging as the way I marketers think. And I think about AI as a team member, AI as a really useful tool for scaling the storyline. But I really feel like the key strategic work here ⁓ absolutely needs that human insight, human curiosity, human ability to find patterns between completely disconnected things and AI just helps with. One final question when it comes to CEOs and storytelling, one of the realities is that CEOs put a lot of faith in marketing teams and marketing leaders to do the right thing. But often they're not sure if marketing is working or working as well as it should. They can look at dashboards, but sometimes tends to be a lack of insight into what marketing is doing and why they're doing it and whether it's actually driving outcomes. If you're a CEO, what are the signals? What are the red flags that your company does not have storytelling or that storyline down? They're lacking something that is hurting them, whether it means longer sales cycles or losing deals to competition, or simply not getting getting prospects into the funnel because there's just no connection. What are some of the things that a CEO should let them go We got a problem. I think a lot of the the companies I work with, they're successful companies. They've scaled up. They're either pushing or just surpassed that hundred million dollar ceiling. There's a pipeline. They've they've scaled up their go-to-market team to some extent. So by all accounts, these are successful companies, but there is that, especially as they get to this point where they're trying to sell bigger deals to bigger customers and move up market, things slow down, right? There is this slowing down in the sales cycle. Lost to no action or sales cycles just dragging out without any really clear reason why, right? It's not that they're losing deals to competition necessarily. It's often no action at all. There isn't a clarity problem, right? Because they've nailed their positioning. They understand what they do, but they're really what they're lacking, I think, is a sense of urgency, right, on the buying side. Of okay, this is interesting. I get what this is, but I have all these other tools and I've got an AI and my CIO just wants me to use Salesforce or whatever existing mega platform they already have to do this. And so I can't really champion to them why we need this very specific thing. But I think that's where the sign often is. Your positioning is solid, your marketing fundamentals are there, but there's no storyline that's really driving. Any urgency in the sales process and through the go to market, which is why I say that why now piece, a sense of urgency, is just such an important and I think underappreciated part of all this. But the challenge with that is that it's a feeling. It's an emotional, it's driven by emotions because the CEO just feels that the story isn't right. Your signals obviously when deals take longer than expected or they don't happen at all. There's different reasons why that happens. Maybe your sales team isn't effective as they should be. Or your marketing isn't identifying the reasons why you would want to consider changing. Can you quantify bad storytelling? Or is it just something when you know it? I think to some degree it it is a gut feeling. Signals or slowing sales cycles or stalled sales cycles is one of those signals. Something that I see a lot is this idea that your product is ready for the enterprise, but your go-to market isn't. You've built a PLG motion and you've been successful. with a PLG motion. But now that you're trying to sell into bigger companies and bigger deals, something just isn't there's a mismatch there, right? And maybe you hire an enterprise AE or two, but they're good at what they do, but they don't have the storyline that they need to sell this thing to these particular companies because the although the marketing machine and the sales machine, all that and to some degree the product, the legacy PLG motion has all been geared towards a different type of customer. So For me, often these inflection points within a business, right? Maybe you were selling a point solution and now you've either developed a new solution or maybe you've acquired one or you or there's an MA that's happened and now you've got a platform, but you don't really have a platform story. Just have disconnected point solution stories, right? Like I said, your board and your revenue goals dictate that you need to sell bigger deals, right? The only way you're gonna hit your targets isn't just having more small deals. It's gonna be really fewer, much bigger deals. But you don't have the motion and the story to back that up. My advice to CEOs would be look out for these particular inflection points in your business where what got you here isn't gonna get you there. But often, from my experience, that really starts with a story problem. You just don't have the right story anymore to communicate what you are now, why you matter to the buyers that you're now selling into. This has been a great conversation, covered a lot of ground for sure. Where can people learn more about you and what you do? Yeah. First we old website at danjelevy.com. Of course, I'm on LinkedIn. Look for Dan J Levy that looks like me with a beard. There's lots of Dan Levy's and Dan Levi's out there, but I'm Dan J Levy. And I also launched a Substack a few weeks ago. It's called The Storyline, and it's with insights. And I try to do as many real life customer examples, client case studies as possible to make this abstract world of brand and product marketing and positioning and messaging as tangible as possible. So look out for the storyline on Substack. Awesome. Thanks to everyone for listening to another episode of Marketing Spark. If you found this conversation valuable and interesting, subscribe via Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can reach me at Mark at Markevins.ca, connect with me on LinkedIn, or visit Marketing Spark.co to learn more about my consulting work podcast, episodes, and newsletter. Thanks again for listening and I'll talk to you next time.