In general, I believe that a good service is the best marketing of that service. The problem is, Made by Many only provides its services to a handful of clients at a time. So, yes the word spreads, but on a small scale. And the digital products and services we build for clients, well, they belong to the clients, so by the time they reach the media (which, pleasingly happens regularly) our company name is the first casualty of the copy editor’s eye. Not to mention the restrictions of what and when we are allowed to publicise things from a legal standpoint.
Then there are opinion pieces. We do blog (hello!) but less often than we’d like, and the more senior members of the company especially struggle to find time to articulate their (I’m sure, MIND-BLOWING) industry commentary. In short, we’re very busy, working very hard, very quietly, for brands with more newsworthy names than ours. Insert emoji of tiny violin.

The point of the ‘in-house storyteller’ (let’s remove the word journalist for a moment) is for them to be a less busy extension of us; our unburdened mouthpiece. Instead of briefing an external PR agency, we want someone to ‘live with us’, be a part of the team, and help to extract the insights and opinions that are trapped inside us and our projects and get them out there. I guess this could be classed as ‘baked-in marketing’, in a sense.

Is this grotty and shameful? We don’t think so, although grot and shame are quite fun in small doses. It just makes sense. While marketing agencies are hiring in product people, I suspect more ‘product companies’ will hire ‘marketing people’. We also intend to make this a two-way process: storytelling that goes inwards as well as out. It doesn’t really work having designated copywriters at a company like ours, but this person can help instil greater linguistic sensibilities in all of us (presumably their first job will be to tell me to stop using phrases like linguistic sensibilities). They will offer one more skill set to be fed into our highly collaborative workflow. And their particular skill will elevate everything we do, both internally and out into hungrily consumed articles and streams, where potential clients will be thumbing through the crisp notes of their annual innovation budget and saying things like: I must hire these talented, busy, and yet curiously articulate people.

My snark is in danger of this sounding disingenuous. It’s not. The thinking will be ours, the work will be ours and we will influence this person as much as they influence us. But our voices need amplifying and this feels like a good experiment to attempt doing just that. Lots of ‘product people’ think marketing is a dirty word. But marketing is simply what happens when value touches people, both directly and indirectly. And as much as we’d like this to be a natural process, it needs a little push.
If you think you could be this person, get in touch. If you think you know this person, send them our way!

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