Why Most Content Advice Stops Far Too Soon

I've just come from listening to a webinar about reach and engagement, and what strikes me is that there is an awful lot of rhetoric about how to make content perform better, but remarkably little about how ideas actually take hold in the human mind.

We are told to tell better stories. To favour quality over quantity. To be authentic. To put people rather than brands at the heart of our communications.

All perfectly sensible advice, and almost impossible to disagree with, but the trouble is that it only takes us so far.

Knowing that storytelling matters does not tell you why one story becomes lodged in somebody’s memory while another is forgotten before they have finished scrolling. Knowing that people prefer authentic voices does not explain why we instinctively believe some people and distrust others. And deciding to publish less frequently will achieve very little if what you publish is indistinguishable from everybody else’s point of view.

For me, this is where far too much discussion about content and thought leadership becomes superficial. We concentrate on the mechanics of publishing when the interesting questions sit much further upstream.

Where does the idea come from? Why should anyone care about it? Who is best placed to articulate it? What will make somebody believe it? And what has to happen for that belief to become sufficiently established that it starts influencing behaviour?

Those are questions about people, rather than platforms. And behavioural science has rather a lot to say about them.

There is no shortage of content. There is a shortage of interesting thought.

The democratisation of publishing has been extraordinary. Anyone with an opinion can now reach thousands of people without needing an editor, a publisher or a media budget. LinkedIn has effectively become one enormous business publication, populated by executives, academics, consultants, journalists, founders, employees and an increasingly sophisticated creator community.

AI has accelerated that process again. Research that once took days can be reviewed in hours. Interviews can be interrogated rapidly. Patterns within large datasets can be surfaced almost instantly. A half-formed argument can be explored from half a dozen directions before breakfast.

All of that is incredibly useful.

It also means that producing competent content has become very easy.

And competence, when everyone has access to it, stops being particularly valuable.

This is why I believe brands need to spend a lot more time looking for the thinking that exists inside their organisations. Every business has people who know things that the marketing team does not. They are talking to customers, solving technical problems, watching markets change, negotiating with regulators, building products and noticing contradictions long before those observations appear in an annual trends report.

One of the most engaged-with blogs I ever worked on - many years ago - was for Open Credo - a tech firm that at the time was focused on derisking the latest technology coming down the line, allowing big brands to embrace the latest thinking, without the risk. The blog was written,  in its entirety,  by developers.  Never touched my marketing.  Yes,  it was geeky.  I didn't understand a fraction of it. But it worked.  Developers and technical teams read it.  When decision-makers asked their technical teams to evaluate Open Credo's approach,  they found it credible,  insightful and authentic. 

Look outwards, as well as inwards

There are also valuable voices outside ever organisation: customers, academics, advisers, practitioners and specialists who see the category through a different lens.

That intellectual raw material is far more interesting than another content calendar populated with “five trends to watch”, an awareness-day post and somebody’s carefully sanitised observations from a conference.

Good thought leadership starts with having a credible thought.

Obvious, perhaps. Yet surprisingly easy to forget.

In our recent work with the gas distribution networks,  team BH&P have explored a range of creator voices - from famers to distillery owners, journalists,  academics,  policy-makers and celebrities - with the one overriding factor being authenticity. Who really cares about this topic and audience? Who has a point of view?

Storytelling matters because brains create meaning

Storytelling inevitably enters this conversation because stories are enormously powerful. But I sometimes wonder whether we have repeated the phrase “humans are storytelling creatures” so frequently that we have stopped asking what it means.

Our brains are constantly constructing meaning from incomplete information. We interpret what we see through previous experience, memory, context and expectation. We make predictions about what is likely to happen next and update those predictions when something surprises us. We place ourselves inside narratives and instinctively assess what information means for people like us.

Stories work well becasue they provide structure for complexity and give abstract information emotional consequence.

It is these same behavioural mechanisms that also explain why some stories fail.

• An argument that requires enormous cognitive effort is harder to process.

• An idea that threatens somebody’s identity may be rejected before its evidence has been considered properly.

• Information delivered by somebody we distrust is interpreted differently from identical information delivered by somebody we respect.

• Familiar claims can start to feel more credible through repeated exposure, while social cues from people around us help us decide what deserves our attention in the first place.

This is why creative communication becomes considerably more interesting when behavioural science sits beneath it.

Storytelling gives you a form. Behavioural understanding helps determine how that story is likely to land.

Trust has become much more complicated

The question of who delivers an idea feels particularly important at the moment because the relationship between brands and trust is changing.

The Edelman Trust Barometer has been documenting this tension for years. G2 has also reported a striking increase in the number of B2B software buyers who regard vendor websites as unreliable; the proportion tripled in a year.

That does not mean corporate communication has suddenly become pointless. Brands still need strong points of view, coherent narratives and places where people can understand what they stand for.

But brands would be wise to recognise an uncomfortable reality: saying something about yourself and having somebody credible say it about you are psychologically different events.

People use social proof constantly, often without consciously recognising that they are doing it. Faced with uncertainty, we look sideways. What are other people doing? What do people like me believe? Who appears to know what they are talking about? What has already been accepted by the group?

This happens when we choose restaurants from reviews, select a new piece of technology, decide which consultant to hire or form an opinion about an unfamiliar company.

That is also why the growth of professional creators on LinkedIn is interesting. Some organisations still seem to regard creators as essentially another advertising format: find a person with an audience, give them a message and ask them to distribute it, but that misses most of the value.

A good creator has earned an audience through a recognisable point of view. People have made repeated judgements about whether that person is interesting, credible, useful or entertaining and have chosen to continue listening. The relationship already contains a degree of accumulated trust. 

The same applies to people inside a company.

An engineer explaining the consequences of energy theft can carry a different kind of authority from a corporate campaign. A researcher discussing the findings of a study brings something different from the press release announcing it. A founder who has spent twenty years inside a market can say things that would sound ridiculous coming from the company page.

Authentic voices work when the authenticity has substance behind it.

Simply transferring corporate copy into somebody’s personal LinkedIn account achieves very little.

M is for Messenger

Back in 1951, Hovland and Weiss ran experiments which showed that identical arguments produced different levels of attitude change when attributed to sources with different levels of credibility. More recent research has found that source credibility can affect both what people say they will do,  and what they will actually do. Similarly, EEG studies (brain scans) show measurable differences in neural activity while people assess whether a source is credible.

In Brent, former gang members working as youth officers were used to communicate the risks of gun crime to young people. Their relevance and lived experience gave the message a credibility an institutional voice could struggle to achieve.

The Institute for Government and Cabinet Office uses an approach called MINDSPACE to evaluate the factors influencing how people will behave - and the "M" in Mindspace stands for Messenger - it comes first becasue it is critically important: “we are heavily influenced by who communicates information.” Authority, expertise, similarity and our existing relationship with the speaker all affect how any message is received.

For marketers, messenger choice should be part of the strategy from the very start of communications design.

References: Dolan et al. (2010), MINDSPACE; Hovland & Weiss (1951), Public Opinion Quarterly; Smith et al. (2013), Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin; Wawer et al. (2021), Frontiers in Neuroinformatics.

We also need to understand what people do with information once they receive it

One of the reasons I remain obsessed with behavioural science is that human beings are far less rational than most marketing plans assume.

We pay disproportionate attention to information that supports things we already believe. We look for evidence that helps preserve a coherent sense of who we are. We copy others, and we use shortcuts. We respond to emotion before constructing beautifully rational explanations for decisions that may have been largely intuitive.

Imagine that you are trying to establish a new idea in a complex B2B market. Publishing one authoritative article may create a moment of attention, but beliefs will never shift because somebody encountered a single beautifully reasoned argument on a Tuesday morning.

The idea gains strength when the audience encounters it in several credible contexts.

They hear an expert discussing it.

A customer describes experiencing the same problem.

Some original research gives it evidence.

A journalist covers the issue.

A colleague shares the article.

They come across a second piece exploring the idea from another angle.

Eventually it begins to feel familiar, other people appear to recognise and reinforce it. The argument becomes easier to retrieve from memory and easier to repeat to somebody else.

At that point, marketing has moved beyond publishing content and started shaping a mental model. That is reinforcement. Social proof, familiarity, messenger effects, identity and cognitive fluency are all working together.

If we could, should we stop "AI Slop"?

I am increasingly wary of the blanket use of the phrase “AI slop”, because it collapses several very different things into one easy insult.

There is certainly a great deal of truly dreadful AI-generated material around. Anyone who has read enough breathless articles about “navigating an ever-changing landscape” and "a world where change will never be as slow as it is now" can probably recognise it within three sentences.

But dismissing AI itself seems intellectually lazy.

We use AI to help interrogate research, organise knowledge, identify patterns and explore connections between ideas. It can help an expert get to the interesting question faster. It can compare interviews, find contradictions in a body of evidence, pressure-test an argument and retrieve information that might otherwise remain buried in a folder somewhere. It also allows us to pressure-test our arguments and compare them with properly referenced scientific studies as well as common thinking,  to see whether they hold water.

I, for one,I think that is enormously exciting.

The quality of the result still depends on what is brought to the process in the first place: expertise, curiosity, experience, judgement and a willingness to have a point of view. Without those things, AI simply makes it possible to produce mediocre material at astonishing speed.

Used intelligently, however, it gives knowledgeable people much better tools with which to think. As the cost of producing polished words falls, the scarce resource becomes the thinking underneath them.

So, let's start somewhere else

Before deciding whether a post should be a video, carousel or article, I would like to see more organisations asking a different set of questions.

1. What do we know that is genuinely worth somebody else knowing?

2. Where does our audience currently stand on this issue?

3. What are they likely to resist, and why?

4. Which voices already have credibility with them?

5. What evidence would give the argument weight?

6. Where might social proof help?

7. How can the central idea be explored repeatedly without simply saying the same thing over and over again?

8. And, perhaps most importantly, what do we actually want somebody to think, feel or do differently as a result?

Those questions make content strategy harder.

Good!!!!!!!

It should be harder!!!!!

Nothing worth doing was ever easy. Creating more material has never been the interesting part of marketing. Understanding people well enough to influence what happens next is where the real work begins.

And that requires rather more than telling a goodish story, three times a week.