“We, marketers, are the story builders. We craft stories, together with leadership.
But how do we identify the story tellers?
The people within the organization who can express that story in the right way, in a way that resonates with your minimum viable audience?”
That was me. At a microphone. Asking Seth Godin a question.
I couldn’t resist.
When the hosts of The Reinvention Summit in Dublin opened the floor for Q&A during Seth’s keynote, my legs took me to the mic before my brain could reconsider.
See, I’ve been obsessed with this idea lately. How do we build thought leadership within companies that doesn’t feel forced? Yes, it’s about finding the experts and amplifying their voices. But it’s also about something bigger.
It’s about every person in the organization telling the company story, authentically. Not reciting a script from marketing.
We could call it “story leadership.” And who better to ask about it than Seth Godin himself?
The story isn’t written—it’s lived
His answer immediately shifted my perspective.
“The stories I am talking about are rarely in print or even delivered verbally,” Seth explained.
He challenged me to name three people who work at ChatGPT or Claude. I couldn’t. Because their success isn’t built on having great spokespeople—the product itself is the spokesperson.
When you evaluate a restaurant, you don’t interview the chef. You judge it based on “countless little clues and smells and sights and vibe” before you even taste the food.
“The aroma when you walk into the first-class lounge on Air France—that aroma is a story. The sound they pump in before a concert starts is a story. Whether check-in went smoothly at a conference—that’s a story.”
What Seth was describing wasn’t thought leadership as we typically define it. It was something more pervasive, more authentic, and ultimately more impactful.
And, crucially, while they may be defined by leadership, these experiences of products and services are built by everyone in the company.
Empowering every employee to be a storyteller
So how do we actually do this?
Seth offered a powerful example.
A luxury hotel chain recognized that all good hotels are essentially the same in the middle of the night—dark and quiet. So how could they justify charging five times more?
The answer wasn’t in training their executives to be better spokespeople. Instead, they went to the service staff. They gave each of these employees $250 that they could spend at any time, as often as needed, to solve any customer problem. No questions asked.
“When you empower a thousand, two thousand, five thousand, fifteen thousand people with a budget and a system that rewards them for doing it, when you tell their stories again and again, it’s gonna happen, and because it happens, then the story becomes true.”
It’s not media training—it’s enablement
When I asked my question, I was sort of looking for a system to identify people willing to participate across the organization. Seth’s answer went in a completely different direction: it’s not about finding people who are ready; it’s about getting everyone ready.
“It’s not the media training of the CEO,” Seth emphasized. “It’s figuring out how to build deep into the system itself the thing that’s going to build trust.”
This flips traditional thought leadership on its head.
Instead of focusing solely on a select few voices—executives and subject matter experts—we should be creating platforms that empower everyone to participate in building the brand story.
When we build these enabling systems, the narrative becomes more resilient, because it’s built by many unique diverse voices.
Stories matter,
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đź“ť From the blog
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