Argue Against the Story Your Market Believes

The story every doctor knew

For decades, doctors knew why people got stomach ulcers. Stress, spicy food, and too much acid.

In Perth in the early 1980s, a physician named Barry Marshall and a pathologist named Robin Warren thought a bacterium was involved. In 1982 they grew the first culture of H. pylori, after early samples failed because the lab threw cultures out after two days, before the slow-growing bacteria appeared.

The established view held that no bacteria could live in an acid stomach. To test it, Marshall drank a broth of the bacteria and developed stomach inflammation within days.

In 2005 the two men received the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for showing the bacterium's role in gastritis and peptic ulcer disease.

Notice what they did not do. They did not add another reason to treat acid. They showed that the old story's evidence was incomplete.

Every market runs on a story

Your market has a story too. It is the explanation buyers repeat about why their problem exists and what fixes it.

Ask an owner why sales are flat and you will often hear one: we need more traffic. Ask a homeowner why the bills are high and you will hear another: the energy company keeps raising prices.

These stories are not lazy. Each one rests on real evidence, usually something the person saw happen.

People hold on to beliefs even after the evidence for them has been weakened, a pattern researchers call belief perseverance. A story that has served someone for years does not move for a slogan.

That is why most marketing bounces off. It argues for a new answer while the old story is still standing.

Why arguing for loses to arguing against

Picture the reader's head as a courtroom where the verdict is already in. Your ad walks in with one more witness for a different answer.

The reader has heard witnesses all week. Every competitor brought one too.

Now picture a different move. You do not call a new witness. You show the old evidence was collected wrong.

That changes the reader's job. They cannot simply file your claim next to the others, because now the thing they believed has a crack in it.

Holding two clashing ideas is uncomfortable, a state psychologists call cognitive dissonance. People want it resolved, and your explanation is standing right there.

So the competition is not other offers. It is the explanation.

The Market Story method: four steps

1. Write the story in the market's own words. Read reviews, forums, and your own call notes.

Write down the sentence buyers use to explain their problem, word for word.

2. Find the evidence it rests on. Every story has a reason behind it.

"More traffic fixes sales" usually rests on a time when more traffic did.

3. Show where the evidence stops being true. Evidence expires in two ways.

It was true at a different time, or it was true for a different case.

In the ulcer case, the evidence was the failed cultures. The method threw samples away too early.

4. Offer the replacement, with proof. Give a better explanation, back it with evidence the reader can check, and only then show your product as the way through.

For how to win agreement on the explanation before you argue, see agree on the cause first.

If the replacement is weaker than the old story, stop. You have found a story that is right.

"Contrarian marketing sounds like picking fights."

It is, when it is done for attention. Saying the opposite of everyone else, without evidence, is noise with a louder voice.

There is also a legal line. In the US, advertisers need a reasonable basis for objective claims before they make them, and an attack on a common belief is a claim like any other.

Attack the story, never the reader. They believed it for good reasons, with the evidence they had.

History has a warning for the other side too. In 1847 Ignaz Semmelweis showed that hand-washing cut deaths on a maternity ward, and many colleagues rejected it. Being right was not enough; the evidence had to be shown in a way people could accept.

So make it easy to accept. Show the reader exactly where the old evidence came from, and let them see the limit for themselves. Then see selling to buyers who have seen it all for when the market has heard every claim.

What to read next, and why

Barry Marshall (encyclopedia entry): The full ulcer story, including the argument that early skeptics were right to demand evidence.

Helicobacter pylori (encyclopedia entry): What the bacterium does and how the medical view changed.

Belief perseverance (encyclopedia entry): Why old beliefs outlive their evidence.

Advertising FAQs for small business (FTC guide): The substantiation rule that applies to every contrarian claim.

So the simple takeaway is this: write down the sentence your market uses to explain its problem, and find the one piece of evidence it rests on before you write another ad.