The Wall Street Journal recently noted that "Storyteller" is the hottest new job in tech.

After a decade in the trenches, writing in high-stakes B2B sectors like Fintech, eCommerce, and insurance, I’ve witnessed firsthand how great storytelling can really distinguish brand messaging from the sea of sameness and create genuine customer loyalty.

The end of the Feature-Parity Race

Before the AI boom, you could get ahead by simply having a longer feature list than your competitors. But today, AI can wax lyrical about features in seconds — effectively relegating product-centric copy to table stakes.

If your content is just a list of ‘what we do,’ you’re not differentiating; you’ve become a commodity meeting the bare minimum to exist in the market. To actually win nowadays, you have to move past the product and bring the ‘why you do’ message into your content strategy. But how?

The Antagonists in your brand story

When a campaign fails to convert, the writing usually takes the blame. But the failure almost always happens before the first word is typed. Most brands are fighting a losing battle against two invisible villains that kill great copy before it even reaches the customer:

Villain #1: The ‘Camel’ Committee: B2B software is rarely a solo purchase; it’s a decision made by 5–10 people across different roles. Without a unified narrative, the message gets watered down through internal feedback loops into a common denominator— the classic ‘a horse is a camel designed by a committee' truism. This results in beige copy that fails to solve anyone’s unique pain points because it’s trying to please everyone all at once.
Villain #2 The Ghost Persona: This happens when a brand writes for a customer that doesn't actually exist, a perfect version of a buyer who has infinite time and zero cynicism. In reality, your buyer is distracted, jaded, and overwhelmed. When copy is written for a Ghost Persona, it relies on fluff and generic aspirational language that the real-world buyer has learned to tune out. If you aren't addressing the specific, messy, day-to-day friction of a human being, your story is just expensive background noise.

Building the Brand as a Trustworthy Narrator

In my recent articles for CopyHouse, covering the art of Simplifying Complex Topics and Thought Leadership, I explore how brands must transcend the role of a vendor to become a trustworthy narrator.

To do this, your messaging architecture must navigate the Hero’s Journey to address three critical pillars:

The Market Friction: Where does your brand story begin in the wider marketplace? Why is the status quo failing your customer right now?
The Deep Emotional Trigger: How does this failure make customers feel deep down? Are they afraid of being left behind? Frustrated by invisible inefficiency? How can you be honest yet hopeful about overcoming the various obstacles?
The Strategic Resolution: How is your solution uniquely positioned to solve the issue, and how do you pay it forward to help the supporting characters in your industry?

The Composite Skillset of the Modern Marketer

Great marketing is a composite of high-level skills: audience and competitor analysis, stakeholder interviewing, and technical translation. When these skills are combined, storytelling becomes more than ‘persuasion gymnastics.’ It allows us to define the audience, the trigger, and the timing with precision.

Conducting deep stakeholder interviews kills the Ghost Persona and performing extensive competitor and market analysis helps you move past the Committee Trap and find the ‘why’ that actually differentiates. With this strategic storytelling framework in place, the copy essentially writes itself because it’s grounded in market truth, not marketing fluff.

If you’re looking for more than just a copywriter to fill the page — a storyteller to architect a narrative that survives the boardroom and resonates in the market, let’s talk.