The Gift of Status

This week, a couple of ideas conflated from a couple of my favorite podcasts: the gift of status from a flawed leader.

First, on the Nudge podcast, I heard that Harvard Professor Leslie John studied hundreds of Dragon’s Den (or Shark Tank in the US) pitches to see which pitch style led to investment.

She found that founders who strategically share vulnerabilities or authentic personal limitations when investors challenge them were up to six times more likely to get funding than founders who stood toe-to-toe with investors on the numbers, the market, or whatever they were being challenged on.

The psychology is that flawed leaders inspire greater trust.

I’ve not been in the tank or the den with investors, but in my B2B tech marketing career, I have been in dozens of analyst meetings with vendors on both sides of the table, as a product marketer and briefly as an analyst, and I suspect the same psychology applies.

The CEO, founder, or product evangelist who takes an adversarial approach to analyst relations will probably be viewed less favorably by the folks that shape the market than one who admits they don’t have all the answers; it will engender trust.

The Nudge podcast interview went on to explore this idea of the flawed leader more, but then Seth Godin entered my podcast roster, having dropped a special episode of his Akimbo podcast, after a year or more of hiatus, and the idea he’s talked about for a decade - status.

Conflating these ideas, a Dragon’s Den investor (or an industry analyst) responds to the flattering fluttering eyelashes of being asked for their opinion, as the person asking bows down to their superior knowledge, showing vulnerability, is offering them status.

We talk about creating something useful in content marketing that is not about us, but about the problem the audience has. But what if we chuck a cherry into this cocktail and give them some status? Which, after all, is about what engaging with or sharing the content says about them.

The goal of our content should be not only to be useful, but to raise the reader’s status with their colleagues or boss, supporting the spread of our ideas (and therefore awareness of our product or service) and consideration of us.

Maybe when we tell a customer success story, we tell more of the story, not just that the client had a problem and we rode in on a white horse and solved it, but offer some of the problems that happened along the way, maybe showing a little vulnerability that not all projects go to plan, even when the ending is rosy.

This, I think, is the trick with content marketing: how do you present something that will contribute to the status of the intended audience while still projecting authority?

It's a delicate dance — whether leading a team, pitching in the shark tank, presenting an analyst briefing, or trying to build trust with an audience — you want to offer leadership, but to gift status, you have to show a cheeky, pretty little ankle of vulnerability.