Selling culture consulting

For Michael Henderson of Cultures At Work, he’d never struggled to get his point across in person… but selling culture online proved harder. How could we elevate lead-gen through his website? That was our task. Selling a service over a product has its difficulties. For one, people can’t touch, taste or smell the very thing you want your audience to pay for, so how do they know what they’re really getting? It’s a tricky one.

What we discovered

Michael’s personal charm and charisma when he talks about culture turned out to be his secret weapon and we wanted to communicate that through his website by going back to storytelling in its most organic form.

Positioning Michael as the David Attenborough of Culture.

Since Michael’s biggest USP is that he’s a Cultural Anthropologist (a rarity), we realised that if we positioned Michael as the storyteller and made culture the subject of a documentary, his audience would not only feel the awe of his presence, they’d understand what culture is, in a tangible way.

What we did about it

We wrote a script and produced a video with the purpose of educating his audience, so they could better understand what culture is, while inviting them to get to know Michael more intimately.

Using storytelling as a transportation device.

We wanted Michael to communicate a sense of ancient wisdom in a timeless, natural setting so we chose a wild New Zealand beach as the setting for our documentary-style story.

This involved:

  • Writing a treatment. We needed to set the scene, so we opened with Michael driving his Land Rover on the sand, in an untamed, anthropologic environment.
  • Transporting viewers to a new place and time using The Camp Fire Narrative of a speaker and their captive audience, which formed the essence of our script.
  • Filming Michael drawing an arrow in the sand to explain culture. Picking an analogy and applying a visual helps the viewer relate to something complex.
  • Launching the video on his home page and across social media channels to drive brand awareness and engagement.

And the result?

The launch of the video was a huge success. Within the first couple of weeks it received record views and shares with an incredible amount of positive feedback from audiences on LinkedIn.