Narrative Gaps

"My favorite marketing insight is this:

If people like buying your product, it's because its story helps fill in the narrative gaps in their own lives.
Human beings need to tell stories. Historically, it's the quickest way we have for transmitting useful information to other members of our species. Stories are not just nice things to have, they are essential survival tools.

And yes, the stories we tell ourselves are just as important than the stories we tell other people.

Ergo, marketing is not about selling. Marketing is figuring out where your product stands in relation to personal narrative.

So where does your product fit into other people's narrative? How does telling your story become a survival tool for other people? If you don't know, you have a marketing problem.

Narrative gaps. It's all about the narrative gaps."
http://www.gapingvoid.com/Moveable_Type/archives/003036.html