Marketing teams track clicks, conversions, sentiment scores and customer journeys with precision, yet many brands still struggle to convey their unique value. Standard marketing metrics reveal whether a message is being seen and heard by audiences, but not why it is (or isn’t) inspiring customers to take the next step. Marketing teams must learn to surface not just quantitative data but also qualitative insights—that is, they must go beyond vanity marketing metrics to understand and measure persuasion.
But that’s just the first challenge. At the November 2025 MarTech conference, Eric Mayhew stressed that a competitive edge comes from combining unique data with a compelling narrative. That observation builds on an insight recognized across disciplines, from education to sales: A well-told story helps audiences learn and retain information far better than a list of facts.
So how can brands pinpoint meaningful insights and weave them into noteworthy narratives? The members of the Senior Executive CMO Think Tank have deep experience in brand storytelling, digital advertising, customer engagement and the growing role of AI in marketing. Below, a group of them draws on their years of frontline experience to share how marketing teams can uncover differentiating data competitors overlook and transform it into stories customers recognize, repeat and rally around.
“The gold isn’t in your analytics dashboard. It’s in the patterns your sales team sees but never reports. The objections that keep coming up. The moment a prospect’s eyes light up—what triggered that?”
Ask Better Questions to Find Better Answers
Kathleen Lucente, Founder and CEO of Red Fan Communications, argues that most companies swim in the same data lakes because they’re asking the same questions.
“Differentiated insights come from differentiated curiosity,” she explains. “The gold isn’t in your analytics dashboard. It’s in the patterns your sales team sees but never reports. The objections that keep coming up. The moment a prospect’s eyes light up—what triggered that?”
Lucente also cautions against the all-too-common “here’s what we do” pitches that only sound impressive to the companies touting their wares and services.
“A fintech CEO told me his competitors sound like ‘alphabet soup.’ They’re describing features, not the transformation customers experience,” she says.
Lucente calls that transformative experience the “insight gap.” When a company finds it, she says, testing the strength of a narrative comes down to two simple questions.
“Can your sales team articulate it under pressure? Can your customers repeat it? If not, you have a problem.”
Ultimately, Lucente says, advantage comes from restraint, not abundance.
“The companies winning aren’t the ones with the most data. They’re the ones that turned one sharp insight into a story everyone can tell.”
Look for Customers’ Emotional Motivators
Daryl Travis, Founder and Chairman of Brandtrust, agrees that many marketing teams get off on the wrong foot by starting with the wrong question.
“Most teams ask, ‘What do customers do?’ The better question is, ‘What are customers trying to resolve emotionally when they do it?’”
Taking that road less traveled, Travis asserts, will lead brands to deeper understanding.
“The most powerful insights are often hiding in plain sight, filtered out by efficiency, scale and a bias toward what’s easy to quantify,” he says.
Travis cautions, however, that unique data doesn’t create a competitive edge on its own. Brands have to take the next step.
“The real advantage comes when brands uncover a human truth others overlook, then have the discipline—and bravery—to build a narrative around it and live it consistently,” Travis says. “When that happens, customers don’t just understand the story. They are drawn to it because they recognize themselves in it.”
“Anchor the story in consequences, not features. What breaks if nothing changes? What improves if it does?”
Anchor the Story in Real Results
For Kurt Uhlir, Chief Marketing Officer and Board Member at ez Home Search, insight often emerges when teams stop chasing scale and start embracing restraint.
“When everyone has similar data, constraint becomes the advantage,” he says. “Middle-market teams uncover sharper insight by asking which customer decisions feel risky, slow or politically hard inside the account.”
Those moments, Uhlir adds, signal where trust is fragile and where a well-crafted narrative written with the customer’s viewpoint in mind can be a difference-maker.
“Anchor the story in consequences, not features,” he advises. “What breaks if nothing changes? What improves if it does?”
Another key detail? Understanding how, not just why, customers choose a product or service.
“Customers rally when the story aligns with how decisions actually get made inside companies,” Uhlir says.
He concludes by reminding us that even the best marketing messages—and customer trust—can collapse quickly if promises aren’t kept.
“The narrative only holds if execution backs it up,” Uhlir warns. “Messaging can open the door, but delivery determines whether the story compounds or collapses.”
Interrogate Overlooked Anomalies
Cody Gillund, Founder of Grounded Growth Studio LLC and Pinyahta, says differentiated insight rarely comes from bigger datasets. Instead, she says, it comes from asking sharper questions.
“The teams that win interrogate anomalies, outliers and moments of friction—signals most companies ignore,” she says.
Those signals, Gillund explains, often surface genuine pain points.
“When you uncover what customers can’t articulate but consistently feel, you get insight no competitor can copy,” she says.
Armed with that information, teams must approach messaging with discipline and focus. If they do, the payoff is real resonance.
“Turning that insight into narrative requires choosing one truth, stating it boldly and proving it through your product, your actions and your customer stories,” Gillund says. “A narrative becomes magnetic when it reflects customers’ lived reality and gives them language for a problem they’ve struggled to name.”
Zoom In, Not Out
Magda Paslaru, Founder and CEO of THE RAINBOWIDEA, says differentiated insights don’t come from having more data; they come from looking at familiar data through an unfamiliar lens. She encourages teams to zoom in rather than out.
“Teams can find unique insights by zooming in on anomalies, outliers, underserved segments or unexpected behaviors that competitors overlook,” Paslaru says.
She adds that surfacing the real truth of both marketing effectiveness and customer experience takes more than looking at numbers.
“Pairing quantitative patterns with qualitative depth—customer interviews, frontline observations and community conversations—often reveals the emotional truths hidden beneath the metrics,” Paslaru says.
Turning those truths into an effective message requires structure and intention.
“Once those insights surface, turning them into a narrative requires clarity, tension and relevance,” Paslaru says. “The story has to name a real customer struggle, define what’s changing in their world, and position the brand as the guide with a point of view.”
If a brand can achieve that, she concludes, it will realize a real marketplace advantage.
“When the insight feels personal and the story feels empowering, it becomes a competitive moat.”
“Instead of getting lost in spreadsheets, spend time with the people behind the data to reveal the nuances, language and emotions that won’t show up in a dashboard.”
Spend Time With the People Behind the Data
Rachel Perkins, Founder and Chief Strategist at Venturesome Strategies, says some of the richest insights are surfaced through the sometimes lost art of exceptional customer service.
“In my experience, having real conversations with frontline teams—such as sales, customer success and customer support—will consistently surface the richest insights you can use to shape messaging that actually resonates with customers,” she says.
It’s all too easy for marketing teams to become enamored of tech tools, but Perkins warns against overreliance on numbers and analytics.
“Instead of getting lost in spreadsheets, spend time with the people behind the data to reveal the nuances, language and emotions that won’t show up in a dashboard,” she urges.
Data may not lie, but it often lacks context—and it certainly lacks emotion. Perkins stresses that both those factors are essential for real reach.
“A truly distinctive story starts with listening to real customers using your product ‘in the wild,’ then translating what you hear into a narrative that feels human.”
Weave Logic, Emotion and Cognition Together
Paul L. Gunn Jr., Founder of KUOG Corporation, says brands that rely on data alone miss the signals that matter most.
“Smart brands embrace human advocacy and use storytelling to capture emotional cues through quiet signals in micro behaviors,” he says. “These brands differentiate themselves from others that simply anchor outreach in data without context.”
Gunn points to often-overlooked qualitative sources of information. Instead of just using customer feedback to improve products and services, he advises, use it to frame outreach.
“Essential insights can be found in the qualitative data that reveals human patterns—data from support tickets, feedback surveys, field reports and other touchpoints with a brand,” he says. “Many times, these revelations are found embedded deep within company dashboards.”
For Gunn, effective narrative is multifaceted—just like the human beings it’s intended to reach. The result is persuasion that feels earned, not engineered.
“A marketing or branding team that weaves multiple strands—logic, emotion and cognition—into their strategies will create more effective, data-driven narratives,” he says. “Such messages are likely to be well-received by an audience and help a brand stand out as a viable solution.”
How to Move From Metrics to Meaning
- Ask questions your competitors aren’t asking. Differentiated insights emerge when teams challenge default assumptions and look beyond dashboards to frontline observations and recurring customer moments.
- Focus on what customers are trying to resolve emotionally. Understanding the emotional motive behind a behavior reveals human truths that data alone can’t surface.
- Frame your story around consequences, not features. Customers engage when narratives reflect real risks, trade-offs and outcomes tied to how decisions actually get made.
- Pay attention to anomalies and friction. Outliers and moments of resistance often reveal unmet needs and insights competitors overlook.
- Pair quantitative patterns with qualitative depth. Combining metrics with interviews, observations and conversations exposes the emotional truths beneath performance data.
- Spend time with frontline teams and customers. Sales conversations, support touchpoints and real-world usage uncover language and nuance that make stories feel authentic and repeatable.
- Weave logic, emotion and cognition into every narrative. Stories persuade most effectively when they align rational proof with emotional resonance and human understanding.
From Data-Rich to Story-Strong
Differentiation in marketing isn’t just achieved by gathering more data or leveraging more tools. It comes when teams probe more deeply, taking the time to ask sharper questions, listen more closely and recognize the truths buried beneath metrics. Data may surface signals, but human understanding is needed to craft a narrative that gives those signals meaning and momentum.
As AI accelerates access to insights and automation levels the analytical playing field, brands that pair disciplined insight-gathering with human-focused storytelling will stand out. The ability to translate what customers feel, fear and hope into stories that hold up in execution—not just in campaigns—will increasingly define competitive advantage.
