A while back, a company handed me a brain health supplement to promote. On paper the assignment was simple. This was a direct sales company, beauty and skincare at its core, with tens of thousands of independent reps spread across the country. The supplement was the outlier in the portfolio, and my job was to create noise and give that sales force something exciting to talk about.
I could have done exactly that. Written the claims, pushed the pill, moved on. But I knew that path leads almost nowhere. Traditional media will rarely feature a supplement unless it is FDA approved or has strong third party science behind it, which few can claim. And a product pushed as a product has no story, nothing that tells you why it should matter. You get a small blip of coverage, nowhere near the goal, which was simple: sell as much of it as possible. So the real challenge was never what to claim. It was how to make anyone care. That is the surface story, and it is almost never the one worth telling.
At the time, brain health was everywhere in the news, but only in one narrow frame: concussions, CTE, and professional football. Important, but small. And I kept snagging on the same thought. Your brain is not some sealed, mysterious thing that only breaks under a helmet. It is an organ, like your heart or your skin, and it wears down a little every day from the most ordinary things. A rough night of sleep. One too many drinks. A diet quietly short on something as basic as B12. Whole evenings vegging out on the couch instead of giving it anything to do. A fall off a bike. Brain health was not a football story. It was everyone's story, and nobody was telling it that way.
So on a call with the client, I floated it. We should get Super Bowl champions to publicly commit to donating their brains to science. The line went silent. I mean silent. I figured I had just thought out loud, and we moved on.
About an hour later my CEO called me into her office. She was not calm. She wanted to know if I had really, actually told a client I would deliver Super Bowl champions pledging their brains to science. I said yes. "How on earth," she asked, "are you going to do that?"
Here is what I told her, and it is the same thing I'll tell you. These are men who have watched teammates and friends live with the long term damage of the game, so the cause was already real to them. And most of us, athletes included, are already organ donors. Your brain is just another organ, so pledging it after death is not the wild leap it sounds like. It is one more gift, from people who understood exactly why it mattered. That is how I work. Strategy keeps creative honest, creative gives strategy something worth executing, and neither is much good alone.
She was not sold. So I made her a bet. When this works, I said, you are going to eat humble pie. She said "yeah, sure," and waved me off.
It worked. Two Super Bowl champions signed on and pledged their brains, each putting their name to a certificate that made the promise real. Neuroscientists lent their credibility. The story went everywhere, from national morning shows to outlets around the world, close to a billion media impressions in all. And it moved the product by telling the truth, not by inventing a reason to care but by finding the real one and telling it well.
And here is the part that mattered most to the business. In a direct sales model, every rep is an independent seller, and the best thing you can do for them is put a great story in their hands. So all of that awareness turned into fuel. Tens of thousands of reps suddenly had bold, credible, genuinely exciting material to bring to their own customers, and a product that had never quite fit the portfolio finally had a reason to exist that anyone could repeat. It sold out so fast that orders had to be filled in phases while production caught up.
And that same idea, brain as just another organ, became the message we carried to everyone watching. Not as a reason to give it away, but as a reason to look after it. Your brain is yours to care for, just like you would other parts of your body to remain healthy, and it happens to be the most important part of it.
And the bet? The morning after it landed, I stopped at a bakery near me and bought an armful of pies. I set them out all around the office. When my CEO walked in, later than everyone as always, I met her at the door with a plate and asked if she was ready for her piece of humble pie. She could be tough to work for, but she laughed, and she took her slice.
Here is the part I keep coming back to. We did have good, honest research and the endorsement of credible scientists. But that was never going to be enough on its own to move a product. None of it is what made a single person care. A story did. There is always an easy version, the transaction, the narrow frame, the thing that is "not for you." Underneath it sits a higher story, the human truth that makes people actually feel something.
A supplement that seemed like it was not for you became one that was for everyone. Our job in marketing and communications is not to sell harder. It is to find that truth and tell it so people can feel it.
The real truth is in the higher story. What have you been told is "not for you" that is actually for everyone?
The Higher Story is a series about looking past the surface to the truth underneath: how that shapes the way we see the world, meet our challenges, and, in marketing and communications, do work that lands with more honesty and impact.
Originally published on LinkedIn.