Storytelling & Provenance in Marketing opened its latest cohort this week, and the first assignment isn't a marketing plan. It's a single paragraph, written cold, answering one question: why does your cheese taste the way it does. Not the tasting-note version — the actual reason, whether that's a specific pasture, a starter culture your predecessor mixed by hand, or a cave you inherited with a leak you never fixed. Members tell us it's the hardest paragraph they write all year.
Why this course exists right now
A year of counter conversations disappearing into a shipping box has made a plain problem plainer: the things a good clerk used to say out loud — where the milk comes from, how long the wheel sat, what to pair it with — have to live somewhere else now. A product page. A shipping insert. A three-line caption. Members who sold almost entirely across a counter in 2019 have spent the last year learning to write down what they used to just say, and the course was built directly out of that gap. It's the same pressure that pushed a wave of small farms into direct-to-consumer sales for the first time last spring, often faster than their websites were ready for.
The curriculum is built around four artifacts: a one-paragraph origin story, a product description template, a photography checklist that doesn't require studio equipment, and a short customer-facing FAQ covering the questions a counter clerk fields ten times a day — rind edibility, storage, what to do if a cut piece sweats in the fridge. None of it is abstract branding theory. It's closer to a worksheet than a seminar, which members have told us in past cohorts is exactly what they wanted and didn't expect.
What tends to trip people up
The most common note we hear from instructors: members over-explain the operation and under-explain the cheese. A page that opens with "founded in 1987" before it says what the cheese actually tastes like loses a browsing customer in the first two lines. The course pushes members to lead with the sensory detail — the paste, the rind, the smell when you cut it open — and save the history for a second paragraph, if it earns one.
The other recurring issue is tone creep. A story written for a farmers'-market table sign, read out loud with a smile, reads differently typed into a product page at 11pm with no one there to soften it. The course spends real time on trimming that flatness back out — reading copy aloud is part of the homework, not a suggestion.
You don't need to be enrolled to start the exercise. Pull up your best-selling wheel's current online description and read it as if you'd never tasted the cheese. If nothing in it tells you why the cheese is worth the price, that's the gap this course is built to close — and it's worth doing regardless of what cohort you're in.
The Dairy cohort runs through the spring; a new cohort typically opens once or twice a year, and members interested in a future session can register their interest through our education program page. If you took an earlier cohort and it changed how you write copy, we'd like to hear about it — member examples are some of the best teaching material we have for the next group.
The International Cheese Federation (ICF) and More Cheese are entirely fictional. This post is demonstration content created for MemberJunction. All people, organizations, events, courses, certifications, figures, and quotations in it are invented, and nothing here represents a real association, a real business, a real person, or real professional advice.