Our Storytelling & Provenance in Marketing course wraps its latest nine-week cohort this week, and a few members who took it wanted to tell us what stuck. Not the copywriting exercises, as it turns out — the part they kept coming back to was the very first assignment, which asked each participant to write down, in three sentences, why their cheese exists.
"I'd never had to say it out loud," one member told us. "You know your own reasons in your body, not in words." She runs a small goat dairy and had spent the past year moving most of her sales online; her three sentences became the "about" section of her shop page, more or less unedited.
That's the throughline of this course, and it's worth naming for anyone who hasn't taken it: the marketing skill it teaches isn't really about slogans. It's about noticing which parts of your operation are actually interesting to someone who's never set foot on your farm, and saying those parts plainly. A cave humidity log is not interesting on its own. The reason you started keeping one probably is.
Why this course matters more now than it did two years ago
Direct online sales have become a much bigger share of member revenue over the past year, and an online customer doesn't get the version of your story that used to come free with a farmers market conversation — the small talk, the sample, the "how long have you been doing this." A product page has to do that work instead, in a few hundred words and maybe a photo. Members who've built out a shop page in the past year consistently tell us the write-up is the part they underinvested in relative to the photography, and it's usually the first thing they go back and redo once they've taken this course.
The course spends real time on provenance specifically — how to describe milk source, region, and aging in language that's accurate without becoming a label copy exercise. That distinction matters: your marketing description and your regulated label text serve different purposes and shouldn't be written as if they're the same document. If you're not sure where that line sits for your product, our labeling course covers the compliance side in more depth; this one covers the persuasion side, and the two are meant to be taken together rather than as substitutes.
By the course's own design, each participant leaves with a working draft of their product page copy, not just notes on theory. Instructors told us this cohort's group critique session — done over video, as most sessions have been this year — ran long because so many members wanted feedback on each other's drafts, not just their own. That kind of peer exchange has become one of the more valued parts of the virtual format, even among members who initially missed the in-person version of this course.
If you want the next cohort
We don't have a start date locked in yet for the next Storytelling & Provenance in Marketing cohort, but interest has been running high enough this spring that we expect to open enrollment before summer. If you want to be notified the day registration opens, add yourself to the course's interest list through the member portal, or mention it to the Education Committee at your next regional call.
In the meantime, the three-sentence exercise costs nothing and takes about ten minutes: why does your cheese exist? If you can't answer it without reaching for jargon, that's usually the sign you're closer to needing this course than you think.
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.