Rick and Morty: B2B Marketing Lessons from Dan Harmon’s Circle Story with Sarah Frazier, Director of Content and Brand Strategy at Cube

Does it feel like you’re flailing for ideas ​​every time you’re starting a new campaign? It’s good to have a place to start every time. To have a framework for your story that gives you loose benchmarks to meet so you’re not starting from scratch every time. It’s the answer to all the hard and repetitive work that goes into storytelling. It’s the antidote to marketer’s block. It’s marketing, codified.Rick and Morty co-creator Dan Harmon came up with the “Story Circle,” an 8-step journey the characters go on in each episode akin to the Hero’s journey. And Harmon has used this framework for any new story, including for his work on the show Community. He says, “I can't not see that circle. It's tattooed on my brain." This structure enabled Harmon to write over 60 episodes of the show, which has become the most watched TV comedy for adults between ages 18 and 24 as well as a hundred-million dollar media franchise. So on this episode of Remarkable, we’re looking to the Emmy Award-winning Adult Swim hit TV show for lessons on storytelling structure, the delightful use of absurdity, and much more. And chatting with us is Cube’s Director of Content and Brand Strategy, Sarah Frazier. Join us as we talk Pickle Rick and all things content marketing on this episode of Remarkable.About Rick and MortyRick and Morty is an animated series on Cartoon Network’s Adult Swim about mad scientist Rick who takes his grandson, Morty, on sci-fi misadventures including things like inter-planetary travel. The series was created by Dan Harmon and Justin Roiland. Both Rick and Morty were voiced by Justin Roiland until 2023. (Adult Swim cut ties with Roiland following news that Roiland was facing felony charges for domestic violence. The charges have since been dropped.) It also stars voice actors Chris Parnell as Jerry Smith, Spencer Grammer as Summer Smith and Sarah Chalke as Beth Smith. Rick and Morty started airing in 2013, and It’s won a slew of awards, including 2 Primetime Emmys. About our guest, Sarah FrazierSarah Frazier is Director of Content and Brand Strategy at Cube. She joined the company in February 2023. Prior to Cube, she served as Head of Content Marketing at Podium, a platform for local businesses to get more reviews, collect payments, send text marketing campaigns, and centralize their communications. She has also held content marketing and demand gen roles for Drift and CustomerGauge.   What B2B Companies Can Learn From Rick and Morty: Create a framework for your storytelling. Map out the stages of your story structure to give yourself a foundation for each campaign. It gives you a basis to build campaigns from instead of having to start from scratch every time. Co-creator of Rick and Morty, Dan Harmon says creating the story circle was his “attempt to remove all the hard and repeated work from the task of breaking a story.” So do yourself a favor and create a framework for each campaign to start from.Employ absurdity. Be ridiculous and wildly unreasonable as a way to grab audience attention. When blended with seriousness, clever humor, and creative ideas, it’s a surefire way to keep your audience interested. Sarah says, “The inherent randomness of our own lives makes us feel better to see it played out on the screen. The ability to see like you are maybe not solely responsible for the things that happen to you, that there is inherent randomness in the universe. But ultimately the lesson is like you are responsible for how you react to those things. Very similar to how you de