Rachel Hill brings a line straight out of her own Friday team meeting into this conversation: senior living needs to stop selling a building. Peter Murphy Lewis had already got there by another route. Asked what storytelling actually does for an operator, he skipped the word itself and went to the return. “If you approach it from an ROI, if you’re a CEO, storytelling is building a moat around your brand, your team, your buildings,” he says. “It’s not selling commodities, rather you’re selling a narrative.”
Foresight Radio is hosted by Rachel Hill, creative director at Senior Living Foresight, who studied film and editing before she came to the sector and opened this season with Peter for that reason. He is a documentary filmmaker and healthcare marketing consultant, and the creator of the docuseries People Worth Caring About, which he says on the episode was picked up by Amazon, Hulu, Samsung and Apple about six months after the first film was shot on his phone.
What follows is less a marketing talk than an occupancy argument. Peter’s claim is that the room, the pool and the cocktail hour are commodities any competitor down the road can match, and that the only thing that cannot be copied is the people already inside the building. Find the one staff member everybody names, capture her properly, and the same footage works on tours, in recruitment ads and on the people already living and working there.
Key Takeaways
1. Storytelling Is A Moat, Not A Line Item On The Marketing Budget
Peter frames storytelling as the thing that stops a community being shopped on price and amenities. “You’re selling a solution, not a room, not a hotel room, not an air conditioning, not a new TV, not a new building,” he says. “You’re selling your community that goes with your residents, that goes with your staff, that goes with your leadership.” The practical test is simple. If a prospect can put your brochure next to a competitor’s and see the same list, you have not built the moat yet.
2. You Are Not Selling The Object, You Are Selling What Happens Around It
Rachel raises Peloton, whose leadership concluded they were selling connection and personality rather than a bike. Peter matches it with the bicycle travel company he ran in South America. “We don’t sell butts on bikes,” he told his team. “We sell that you are going to become a real traveler.” He also gave that company an enemy, bus tours, which turned customers into a tribe who described themselves as real tourists. “We weren’t selling a bicycle. We were selling what you can do on a bicycle.”
3. The Protagonist Is Already On Your Payroll, And Three People Can Name Her
Asked who the story should be about once the building stops being the pitch, Peter goes to the frontline. “Go ask three people that you meet at your building, say, who is the most passionate person here and loves to come to work every day,” he says. “More than likely those three people are going to say the exact same person and start your story there.” One capture then runs everywhere: a recruitment post, a nurture email to prospects who will never meet the 4am shift, and a reminder to current staff of why they stay.
4. Some Moments Only Exist In Long Form, And They Are The Ones That Sell
Peter offers an example of something a photograph and an email cannot hold. Interviewing a resident of an assisted living community in Denton for a new project, she told him that any person who moves there and does not have more friends afterwards has not made an effort, “because there is no place like this.” She added that the staff had become her best friends and that she wished she had come earlier. “Now slow down and go get that story,” he says. “Do you know how long they’re going to be able to use that?”
5. Polished Video Is Why Senior Living Marketing Bounces Off People
Peter argues the category has not overused storytelling so much as sanded it flat. “Our videos look polished. They don’t look human, they don’t look vulnerable,” he says. “They look like so