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 somebody sat down and filmed them in Hollywood and everybody knows that’s not true.” He compares the Instagram filter to a natural TikTok clip and puts himself in the second category, stutters included. He also names Caterpillar, 3M, General Electric, Patagonia and John Deere as the standard the sector is not yet reaching.
6. Contradiction, And Being Wrong On Camera, Brings In People Who Were Not Shopping
The docuseries formula Peter says he can now repeat rests on contradiction: audiences carry a stereotype of senior living as a last stage, so footage of residents laughing, hugging and painting their nails works against the picture in their heads. The same applies to his own mistakes. When he complimented a man on his nice room, the man cut him off, “no, no, this is my home.” Peter kept the correction in. He says on the episode that the clip has since drawn millions of views on TikTok.
Rapid Fire Q&A
Q: Has storytelling become a buzzword we should retire?
A: Peter says it is overused superficially, mostly on LinkedIn and Facebook, but underused where it counts. “Until we see a story on everybody’s homepage and everybody’s email, it is underutilized,” he says, and he calls senior living and long-term care particularly behind.
Q: What are the first elements of a marketing story?
A: He does not start with the story. Start with the goal, then decide whose voice gets you there, whether that is an employee, a resident, a CNA or a co-founder, then work out how you amplify it. Storytelling, he says, is the tactic, not the starting point.
Q: Most healthcare leaders say they cannot tell their own story. What then?
A: Tell somebody else’s. Peter’s exercise: pick an important person who does not think they are important, recall one specific moment they taught you something, then say who you were before and after in a sentence. “You’re done with storytelling,” he says.
Q: How did People Worth Caring About actually start?
A: At a cocktail hour during a speaking engagement for the Nebraska Health Care Association, he pitched the president and CEO on a documentary about their staffing shortage, told through a caregiver’s eyes. She said yes. “I was scared when she said yes,” he says.
Q: What should an operator who feels unqualified do this week?
A: Start filming today, and accept that most of it will never be published. “Give your cell phone to a frontline caregiver,” he says. “Don’t let the marketer tell you it needs to be polished. The lighting’s not right. No, just go get a vulnerable story.”
What This Means for Senior Living Operators Chasing Occupancy
If move-ins are the number you are judged on, the useful part of this episode is the sequencing. Peter does not tell operators to make a video. He tells them to name the goal, then find the voice that gets them there. Occupancy, recruitment and retention are three different goals, and in his telling one well-captured frontline story can serve all three, because the person carrying it is the same person a prospect, a candidate and a current employee each want to believe in.
The cheapest version of this is the three-person survey. Ask three people in your building who most loves coming to work, film whoever they name, and put that clip into the nurture sequence prospects get between the tour and the decision. That is the practical shape of marketing built for senior living communities: an asset that works on a tour follow-up, a hiring post and an all-staff email without being re-shot for each.
Expect the instinct to polish it, and resist it. Peter’s point about videos that look filmed in Hollywood is not an aesthetic preference. It is a conversion argument. A resident saying she wishes she had moved in earlier, in her own words, on a phone, does work that a scripted testimonial cannot, because the audience can tell which one was written for them. The same logic runs through the People Worth Caring About docuseries, which began as a fifteen-minute recruitment video shot on a cell phone.
The last thing worth carrying out of this conversation is the contradiction rule. If you want attention from people who are not currently shopping for care, the footage has to argue with what they already assume about senior living. Residents laughing, residents painting their nails, a filmmaker being corrected on camera for calling a home a room. Those moments travel. The brochure shots of the lobby do not, because every competitor has the same lobby.
Listen to the Full Episode
Full episode: “Stop Selling Buildings: How Storytelling Drives Occupancy, Retention & ROI” on Foresight Radio, hosted by Rachel Hill, creative director at Senior Living Foresight, published 4 March 2026. Listen to the full conversation on Apple Podcasts.
