I've loved The Odyssey since I was a kid. Initially, obviously, it was the good stuff that got me: the Cyclops, the Sirens, Circe turning people into pigs, Scylla and Charybdis, gods behaving badly and a bloke spending ten years having an absolute nightmare trying to get home.

But something else about Odysseus has always fascinated me.

He's a hero, but he's not really a superhero. Yes, he can fight, but his greatest weapon is usually his ability to think his way out of trouble. More particularly, he is extraordinarily good at working out what somebody else wants, fears or needs to hear — and then finding the words that will get him the response he wants.

Watching Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey recently got me thinking about that again. So over the last couple of weeks I've gone back to Homer and done a bit of further reading around rhetoric, psychology and behavioural science.

And I've become convinced there's another way of looking at the book.

The Odyssey is rightly regarded as one of the foundational texts of Western storytelling. You can find bits of its DNA in everything from Ulysses to Star Wars, road movies to fantasy quests.

But it's also a surprisingly good guide to persuasion. Not because Homer secretly invented advertising. He didn't. It's because the basic raw material of marketing — attention, desire, curiosity, temptation, reputation, identity, reciprocity and storytelling — is really the raw material of human beings.

And Homer understood human beings rather well. Odysseus starts where good marketing starts: with the audience 

One of my favourite examples occurs in Book Six. Odysseus has been shipwrecked and washed up on the island of the Phaeacians. He has lost his crew, his ship, his possessions and, inconveniently, his clothes.

Then he sees Nausicaa, the young daughter of the Phaeacian king.

He needs her help.

What's interesting is that Homer doesn't simply have Odysseus walk over and ask for it. We actually see him consider how he should approach her.

There is a traditional way of supplicating somebody: physically approaching and clasping their knees. But Odysseus realises that a naked, filthy stranger charging towards a young woman and grabbing hold of her may not be the optimal communications strategy.

So he stays where he is and talks.

Classicist Rafael de Almeida Semêdo has examined the scene specifically as an act of rhetoric. His argument is that Odysseus isn't simply being naturally charming. He assesses the situation, considers his audience and deliberately chooses the form of communication most likely to produce the result he needs.

Then look at the speech itself.

He begins with flattering Nausicaa, compares her to a goddess and talks about the happiness her parents must feel when they see her. He moves towards marriage — something particularly relevant to Nausicaa at this point in the story — before describing his own suffering and vulnerability. Only after establishing that emotional connection does he make the actual request: he needs clothes and directions to the town.

And it works.

Semêdo points out that Odysseus first wins her sympathy and only then states precisely what he wants. Nausicaa subsequently gives him exactly those things, and more besides.

Strip away the Greek gods and the naked hero and there is something remarkably familiar going on.

Understand your audience. Understand their situation. Find the point of relevance. Establish some emotional connection. Then ask for the response.

Which is still considerably better advice than starting a brief with: “We need to communicate our commitment to innovation.”

The Sirens don't sell music. They sell what Odysseus wants most

Then there are the Sirens.

We tend to think their irresistible appeal is simply that they sing beautifully. But their pitch to Odysseus is more sophisticated than that.

They offer him knowledge.

They know who he is and they appeal directly to his identity as the cleverest man in the room. Listen to us, they effectively tell him, and you will know more. You'll learn what happened at Troy and gain knowledge unavailable to ordinary men.

That's very good targeting.

Because if you want to tempt Odysseus, knowledge is a far stronger proposition than generic pleasure.

Psychologist George Loewenstein later gave us a useful framework for understanding why that works. His influential “information-gap” theory proposes that curiosity can be created when people become aware of a gap between what they know and what they want to know. Drawing attention to that missing information can create the desire to close the gap.

It's the psychological machinery beneath countless headlines, trailers, subject lines and pieces of clickbait.

But Homer's version contains an important marketing lesson that sometimes gets forgotten.

Temptation is personal.

You don't create irresistible desire simply by making something desirable. You make it desirable to somebody.

Offer Odysseus knowledge. Offer somebody else status, belonging, security, convenience or the chance to feel twenty years younger. The trick is understanding which desire you’re really selling.

Odysseus also knows that sometimes the customer can't trust himself

The Sirens episode becomes even more interesting once Odysseus knows what's coming. He wants to hear their song, but he also knows that once he hears it he will no longer be capable of making a sensible decision.

So he creates a system in advance.

His sailors block their ears. Odysseus has himself tied to the mast and orders the crew that, however much he begs them to release him later, they must ignore him.

This isn't just an amusing parallel with modern behavioural science. Modern behavioural science has explicitly borrowed the story.

In Ulysses and the Sirens, social scientist Jon Elster used Odysseus as the model for what became known as precommitment or self-binding: deliberately restricting the options available to your future self because you know your future preferences may conflict with the goals you hold now. Elster describes Ulysses binding himself as the central concept of his discussion of imperfect rationality.

A couple of years later, economists Richard Thaler and Hersh Shefrin formalised a related problem by describing the individual as containing both a farsighted “planner” and a more short-term “doer”.

And this is incredibly relevant to marketing because consumers aren't always trying to decide between Product A and Product B.

Often they're trying to decide between two versions of themselves.

One wants to save money; another wants the new trainers.

One wants to lose weight; another wants pudding.

One wants eight hours' sleep; another wants one more episode.

One wants to concentrate; another has just seen a notification appear on their phone.

Good behavioural design sometimes isn't about creating another temptation. It's about helping the person who made the decision yesterday protect themselves from the person they're going to become at 11.30 tonight.

Stories work because facts aren't the only things doing the persuading

Odysseus also understands something advertising people endlessly rediscover and rename.

Stories move people.

Books Nine to Twelve of The Odyssey are essentially Odysseus telling the Phaeacians what has happened to him. The Cyclops, Circe, the journey to the Underworld, the Sirens, Scylla and Charybdis — much of what we think of as The Odyssey is actually a story being told inside the story.

And Odysseus has an audience he needs something from.

His account establishes who he is, demonstrates his intelligence, builds sympathy for what he has endured and makes him rather difficult to forget. By the end of his stay, the Phaeacians load him with gifts and finally provide the transport he has spent years trying to obtain.

Modern psychologists Melanie Green and Timothy Brock later developed the concept of narrative transportation, exploring what happens when people become mentally absorbed in a story and how that absorption can affect beliefs and persuasion.

Marketing researcher Jennifer Edson Escalas subsequently connected narrative processing directly to brands, arguing that stories can help people create connections between brands and their own sense of self.

Which is why “tell stories, don't just list benefits” is much more than a copywriting cliché.

Facts give people information.

Stories give information context, causality, people, tension, consequences and meaning.

They give the audience something to enter.

Odysseus doesn't merely announce that he is resourceful, brave and deserving of help. He tells people stories in which they can discover those things for themselves.

That's a much better ad.

Give before you ask

Another idea running throughout The Odyssey is xenia, usually translated as hospitality or guest-friendship.

It creates an entire system of expectations around strangers, hosts, gifts and obligations. A traveller may be fed, sheltered and given gifts; in doing so, relationships and reciprocal duties are created.

Erwin Cook's work on Homeric reciprocity argues that systems of exchange aren't simply incidental details in the epics. They help structure the stories themselves, with generalised reciprocity particularly prominent throughout The Odyssey.

Marketing obviously operates in a completely different social world, but the psychological principle remains useful.

Give somebody something useful and the relationship changes.

It's one reason sampling works. And free advice. Useful newsletters. Generous trials. Tools. Guides. Great service before somebody has spent much money with you.

Not every piece of marketing needs to extract value immediately.

Sometimes the cleverer move is to provide some.

The suitors, incidentally, offer the reverse lesson. They consume Odysseus's household indefinitely, abuse the hospitality being extended to them and give nothing meaningful back.

That CRM strategy ends badly.

Odysseus knows identity is partly a story we tell

Odysseus also spends a surprising amount of the poem pretending to be somebody else.

He tells Polyphemus his name is Nobody. He returns to Ithaca disguised as a beggar. At several points he constructs detailed false biographies, combining truth, invention and plausible detail depending on who happens to be listening.

A 2023 paper by Luca Valle Salazar looks at these fake autobiographies through contemporary thinking about memory and social psychology. His fascinating point is that Odysseus's lies work partly because credible deception uses many of the same mental and narrative structures involved when people construct genuine accounts of themselves.

Again, there is a recognisable marketing idea hiding in there.

We don't only buy things for what they do. We sometimes buy them for what they allow us to say — to ourselves and other people — about who we are.

Consumer researcher M. Joseph Sirgy's work on self-concept helped establish this as an important area of consumer behaviour: the relationship between the image of a product or brand and the consumer's conception of themselves.

The watch tells the time.

The running shoes protect your feet.

The car gets you to work.

But around those functional jobs sit stories about success, seriousness, taste, youth, independence, adventure, responsibility and belonging.

People aren't merely consumers of products.

They're authors of identities.

Which makes identity one of the most powerful benefits a brand can offer.

And reputation existed long before the review button

Homer also gives enormous importance to kleos: roughly, fame, glory or reputation — what is heard about a person.

Charles Segal's classic study of kleos in The Odyssey examines a fascinating contradiction in Odysseus. Much of his success comes from concealing who he is, yet those secret adventures eventually become the very stories through which his reputation spreads.

That's remarkably close to something marketers now call earned media or word of mouth.

A reputation ultimately exists in other people's heads and conversations.

Research by Jonah Berger and Katherine Milkman into why online content gets shared showed that transmission isn't random either: emotional arousal is one of the things that can increase the likelihood of people passing something on.

Homer didn't have TikTok.

But he certainly understood virality.

Do something worth talking about, give people a story worth repeating and your fame can travel somewhere you aren't.

The technology is new.

The social behaviour really isn't.

There is one final lesson, though

All of this needs a fairly important caveat.

Odysseus is a brilliant persuader.

He's also a spectacular liar.

The Sirens know exactly how to make their proposition irresistible, but their customer satisfaction scores are presumably appalling.

Circe uses temptation. Calypso makes Odysseus an extraordinary offer. Various characters manipulate, disguise, withhold information and exploit vulnerabilities.

Which means The Odyssey also contains a useful distinction between effective persuasion and ethical persuasion.

They're not the same thing.

A dark pattern may increase conversion. Artificial scarcity may make somebody buy faster. An outrage headline may increase engagement. An algorithm may learn precisely which emotional button keeps somebody scrolling long after they'd intended to stop.

Those things can work.

That doesn't automatically make them good marketing.

The more sophisticated our ability to understand behaviour becomes, the more important that distinction gets.

Perhaps that's Homer's most modern lesson of all: understanding what moves somebody gives you power over them, and power always comes with a choice about how you use it.

And there's a lesson for the consumer too.

If something looks too good to be true, it probably is.

The Odyssey itself recalls the story of the Trojan Horse: an extraordinary gift apparently left behind by a defeated enemy. The Trojans bring it inside the city. Unfortunately, the terms and conditions include a group of armed Greeks hiding inside it.

Modern marketing is unlikely to end with your city being burned to the ground, but the principle holds up rather well. Free trials renew. Introductory prices expire. Incredible offers come with exclusions. Convenience sometimes asks for your data in return.

Persuasion works partly by directing our attention towards the thing being offered. Good judgement means remembering to ask what might be hiding inside it.

So, is The Odyssey really a marketing book?

Of course not.

I don't think Homer was sitting around in approximately 700 BC worrying about his conversion funnel.

But the further I've read into this, the less frivolous the comparison has started to seem.

There is a genuine scholarly argument that the Homeric poems contain some of the earliest examples of deliberate rhetorical practice in Western literature. Semêdo, following Rachel Ahern Knudsen's work on the origins of rhetoric, describes Odysseus's encounter with Nausicaa not as spontaneous eloquence but as a calculated attempt to understand an audience and choose the words most likely to create the desired action.

Then later psychology starts putting names and theories around many of the same human tendencies: curiosity gaps, precommitment, narrative transportation, reciprocity, self-concept, social transmission.

And that's the bit I find fascinating.

The Odyssey has endured partly because its monsters are memorable and its adventures are extraordinary. But underneath all that spectacle is an incredibly perceptive understanding of ordinary people: what attracts us, what frightens us, what tempts us, how we want to be seen, whose stories we believe and what finally makes us act.

Those are also the questions that good marketers spend their careers trying to answer.

The channels keep changing. We moved from oral storytelling to manuscripts, printing presses, posters, radio, television, websites, social media and whatever comes next.

Human nature hasn't upgraded at anything like the same speed.

So no, Homer wasn't the world's first copywriter.

But if you want to get better at understanding persuasion and response, spending some time with Odysseus isn't a bad place to start.

Further reading

Rachel Ahern Knudsen's Homeric Speech and the Origins of Rhetoric makes the wider case for deliberate rhetorical technique in Homer; Rafael de Almeida Semêdo's 2020 paper provides the particularly useful analysis of Odysseus and Nausicaa. Jon Elster's Ulysses and the Sirens is the classic connection between Odysseus and precommitment, while Thaler and Shefrin's “An Economic Theory of Self-Control” develops the planner/doer problem.

For the psychology and marketing connections, George Loewenstein's 1994 paper covers curiosity and information gaps; Green and Brock examine narrative transportation; Jennifer Edson Escalas connects narrative processing to brands; Sirgy reviews self-concept in consumer behaviour; and Berger and Milkman examine the emotional drivers of social transmission.