Summary: At times, marketing and messaging collide with the brute force of cold technical reality. This post unpacks one such moment—the case of receiving a JSON response from an API that simply delivers an ‘insufficient account balance’ error. There’s no emotional drama here. No character arc. Just the raw code of negative feedback from a system that deals only in structure, not story. That doesn’t mean there’s nothing to learn. On the contrary, we find something valuable in understanding exactly why not every message becomes a story—and why marketers must sometimes resist the urge to make it one.
When No Means No: Why Some Data Doesn’t Want to Tell a Story
A lot of marketing copywriters, storytelling consultants, and AI prompt engineers fall into the trap of trying to make everything a narrative. But here’s the truth: not every message is meant to be a tale of hope, struggle, and victory. Some content—especially machine-to-machine communication—simply conveys status. It’s protocol, not parable.
Let’s say you receive the following JSON response from an API:
{
"error": "insufficient_funds",
"message": "Your account balance is too low to complete this operation."
}
There’s no protagonist. No goal to chase. No conflict beyond the absence of resource. No climax or plot twist or redemption arc. Could you write a dramatized tale of a user frantically refreshing their balance screen? Sure. But let’s be clear: you would be inventing a story, not extracting one. And that’s an important distinction for marketers to recognize.
Understanding the Limits of Data Interpretation
This response represents a boundary condition. It’s mechanical. Structured. Utterly devoid of human context unless that context is supplied externally. This isn’t a prompt from a confused customer. It’s not a tweet revealing unmet needs. It’s a procedural flag triggered by rules. Nothing more. Anything else must be imagined, not discovered.
Attempting to frame this as a story is like asking a bank’s error code to feel guilty. It’s absurd. And worse, it teaches bad habits—assuming all communications are emotional, even when they aren’t. One of the hallmarks of a mature communicator is knowing where meaning ends and constraint begins.
The Difference Between Messaging and Narrative
A narrative includes motion over time. A character encountering change. There’s desire. Dilemma. Resolution. But a JSON error response is a status. It’s the system holding up a stop sign. Most importantly, it’s immutable. You can’t rewrite it because nothing else happened. The API call failed. That’s the full event log. Move on.
If you’re a product manager or content designer—a key question to ask is: “Who is the message for?” Because the error isn’t for a general audience. It’s for developers or tech users, and its purpose isn’t emotional resonance—it’s operational clarity. Its job isn’t to inspire. It’s to inform with precision.
An Exercise in Restraint: Knowing When to Say Less
Chris Voss, in Never Split the Difference, reminds us about the importance of calibrated questions and the power of ‘No’. This is a perfect ‘No’ moment. You do not need to embellish this message. You do not need to coax more words into it. Ask yourself—what would adding story elements actually accomplish here?
Would it help a dev debug faster? Would it clarify the failure state? Or would it entertain you while driving confusion? Strategic silence is powerful—and here, the silence of the system speaks clearly: the transaction failed due to insufficient balance. That’s the entire event. Full stop.
Misplaced Creativity Undermines Clarity
The temptation to inject narrative elements into sterile data often comes from insecurity—the itch to demonstrate creativity. But good communication isn’t about showing off. It’s about making sense. And sometimes sense comes in the form of a hard, context-free fact. Like running out of money.
Introducing fictional backstories or emotional tone into a message like this dilutes its function. It may even mislead. You wouldn’t want a fire alarm that tries to coach you through early childhood trauma. It just needs to shout “Fire!” for you to act. Same principle applies here.
So What Can Marketers Take From This?
Restraint can be a strength. If you recognize where a narrative genuinely exists, you can extract it and amplify it. But if you’re dealing with a mechanical status message, your job is to frame—not fabricate. Framing might mean making sure the error response gets surfaced in product UX. It could mean educating users on how to fix the issue when they see that message. That’s where the content work lives—around the edge of the status, not inside it.
You can’t spin a compelling story from pure system feedback. What you can do is use those signals to shape more meaningful interactions elsewhere. That’s the real craft. Communicating what’s real, not inventing emotional fiction from cold code.
Bottom Line: The desire to extract a story from every source is natural, but misguided when applied to structured system messages. Understanding the boundary between operational feedback and communicative intent is a sign of professional maturity. Don’t force story where there is none. Instead, design the environment around these responses to serve real user needs. Deliver clarity before color. Simplicity before sentiment.
#MessagingClarity #KnowYourAudience #ContentDesign #UXWriting #TechCommunication #ProductContent
Featured Image courtesy of Unsplash and Bernd 📷 Dittrich (1GTnOQFug2c)
