Stories. The future of Brand Communication. Here is a wonderful piece by Özlem Tuskan Why Brands Must Tell Stories It is no secret that branding specialists encourage the use of stories in their work; it is how we share our ideas, our concepts and how we seek to influence our clients. At the end of the day, stories are integral to human experience. Stories are easy to remember because they are in most ways how we remember. Most of our experiences, our knowledge and our thinking is organized in stories. We compress years of experience, thought and emotion into a few compact narratives that convey who we are to others. According to the renowned storyteller and author Kendall Haven (author of Super Simple Storytelling) “Human minds rely on stories and story architecture as the primary road map for understanding, making sense of, remembering and planning our lives – as well as the countless experiences and narratives we encounter along the way.” Brands are the same. Companies are in a race to connect with consumers emotionally. However their commitment to communicate competitive advantage often leads them into the trap of focusing on product claims that are fact based. Shouting loudly about higher interest rates, newly extended opening hours and the new gloss finish on your ceramics range (all of which are important factors in a value and convenience hungry society to a certain extent) are increasingly proving to be a less effective way of really connecting with consumers. Business consultant Annette Simmons explains, “Facts are neutral until human beings add their own meaning to those facts. People make their decisions based on what the facts mean to them not on the facts themselves. The meaning they add to facts depends on their current story. Facts are not terribly useful to influencing others. People don’t need new facts – they need a new story.” Like design, storytelling is becoming a key way for individuals, entrepreneurs and large organisations to distinguish their goods and services in the marketplace. So why is storytelling so important? Here are my top 5 reasons: 1. Consumers are readily available to express their emotions. For a long time companies created products and services and then pushed them out to customers using the classic 4 Ps – product, place, promotion and price. The message was controlled by paid media and the role of the consumer was to listen and buy. However, with over 3,200,000,000 ‘likes’ and comments every day, (that’s 37,000 every second, Facebook 2012) technology-enabled collaborations have changed brand- consumer relationships. Today’s brand owners are trying to earn a place in earned media, which is word of mouth and recommendations from friends and family. 92% of global consumers say they trust earned media above all other forms of advertising – an increase of 18% since 2007 (Nielsen, April 2012). It is no longer what you as a brand owner say that counts. Instead it’s what is said about you on Google. As a result brands need to better influence this conversation; to establish themselves through making and maintaining compelling brand promises and by adopting rich brand consumer dialogue. Stories that excite and engage can enrich this dialogue. 2. Stories resonate more than facts in today’s information overloaded society. There is more information consumed today than ever before. Sean Moffit and Mike Dover in their book ‘Wikibrands’ sum it up in a great factoid: "Between the beginning of recorded history and the year 2003 there were five exobytes of information recorded. To put this in perspective there were five exobytes of information generated and recorded over the past two days – most of it by the public". We are all more than aware that people are no longer listening to or watching the same few TV stations. They’re following their own carefully curated twitter feeds, commenting on and creating blogs, zapping through hundreds of TV channels, surfing the internet on IPADS and reading Kindles. In ‘Start Something That Matters’, Blake Mycoskie, the founder of TOMS, sums it up well: “It may seem counterintuitive but because so many product claims and consumer opinions are a click away, it’s actually more, not less, difficult to base purchasing decisions on this information. Not only is there too much to sift through but much of it is contradictory: Crest cleans teeth the whitest – or does Colgate? An article on the web says one thing but the stream of comments under it says something different”. He argues, along with many others, that unless information is presented in an emotionally compelling fashion in the first place, you’ll probably forget most of it almost immediately. In short, when facts become so widely available and instantly accessible each one becomes less valuable and what transpires is the need to put them in a context that delivers them with emotional impact. Dan Pink, in ‘A Whole New Mind’ calls this ‘context enriched by emotion’. Quoting E.M. Forster’s famous observation, “a fact is,‘The queen dies and the king died’, a story is ‘The queen died and the king died of a broken heart’”. In short, stories evoke emotion, facts illuminate. When we read dry, factual arguments we are cynical and skeptical, but when we are absorbed in a story we drop our intellectual guard. We are moved emotionally and this seems to leave us defenceless, and thus open to change. 3. Consuming brands with integrity has become a status symbol. In a time of abundance and materialism, people feel freer to explore a deeper meaning of life, understanding and meaning resulting in personal narrative becoming more important than ever before. What they identify as status symbols is shifting. For many the choice is influenced by what they believe the product will say about them as people. The better the story of integrity they can tell around a product, the better their social status. What continues to emerge is that consumers expect brands that mirror society, and act genuinely, honesty and openly. Humanised stories based on truth (e.g. such as Patagonia, TOMS Shoes) can act as great way to connect with consumer emotions and turn them into supporters of the brand, the type that spearhead influential online and offline conversations. Brands need to move from just ‘having nothing to hide’ to showing and proving everything they do. The foundation to this, however, is the need to find a meaningful purpose; a valuable reason for existence that serves the needs of society as much as the company’s bottom line. 4. We are living in the conceptual age. We have moved from the agricultural age, to the industrial age, to the information age, to the conceptual age. Dan Pink talks about the new six senses that professional success and personal satisfaction will depend upon – Design, Story, Symphony,? Empathy, Play and Meaning. He believes, and rightly so, that we are moving from an economy and society built on the logical, linear, computer-like capabilities of the Information Age to an economy and a society built on the inventive, empathetic, big picture capabilities of what’s rising in its place, the Conceptual Age. He argues that right-brainers will be ruling the future. To oversimplify, the left brain focuses on what is said (analyses details, is sequential, knows logic and converges on a single answer) and the right brain focuses on how it is said (specialises in context, is simultaneous, synthesises the big picture, knows about the world). This is an era that prioritizes high concept and high touch. High concept means the capacity to detect patterns and opportunities to create artistic and emotional beauty, to craft satisfying narrative and to combine seemingly unrelated ideas into something new. High Touch involves the ability to empathize with others, to understand the subtleties of human interactions, to find joy in ones self and to elicit it in others and pursue purpose and meaning. Stories happen when the two intersect. 5. Employers are striving for stronger human relationships with their employees. Organisations are realising that making employees aware of the stories that exist within their walls can play an important role in the pursuit of organisational goals. Steve Denning’s work at the World Bank, a pioneer in using stories to contain and capture knowledge, learnt that an organisation’s knowledge is contained in its stories. At Xerox he realised that its repair personnel learned to fix machines by trading stories rather than reading manuals. He believes that “storytelling doesn’t replace analytical thinking, it supplements it by enabling us to imagine new perspectives and new worlds”. More and more organisations are adopting this approach. 3M is giving top executives storytelling lessons, NASA has begun using storytelling in its knowledge management initiatives. Even Richard Olivier in the UK, son of Laurence Olivier and Joan Plowright, former Shakespearean theatre director is now advising large companies about how to integrate story into their operations. Dan Pink refers to Alan Kay, a Hewlett Packard executive and co-founder of Xeroc Parc who once said "Scratch the surface in a typical boardroom and we’re all just cavemen with briefcases, hungry for a wise person to tell us stories". Perhaps why storytelling is becoming so vastly popular in organisations is because is helps transport people to a place where their imaginations were once more alive. As Benjamin Buist in his thesis ‘Internal and external language and communication through storytelling’ (2012) puts it “Stories are based upon and are reminiscent of childhood, generally a place of less self control and prejudice. This attachment can be invaluable when trying to connect to many different people as stories and childhood is something we all share. Stories can help bring people back to a place where creativity and wonder (innovation) were part of the everyday.” - a mind-set that would foster cultures of innovation and leadership within organisations. But it doesn’t just end with finding and telling the story, the most important thing is to spread it. You need demonstrate commitment to telling the story at every opportunity, whoever your audience, and to have the story become your driving motion, not just an incidental part of your business but an important one that you should focus on. Otherwise you won’t be able to end the effort and investment needed to promote and share it. Without this, the story won’t come to life and serve to create the business opportunities it has the potential to. References: Buist, B., Thesis: Internal and external language and communication through storytelling, 2012, London, UK. Moffit, S & Dover, M., WikiBrands: Reinventing Your Company in a Customer-Driven Marketplace, 2011, USA. Mycoskie, B., Start something that matters, 2011, USA. Pink, D., A Whole New Mind, Why Right-Brainers Will Rule the Future, 2008, London, UK. Istanbul Consumer Trends Seminar, Trendwatching, 2012, Istanbul, Turkey
Posted on: Mon, 26 Aug 2013 06:22:27 +0000
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