Story Form for Marketers

How to tell a story that your customers actually want to read.

1. Make the story less about you.

I touched on this quite a bit in the previous section, but it is so important to avoid creating a world for your customers that revolves around you and your brand –– it must revolve around them –– them being your customer. 

As the story goes, when Apple computer launched their first computer, Lisa, they did a 20 page insert in the New York Times, touting all the amazing hardware aspects of the new computer - 6 programs, and comes with two floppy data-storage disks capable of holding 870,000 characters each, as well as a hard disk capable of storing 5 million….

It didn’t sell as well as they had expected. The next year they launched the Think Different campaign. That campaign focused on the user not the product.

2. Make the story more about them.

To create a story centered around your customer, you need to actually understand your customer. This requires understanding what goes on in their mind. The customer is the hero with a task, something to be solved.

Remember that you're not going to tell the same story to a business executive as you would to a stay-at-home dad, they're two very different customers.

Apple made the new computer about the customer by implying that an Apple computer signals you’re an early adopter and holds the value set of thinking different.

3. The problem in your story make it into the villain

This is what screen writer will tell you is the conflict in the story. While the villains we come face-to-face with outside of fiction may not be as terrifying as the Death Star was for Luke Skywalker, they're still very real and very present in the lives of our customers.

Real-life villains can be literally anything. Tax-season. Lower back pain. Computers that were hard to work with, etc.

Our job as marketers is to find our customer's villains and give them something to battle the villain or conflict with.

4. The hero still needs a guide, the guide provides a solution or tactic.

The sharp sword, the strong shield or the magic wand is your product or service that can relinquish the customer's villain (a.k.a the problem they're experiencing). Here's what this looks like... 

Problem: Tax Season | Sword: Quickbooks

Villain: Lower back pain | Guide know about: Aleve

Tell a story of your customer miserably struggling with lower back pain and discovering the shield that is Aleve... and then experiencing what life can look like pain-free.  

5. Transformation

In the case of the character fighting the villain that is lower back pain, experiencing the shield that is Aleve allows for something extraordinary that is arguably one of the most important elements in regards to the art of storytelling –– the transformation or happily ever after. 

Transformation happens when your customer uses your product or service and kills the villain. It's living happily ever after without the problem.

STORY WARS

Excerpt copied from Jonah Sachs book Story Wars. One the best (and the most entertaining) marketing books I’ve read in some time. Buy this book!

The story wars are all around us. They are the struggle to be heard in a world of media noise and clamor. Today, most brand messages and mass appeals for causes are drowned out before they even reach us. But a few consistently break through the din, using the only tool that has ever moved minds and changed behavior—great stories.

With insights from mythology, advertising history, evolutionary biology, and psychology, viral storyteller and advertising expert Jonah Sachs takes listeners into a fascinating world of seemingly insurmountable challenges and enormous opportunity:

· Social media tools are driving a return to the oral tradition, in which stories that matter rise above the fray
· Marketers have become today’s mythmakers, providing society with explanation, meaning, and ritual

· Memorable stories based on timeless themes build legions of eager evangelists
· Marketers and audiences can work together to create deeper meaning and stronger partnerships in building a better world
· Brands like Old Spice, The Story of Stuff, Nike, the Tea Party, and Occupy Wall Street created and sustained massive viral buzz

Winning the Story Wars is a call to arms for business communicators to cast aside broken traditions and join a revolution to build the iconic brands of the future. It puts marketers in the role of heroes with a chance to transform not just their craft but the enterprises they represent. After all, success in the story wars doesn’t come just from telling great stories, but from learning to live them.

15,000 Years of Stories

Humans have been telling stories since 15,000 B.C. as a way to connect, entertain and pass along important information. In fact, we've been telling stories for so many years that it has become ingrained in our DNA... evolution has literally wired our brains for storytelling.

Thousands and thousands of years of sharing and listening to stories has given the art of storytelling some unfathomable power.

Thousands and thousands of years of sharing and listening to stories has given the art of storytelling some unfathomable power.

Stories have existed long before recorded history, and the telling of stories has changed forms drastically throughout the ages.  From cave painting to novels to movies, stories have always fascinated mankind.  Although the methods have changed, the desire to tell and hear stories has remained unchanged, and still greatly impacts the way we look at life.

The earliest form of storytelling that has been discovered is from the Lascaux Caves in the Pyrenees Mountains in southern France.  Discovered in 1940 by a group of French children, a series of cave paintings that date back to sometime between 15000 and 13,000 B.C. depicted a variety of animals and one image of a human being.  When closely examined, this mural of sorts actually follows a very simplistic series of events.  It tells of rituals performed and hunting practices.  It tells a story.

Flash forward to 700 B.C.  The first printed story, the epic of Gilgamesh, was created and began to spread from Mesopotamia to other parts of Europe and Asia.  The story was carved on stone pillars for all to see, which spread the story around very quickly.

In the 200s B.C., Aesop’s fables were written down, and continue to teach lessons today in many areas of life.  Aesop lived in the 500s B.C., but his stories were remembered for hundreds of years without a single shred of paper or other printed material.  Isn’t that amazing?  Oral storytelling was so powerful and people remembered Aesop’s tales so well that even 300 years later the stories were revered enough for mass production.

Storytellers began to arise as very important figures in a community.  The ability to tell stories effectively and memorably was a very valuable skill.   Why?  As wars were fought and valiant deeds were done, the people needed some way to remember them. 

Instead of simply stating what happened, stories began to emerge as a way to preserve the raw emotions and sequence of events of the actual event.

The Bible’s Old Testament spoke of men and women, of tales and lessons learned that occurred many, many years before they were written.  A majority of the books relied on solid resources for their writings.  What were these resources?  Stories.  People witnessed events, heard the stories and kept them alive through word of mouth.  They told their friends, families and communities about the events, and a chain was formed, one link, one storyteller, at a time.

Shakespeare’s plays and sonnets weren’t meant to be published, but his status became legendary once they were.  He was known as a great storyteller to many of his close friends, but soon became immortalized in the pieces that he produced.  From a young street rat in London to being taught in every school hundreds of years later, he made his mark on literature forever.  How did he do it?

Storytelling.

Steve Jobs was famous for his keynotes.   Whether launching new products or making an announcement, he agonized for hours over the details of his presentations.  People were amazed at his ability to craft a narrative, to create and maintain suspense and to deliver a solid message.  It wasn’t dazzling special effects or crazy props.

It was storytelling.

History is nothing but a series of stories that, when told correctly, can teach us lessons, give us insights into a variety of concepts, or entertain us.  Every story serves a purpose, even if to simply relay a message.  Without history, without chronicled stories, mankind would never learn from his mistakes, would never dream to emulate past heroes, would never see anything but the now.  We would be clueless to the past, and therefore helpless for the future.

We all crave stories because they allow us to sympathize with characters.  Tell your audience a story, and you will gain their support.  A story gives people a reason to care about what you’re saying.  They relate to the characters, the plot and the lessons learned.  They relate to your story, and therefore your message.

So, what’s your story?

Brand Betterness: Powering Purpose

Social media and the internet have allowed humans to connect with one another across the globe and share ideas, knowledge and a sense of community. This sense of connection, feeling of belonging and deep personal inner fulfillment are the things humans really desire.

To be clear, this is not some lofty utopian dream. It’s simply one of those rare moments in time where technology, opportunity and understanding coalesce into a major leap in human history.

And when we connect with that, when we bring purpose, passion and presence into our work, when we commit to tiny acts of doing-it-differently, and when we intend to create brands, leaders and teams that are integrated on a human level, we create conscious companies; and thus a new wave of consciousness capitalism. Companies that matter, and will matter for years in the future.

Companies are no longer just companies. We imbue them with the characteristics of friends and family—and even enemies. So it’s no

surprise that people now demand businesses and their brands to do more than just make a profit. They expect brands to behave like active citizens and partner with customers, employees, and other stakeholders to co-create a better future.

Raison D’etre

Purpose is the reason why a company or a brand exists. It is the underlying essence that makes a brand relevant and necessary to its customers. Purpose sits firmly at the center of a brand’s vision and informs every business decision.  Ultimately, customers choose brands that solve their internal problems, not only their eternal ones. To achieve this means moving beyond external brand touchpoints and siloed social impact programs. Creating purpose tackles company culture, consciousness, customers and ultimately profit: commerce.

The best brand purpose is a vision for the world that you strive to make real every day.

A Story Can Go Where Analysis Cannot

Stories provide the cognitive and neural means of organizing the chaos of information into units of meaning that allow us to understand. They reinforce existing knowledge, give context, and attend  to our emotional state. Storytelling stands the test of time because they speak to the most human fundamentals: psychological, biological, and neurological. Throughout history have been telling stories from cave paintings to blockbuster movies. 

Stories connect us to each other and give us insight about ourselves. They give us a common language where we can share experience, teach, reflect and create culture. As stories are retold, they reinforce cultural traditions and norms, linking our understanding of the human condition across divides and across generations.

“If you talk to a man in a language he understands, that goes to his head. If you talk to him in his language, that goes to his heart.”

Nelson Mandela

A story can go where quantitative analysis is denied admission: our hearts. Data can persuade people, but it doesn’t inspire them to act; to do that, you need to wrap your vision in a story that fires the imagination and stirs the soul.

Harvard Business School professor Gerald Zaltmansays that 95% of our purchase decision making takes place subconsciously.

“Thanks to new research, we now understand that our emotional decisions are not irrational or bad. In fact, our unconscious decisions have logic of their own. They are based on a deeply empirical mental processing system that is capable of processing effortlessly millions of bits of data without getting overwhelmed. Our conscious mind, on the other hand, has a strict bottleneck, because it can only process 3-4 new pieces of information at a time due to the limitation of our working memory.”

But what makes our unconscious so intelligent is that it has spent a lifetime learning from our successes and failures. It has evolved to make decisions for us according to rules of thumb.

Consumers often act on inner urges and emotions. It’s been reported, that the motivations are so powerful that 95% of purchasing decisions are subconscious.  Emotion drives brand choices, purchasing behaviors and decision making.”