The Business Storyteller ... what's the story of your brand, your business and your future?

We all love a great story. To share a laugh, shed a few tears, enjoy a chat over a cup of coffee. Great brand stories, from Levi’s classic 501 jeans in the laundrette to Red Bull’s adrenalin-pumping extreme events, resonate more deeply, and with more enduring impact.

Pixar is perhaps the greatest storyteller of our age. Using lovable characters, classic stories and incredible technology to create works of art. Nike has its own chief storyteller, that keeps evolving the tale from Bill Bowerman and his waffles, Michael Jordan and his hoops, to Mo Farah and his mobots, Google uses stories of future possibilities to reframe its brand, far beyond a search engine, Puma borrows the coolness of Jamaican sprinters to stand out as a brand of urban mobility, whilst HP connects with entrepreneurs by reminding us how it all started in a garage.

For thousands of years stories have entertained and educated, connected and inspired us. They communicate ideas in more engaging ways, more relevant and memorable, connecting people. Stories have more context, helping people to make sense of new ideas, involving characters to whom they can relate, creating a parallel rather than being direct. The stories can be told, or can evolve.

In business we have many different narratives, whether you a start-up trying to explain your idea to potential investors, or a corporate seeking to bring clarity and alignment to the complexity of large organisations and operations:

• purpose - why the company exists, what it seeks to do for people, and make the world a better place - beyond vision, how we see the world, or mission, what we will achieve - a purpose is inspiring and enduring.
• brand - how this purpose is relevant and valuable to people, what it enables them to do which they otherwise couldn't - beyond the business, the brand is more about the possibilities of the audience, and so more engaging.
• strategy - what we will do in order to achieve these goals, the direction and journey we will take, and the milestones and priorities on the way - more engaging and flexible than a rigid framework, and a long list of imperatives.
• communication - the ongoing engagement of all different stakeholders, built around conversations that are interactive and evolving - and that can align the inside and outside, customers and employees, managers and investors.

What makes a great story?

Stories are typically built around timeless, enduring truths – like myths, legends and fairy tales. Indeed there will often be a classic plot on which you can build your own story.

Leo Tolstoy said all great literature is one of two stories: a man goes on a journey or a stranger comes to town. Some say there’s only one story that matters – the quest for the Holy Grail.

Stories have a shape, a narrative arc – although many brand stories are enduring and without an end. That’s what keeps us engaged. But they are unlike most other types communication. They have drama, tension or conflict, secrets and surprises. As author John Le Carré put it “The cat sat on the mat is not a story. The cat sat on the dog’s mat is a story.” At their heart is a very simple structure:

Relating this to a brand, think in particular about the character - feminine or masculine? Mainstream or quirky? Consider your purpose, and brand essence, what aspirations are you seeking to connect with. Think about the opportunities and challenges, hopes and fears, from your audiences view, and relate to them. Consider the objective of the story, how do you want them to feel, and what to do, and the stories conclusion? And think about the media across which the story might be told, how the audience might interact, become involved and personalise it.

Finally think about the words and pictures. The language you use matters. Make it simple, emotional and aspirational. Think of words that are relevant to your audience, unusal and memorable. And also a little playful, open to multiple meanings, twistable and make people smile. And remember that an image can capture a thousand words, processed and recalled faster. Most of all, don’t be “corporate”, be human.

Social stories

Business used to use advertising to tell its story. Whilst this can be creative and dramatic, advertising is also one way. It is increasingly seen as contrived and untrusted. Yet a company's story is told in a million ways every day - by really people - face to face, the words and behaviours of staff, the tweets of happy (or unhappy) customers, the article in the business newspaper, the CEO interview on primetime TV news.

Coca Cola is one brand that realised that 30 second TV slots just don’t work anymore. They don’t engage people. They don’t interact with people. And they don’t move the story on. Instead they have embraced content marketing as a much bigger discipline that advertising, or even communication, and the means by which they will double consumption of Coke by 2020.

 “Liquid and linked” content instead of a thousand stories, create by multiple agencies in different formats, it is about giving content shape – being part of a bigger idea, that morphs and moves forward, telling a story that keeps evolving. There’s a balance to find between Liquid (provokes conversations) and Linked (relevant to the brand), allowing and enabling the content to diffuse and evolve on its own. Whilst some of this is empowering consumers to shape and extend the content, “viral” content only works for consumers if it has an edge to it, provocative and interesting, and for the business if it is strong enough to connect back to the underlying themes, strategy and goals.

Liquid and Linked content starts with the consumer – telling stories through their eyes, about their lives, with them. These brand stories combine business purpose with customer aspirations. They should possess the classic elements of storytelling: compelling characters, plot, suspense and surprise, heroes and villains, beginnings and endings. The story evolves with the audience, dynamic and collaborative, unpredictable and interesting. Every day, the Coke team creatively explore where to go next. He suggests spending 50% of time on the 70% “bread and butter” content, and the second 50% split between the more radical, and potentially higher reward, concepts.

Liquid and Linked has transformed Coke’s marketing. When seeking to engage Australians to drink more Coke, the concept of local characters emerged – the first place to put popular names on the bottles, but also to get the “Kylies and Shanes” becoming real spokespeople for the brand too. During the 2012 Superbowl, Coke’s polar bears took sides, reacting as the team’s did good or bad, and engaging the crowd in them as much as the real game. Stuck in a traffic jam trying to cross the Bosphorus bridge in Istanbul, a Coke van started giving away free drinks. And Coke machines set up in India and Pakistan, with added webcam and screen, enabled people from the two countries to wave at each other, even hold hands.

Contagious stories

Ideas don’t spread by accident. The most powerful concepts, the most catchy songs, spread because they are memes – patterns that can be easily captured, coded and transmitted by the brain. Memetics is a science, although just like a great song, it is human and intuitive too. There are 6 useful factors that make an idea contagious:

• Relevant: We survive information overload through selective attention. Keywords, topics, images, authors, even sounds and images, are ways in which we filter the noise around us, to find content worth exploring further. Just like search engine optimisation, consider the words and phrases, which might be on your audience’s mind.
• Fresh: News is the most frequently shared type of idea, because it is new, topical, edited to be relevant and quickly absorbed. Creating your own news-worthy ideas, or linking your ideas to topical stories (real-time) helps timeliness. Better still is to be first with the news, which is why speculation or gossip is so infectious.
• Practical: We like information that we can use, that gives us some form of advantage. Education or entertainment, popularity or power. The more useful the information, the more people will pass it on to others. The social utility of information however is as much aesthetic and emotional (image and gossip) as functional and practical.
• Intuitive: Ideas have to be easy to interpret, but also easy to articulate. Otherwise they won’t get repeated. Forms of clichés, mnemonics, even alliteration can help. “Gamechangers” is not a completely new phrase, but it’s easy to understand – people who change the game – who themselves are new and interesting.
•  Seeded: Finding the early adopters, typically the most active and engaged audiences, become good transmitters because they have passion for the topic, and also like to be seen as first to know. Ideally find influencers who are respected by the audiences you reach to seek, and enhance the brand’s desired values.
• Wanted: There is no shame in asking people to pass a message on – a special offer which encourages you to tell all your friends, a member get member scheme that explicitly rewards you, or a tweet that includes the phrase “Please RT” is more likely to be retweeted. Calls to action work, particularly in social media where sharing is the norm.

Advocacy is of course more than passing on a cool video. It is about people trusting people, and their recommendations. It is about customers being the ambassadors for the brands they love, the storytellers to others, in a way that is more human, more relevant, and more effective. Forget the expensive advertising, the complex relationship systems, the best form of marketing really is free. However it takes thought and focus, to engage the right people with brands propositions that resonate, who then shared aspirations into experiences, and their stories into contagions. 

What's your story?

What’s your future story? Your strategic script that engages people in your vision and strategy? Your business narrative that connects the many different voices, messages and activities of your company?

The Business Storyteller methodology brings together

• the story of your future (including your past, but focuses on your purpose, potential and path)
• aligning all the narratives (vision, strategy, brand, values, culture, leaders)
• engaging, enabling and evolving (all stakeholders, calls to action, keeps moving)
• and then an ongoing thread for communication (PR, thought leadership etc)

DSM, the Dutch chemical company, is a great example of using storytelling to engage employees and customers in the relaunch of their brand, seeking to reposition their business as a future creator, a sustainable innovator, human and passionate.

They created a film called “Bright Now”, which was originally shown to 22,000 employees in movie theaters around the world, 48 hours before they officially launched their new brand about “Bright Science. Brighter Living.”

The Business Storyteller is built on established processes, tools and ways of working together. It is delivered through any combination of

• 3 day “storytelling lab” as a business school program, but also delivered in your business
• consulting to CEOs, strategy directors, brand, marketing and communication directors
• coaching support to leaders, prior to major speeches, or in formulating new ideas
• framework to design and script big corporate events, and component speakers

It brings together a wide range of academic, creative and practical approaches from the worlds of business and beyond:

• defining business purpose, “outside in” and “future back” (typically part of strategy workshops)
• “strategic horizons”, road maps to strategy implementation (simplifying the phases of change)
• brand strategy, “liquid and linked” communication planning, and customer value propositions
• “culture web”, using symbols and structure (soft and hard) to drive culture change
• the SCQA of “pyramid thinking” (driven by the change curve of human emotions)
• the 16 story models and Pixar methodologies as defined in Creative Genius.

To find out more contact [email protected]

Peter Fisk is a global thought leader on business and brands in a changing world - about leadership and strategy, innovation and growth. His 7 bestselling books are translated into 35 languages, including the most recent "Gamechangers". He has worked with some of the world's most luxurious brands, is founder of Geniusworks, director of Thinkers50 Global, and Professor of Strategy, Innovation and Marketing at IE Business School. He is a keynote speaker, bestselling author, and expert advisor to business leaders. Find out more at his website: www.theGeniusWorks.com