Competing Effectively and The Power of Storytelling

Everyone is drawn to a good story.

In Social Media, and The End of Control, I talked about how the proliferation of social media means that traditional marketing is no longer as effective as it used to be, and paradoxically, how much more important it is to do traditional marketing right than it was a few years ago. As a buyer (of whatever it is I’m buying), I can do my own research, and, more importantly, learn about the experiences of others who’ve bought what I’m looking to buy. I talked about my own shopping habits on Amazon, and the fact that if a product doesn’t have overwhelmingly positive reviews from other buyers, I’ll look for a similar product that does, and buy that one.

Marketing has always been about telling a story…a story about why what I’m selling is the best whatever it is on the market, or why it’s better than somebody else’s, or (if it’s a completely new product or category) why it’s something you didn’t know you needed that you can’t live without. The result (or one of them, and a big one at that) of the three major rebellions in marketing over the last hundred years[1] is that who’s telling the story matters! I no longer need (nor expect, nor even want) to learn what I need to know about the thing I want to buy from the company that wants to sell it to me. Instead, I can research it on the internet, and I can look to communities on social media to tell me the real deal, not what the company wants me to believe about their product or service.

I had coffee a couple of weeks ago with my friend Melissa Reaves. Melissa is a professional storyteller (and, by the way, a wickedly funny improvisational comedian) who teaches business professionals and executives how to tell stories that drive human connection with their audience and win their listeners over. I told her that I’ve been thinking recently about how competing effectively in business today is a much more nuanced undertaking than it used to be, and that to be successful, you need to have customers marketing your product or service to their friends and colleagues, rather than believing (or hoping) that you can control the narrative. Talking with Melissa, I began thinking about whether it’s even possible to shape the narrative and get loyal customers when there’s very little about it that you can control.

If you read my last article, you might believe that I think that “traditional” marketing (what I’ll call push marketing, where a seller pushes the messages they want me to hear to me) doesn’t matter at all anymore. Far from it! But what I do believe is true is that traditional push marketing plays a smaller but far more important role in a buyer’s decision journey than in the past. “Push” marketing is still (I think) the most effective way to create awareness of my product or service. But once I’ve accomplished that, what happens next is pretty much out of my hands.

So, getting my story right (more about what “right” means in this context a little later) is more important than ever. And, from the outset, I’d better ensure that the story I tell is going to resonate with my target audience, and be echoed and amplified by my existing customers, so that potential new customers will be drawn to being connected and in relationship with me and what I’m selling.

What makes for a good story? Stories trigger our imaginations. They inspire us. They help us understand how the world works. A good story is tangible, tangible enough that I can visualize and conceptualize whatever the story is about in my own mind.  And sometimes, stories give us lessons or information that we can apply to our own world to solve our own problems. There is ample academic research that has shown that people learn more quickly and with greater retention through a story than through, for example, a talk or a lecture.

Uri Hasson is a neuroscientist at Princeton University. In 2016, he did a TED Talk titled “This is your brain on communication.”[2] He shared research that he and his colleagues conducted that showed that when people are listening to a story, their brains “synchronize” with the brain of the person telling a story, what they call “neural entrainment.” They showed this by putting storytellers and listeners in an fMRI scanner and seeing what was going on in their respective brains as the story was being told. What they discovered is that the same areas in the storyteller’s and listeners’ brains lit up and tracked the same way during the storytelling. Wow!

As a competitive strategist, as I was listening to the talk, the voice in my head was saying “yeah, ok, that’s when a storyteller is telling a story, and the listeners are listening to it. Does the same thing apply to a story that is written and read? 

Hasson did not disappoint! Another experiment he and his colleagues conducted involved having two groups of people read a story by J.D. Salinger, in which a husband lost track of his wife in the middle of a party, and he's calling his best friend, asking, "Did you see my wife?" Before reading the story, one of the two groups was told that the wife was having an affair with the best friend. The other group was told that the wife is loyal to her husband, and he is just very jealous. Again, using the fMRI, they examined which brain centers were activated during the reading of the story. What they found was, in my judgment, fascinating and highly instructive for marketers who want to be more effective in reaching their target audience.

The one thing each group was told before the story started was enough to make the brain responses of all the people in each group synchronize with one another. Those that believed the wife was having an affair showed very similar activity in these high-order areas, and it was different from the other group. In the second group, which was told that it was just the husband being jealous (loyal wife, no affair), the areas of the brain activated were the same for each reader in the group, but different from those in the first group!  As Hasson describes, “…if one sentence is enough to make your brain similar to people that think like you and very different than people that think differently than you, think how this effect is going to be amplified in real life, when we are all listening to the exact same news item after being exposed day after day after day to different media channels, like Fox News or The New York Times, that give us very different perspectives on reality.” Fascinating, huh?

There are two important takeaways here for marketers. First, it may be possible that I can shape people’s receptivity to, and experience of, the story I tell before I tell it, and by doing so, shape their impressions of my product or service. And if I can do that effectively, I can influence the experience that they share with their friends, colleagues, and professional networks, or even total strangers who might be searching for a product or service like the one I’m selling. Secondly, the fact that I no longer have absolute control of the narrative about my product or service means I have to be much more attentive to the experience my customers have with my company and what I’m selling, because it is they, not me, who will play the most important role in how successful I am at beating my competition.

That begins with me thinking about my customers as people, individual people who I want to have a very individual relationship with, not as targets or companies or audiences or demographics. And it might just lessen the importance of one of the holy grails of competitive strategy, differentiation. I’ll begin to dive into that in my next article…

[1] If you want to understand these three rebellions in a little more depth, read my article, Rethinking Compete, or if you’re really interested in understanding it thoroughly, read Mark Schaefer’s book Marketing Rebellion: The Most Human Company Wins.

[2] It’s a great talk, well worth the 15 minute listen. https://www.ted.com/talks/uri_hasson_this_is_your_brain_on_communication?utm_source=linkedin.com&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=tedspread