How to Become a Brand Storyteller

 To become a brand storyteller, you must find the great stories to tell, have a process of telling them, and have the right people to tell the stories. The brand is never the protagonist in storytelling; rather, it plays the part of the solution or the vehicle through which the story is told. The story is instead focused on what people care about, which humanizes the story. The effect is often subtle, but impactful.

 How to Find Brand Stories in Your Own Organization

Where do brand stories come from? The short answer: they come from just about anywhere. Stories can be about the company’s origin (e.g., Hewlett-Packard, which started in a garage, or Amazon, which has Jeff Bezos driving across the country to establish the company); the people (the faces of the company); the customers (e.g., Tesla customers sharing stories of their experiences with their cars); a cause the company believes in (e.g., TOMS Shoes and its mission to provide shoes for the poor); or a behind-the-scenes look at the operations of the company.

               For example, Microsoft Story Labs captures the behind-the-scenes faces and stories of people who are an integral part of the company and its products. They include gamers who are testing the new Xbox Adaptive Controller that makes gaming accessible to people with disabilities, a researcher who envisions new ways of producing food for urban populations, and a once-unknown salesperson who has become a top Microsoft presenter and now senior program manager in charge of DevOps (software development). By showcasing people, not products, Microsoft puts human faces on a huge corporation.   

               Another rich vein to be tapped is customer stories -- actual experiences that are shared by the company to highlight the loyalty of customers who use their products. An example is the Toyota “Auto-Biography”, a Facebook campaign that asked more than 160,000 people who “liked” the company to post videos and text about why they love their Toyotas. The stories were an invaluable testimony to the brand, which had been faced with a difficult product recall crisis the year before.

               A powerful example of stories from customers is Google’s Year in Search, a montage of images from the most popular searches. The 2017 list begins with the words: “This year more than ever we asked how…. “with questions focusing on hurricanes (there were three that year: Harvey, Irma, and Maria), wildfires, North Korea’s missile range, helping refugees, the Las Vegas shooting, politics, the solar eclipse, and #MeToo. Through this panorama of storytelling writ large, Google put itself in the center of the biggest questions and events on people’s minds as the place to ask “how” and find an answer.

 Managing the Story Process

Stories must be well constructed to be told effectively. A classic plot structure, devised by Gustav Freytag, is Freytag’s pyramid, which progresses from exposition to inciting incident, rising action, climax, falling action, and resolution. A more modern approach is the three-act structure, which is more commonly used today in many forms, including short stories, novels, movies, and even video games. The basic structure is Act 1: setup; Act 2: confrontation; Act 3: resolution. Within the structure, all the elements of a story are used: setting, characters, a problem (obstacle or challenge), engagement, escalation, loss, and turning point.

               In order for an organization to tell brand stories in either the classic or modern structure, you need to have a story process: an editorial team, a content czar, a database, and a distribution process. The storytelling network needs to reach across the organization and beyond the chief marketing officer or corporate communications department to also include sales, customer service, operations -- any and every touchpoint where there are opportunities to gather and to tell stories. The stories are out there, among executives, employees, and customers. What’s needed is a story dissemination process.

               Brands today are like publishers-- creating, curating, and disseminating stories. No single ad or story line can capture and convey the multiple aspects of a brand or the expanse of a transformative campaign. Brand journalism is an even greater imperative in the digital age, in which messages must be staged on multiple platforms and shared as part of the effort to spread the word.

               Part of that journalism is determining who should tell the story. Leaving it to marketing or PR alone is a mistake. In the case of GE, the former CMO Beth Comstock observed that the storytellers turned out to be engineers, particularly those who were good at translating complex ideas (and huge industrial products) into a message -- and who could let their passion for what they did show. Storytellers can be found throughout an organization. They needn’t be amazing writers; they just need to be able to tell a great story.

               Storytelling begins at the top. It’s no surprise that great companies tend to be led by CEOs who could be called “chief evangelist officers.” Think of Amazon’s Bezos with his annual letter, which is considered by many to be a must read, as he opines not only on Amazon’s business, but also principles of business in general. Then, of course, there is the Oracle of Omaha -- Warren Buffet, whose Berkshire Hathaway shareholder letters are widely read for their wit and wisdom. Others leaders became synonymous with their brands, as visionaries and keepers of the story -- none more powerfully than the late Steve Jobs of Apple. Increasingly, Elon Musk, whose diverse businesses include Tesla, SpaceX, and energy generation, is a spokesman for his brand and for his vision of the future (SpaceX has set plans to colonize Mars).

Excerpted with permission of the publisher, Wiley, from “Kellogg On Branding in a Hyper-Connected World” by Alice M. Tybout and Tim Calkins. Copyright (c) 2019 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc. All rights reserved. This book is available wherever books and ebooks are sold.