Mastering the Art of Short-Form Storytelling

Something I'm fond of saying is that storytelling isn't just about "story-telling."

In theater, film, novels, speeches, etc., telling a story is just the tip of the iceberg. When you go deeper, storytelling is all about our brain structures and the way we, as humans, are hardwired to look for a narrative that helps us make sense of the world.

We often reference Jonathan Gottschall's The Storytelling Animal (2013) to talk about this idea, but Gloria Steinem sums it up nicely:

"If you hear a statistic, you will make up a story to go with it, because our brains are organized on narrative."

At Go Narrative, we often talk about longer-form storytelling (like buyer persona reference stories), but in the world of marketing, "short and sweet" has always been the name of the game. Humans have an innate desire to simplify things, and marketers address this by trying to get the maximum amount of information across in the least amount of words in their ads and copywriting.

Often, it's not about spelling everything out for your buyer; it's about leading the horse to water with a brief but magnetic story.

Short-form stories are baby steps toward sales

Brevity is crucial for today's marketers, who are competing not only against declining attention spans, but a massive flood of emails, social media posts, videos, infographics, blog posts, podcasts, and more that their audience is consuming on a near-constant basis. While the pressure to create these types of content en masse is high, it's important to remember that each piece of content you put out there is an opportunity to cut through the noise with a short-form story.

There's an old (but still relevant) marketing "rule" called the Rule of 7, which states that a buyer needs to have an average of seven interactions or engagements with your brand before they'll convert. It's easier than ever to hit that mark of seven interactions with all the different online and offline customer touchpoints that exist – but you have to ensure that those interactions build upon each other and accrue to a larger narrative about the value your business provides. Synchronized stories, if you will.

Think of your short-form content as baby steps toward a sale. If you can say something short and pithy and gets people's attention, then you're opening the door up to the next conversation. Your potential customer gets a taste of your brand when you deliver that first compelling story. They're drawn to consume more content, and then a little bit more, and eventually trust you enough to buy from you.

Each time you positively engage a customer with your story, you'll get their attention, be heard, and ultimately sell more. But how do you simplify that story to its absolute essential elements in the first place? How do you distill it down to something that gets people to take that next step?

This is something I personally struggled with when I worked as Chief Storyteller for Microsoft Dynamics. The leader who brought me onboard knew I was a natural storyteller, so I took that passion for storytelling and applied it to business.

As I was figuring out how to land Microsoft Dynamic's brand and product value to our customers in a compelling way, I did a lot of research on how to effectively tell stories. I discovered that there are a lot of really rich, robust storytelling models that are great for a script or a novel but aren't that applicable to business.

Let's take a traditional model like the "hero's journey." This overview of the hero's journey from Become a Writer Today lists 12 different stages that the story's protagonist must go through over the course of the narrative. Even if you narrow that down to essential elements like the hero and villain, inciting incident, climax, falling action, etc., that's still a considerable amount of things you're trying to juggle in your head – all to create a piece of marketing content for a product.

These classic storytelling approaches work, so I needed to figure out how to apply it to marketing and branding. In essence, I became an interpreter – the person who could interpret the existing story frameworks out there and come up with an appropriate business analogy. At the time the interpretation was a “heavy lift” manual exercise.

Through my work with Microsoft, I recognized the value of simplified business storytelling, especially for technology companies with sophisticated product offerings. This planted the seed of the dream of starting Go Narrative. After founding the company, I took on the considerable undertaking of developing and simplifying these “interpretations” further and ultimately codified them into the repeatable business storytelling frameworks that we use with our clients today.

Simplifying your story with storytelling tools

One of the greatest things about storytelling is the abundance of tools and literary devices that can be used to communicate your message. These tools can help tremendously when you're looking to master the art of condensed storytelling in the form of social content, visual ads, or even a brand tagline (we'll talk more about that in a bit).

Here are just a few tools you can leverage to tell condensed stories:

• Metaphors
• Analogies
• Acronyms
• Famous quotes
• Anecdotes
• Story frameworks (like our 3Ds – desire, difficulty, denouement)

Why do we use tools and frameworks to tell condensed stories? Because they're brain hacks. Think of story as the API that helps you effectively interface with somebody's brain. The above-listed devices are simple and memorable – or "sticky," by Chip and Dan Health's standards – and when you're intentional in your choice of tools, you can help people "get there" quicker when you're trying to make a point.

We do this all the time in everyday life when we use analogies and metaphors to explain something to somebody. A recent example from my own life: I was taking my kids with me to measure my car's engine power with a dynamometer (or "dyno"). My 10-year-old is interested in the exercise equipment at the gym, so my wife chose this metaphor to explain a dyno to him: "It's like the treadmill, but for a car. You can see how fast you can go without actually going anywhere."

For my son, this was a bridge to understanding – a brain hack that helped him grasp the concept of what we'd be doing with the car that day.

Remember, storytelling in itself is already a brain hack. It allows you to press certain buttons in people's brains and get an emotional response.

In a Harvard Business Review article, Paul J. Zak of the Center for Neuroeconomics Studies discusses research and experiments he's conducted on narratives and why they're so useful, especially in business:

"My experiments show that character-driven stories with emotional content result in a better understanding of the key points a speaker wishes to make and enable better recall of these points weeks later."

What does all of this mean? Evoking emotions gets people to pay attention. Once they're paying attention, you can get them hear what you're saying, and then get them to act.

'Just do it': A case study of a three-word story

We're all familiar with Nike's globally recognized tagline, "Just do it." That tagline – those three short, simple words strung together – tells an incredibly powerful story that's accessible to anyone.

How can three words be a complete story? Let's break it down:

• Just: In a lot of cases, "just" is seen as a weak word (Grammarly hates it, for the record). In this instance, it's more about the psychology, the aspiration of the situation. It also makes the two words that follow more accessible by softening the tone.
• Do: Stories are all about action and change. Doing something (anything, it doesn't matter what) is action and change. A story always takes you from a before to an after state.
• It: "It" is a convenient placeholder for anything you want it to be. You can put yourself into Nike's tagline and filling in that blank with your own story.

“All” Nike does is sell shoes, and yet, with this simple tagline, the company effectively packs a story about an aspirational action or change about something important into just three words. This distilled story can create that connection to people's lives – their aspirations, their loves, their fears -- and it means something different for every person.

For Nike's target audience of athletes and active individuals who buy their sneakers, "Just do it" might mean get up at the crack of dawn and go for a run or hit the gym. For an aspiring entrepreneur, this tagline might mean letting go of the fear of failure and take the leap to start their business. For a shy and nervous teenager, the words might mean working up the courage to ask his crush out on a date. And of course it always has relevance to any ‘doing’ with sport.

Hearing Nike's tagline unlocks and aligns with whatever's in that person's brain, and therein lies its real power and impact. Now, we know that not every company can expect to come up with a tagline that's as moving and impactful as "Just do it," but it's proof that it's possible with the right analogies and metaphors.

Just do it!

Are you using the right analogies and metaphors?

One device often used in business (and often criticized) is the war analogy. How often have you heard phrases like "crush the competition," "dominate the market," "PR blitz," or "guerilla marketing" used to talk about a business's approach to sales?

Comparing business to war came about for legitimate reasons: You're competing against other companies, which are viewed as an "enemy" that's poised and ready to steal your customers from you. Nobody is using these metaphors because they're nasty, combative people who want to literally kill their competitors. It's a literary crutch – which is fine and natural, because we're humans who are looking for ways to simplify things and put them in story shaped boxes. But in the current business climate – one that's focused on nurturing relationships, supporting people, and collaborating with internal and external partners – war is hardly the most effective or appropriate metaphor.

In an academic article published by the University of the Latin American Educational Center, professor Paula Liendo comments on this topic:

"War metaphors … can be seen, on the one hand, as a way to facilitate the readers’/listeners’ understanding of the world. On the other hand, however, from a postmodern standpoint, the use of language for mere representation has been widely challenged. [This] language creates, rather than reflects, a reality."

Here's another way to look at it: When you have the language of war ingrained in your notion of business, it permeates everything you do. It surfaces in internal meetings and conversations, and there's a very high risk that it gets out into your external communications. If you're aware of this (and it works for your branding), you can be more intentional and purposely use the metaphor as theme. But often, there are better themes for your company to leverage than war.

Rather than relying on the tired analogies, everyone else is using, think beyond war and battle, and instead look at your business through a positive and more differentiated lens. We do this when we work with our clients on their storytelling frameworks. We seek out universal truths/themes about their business that can then serve as a "meta" metaphor – a filter that helps our clients select the most appropriate stories, analogies, and metaphors to use in their communications.

If you're struggling with this, let us help you. When you book a complimentary 30-minute consultation with Go Narrative, we'll give you the tools to think out of the box and reach your customers with a fresh, unique approach to your brand's story.

Go Narrative is a marketing consultancy that assists business leaders in technology firms to build and implement advanced marketing strategies. Our secret sauce is storytelling for business growth and transformation. We can help you cut through the noise and improve your reputation. We love helping business leaders understand, use and apply storytelling in business via writing, presentations, video, strategy and actionable plans. Get attention. Be heard. Sell more.

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