What’s the Story? Scripting your brand’s success in 2018

In his latest column for the Hindu Business Line, Harish Bhat, Brand Custodian for the Tata group calls out Storytelling as a key trend for 2018 that will dictate and differentiate brand success - What your H.O.S.T predicts for 2018. As a harbinger of how marketing has and will transform, this marks a serious departure for brands that may have relied for too long on entertaining or informative advertising as a path to distinguishing themselves competitively.  

Over the last two years, the art of Storytelling has taken center-stage in various spheres. Some large MNCs have insisted on the removal of powerpoint in favour of Storytelling and still others have begun using Storytelling to help shape, communicate and help execute strategy even better. In a world where brands are constantly vying to break through the clutter, smart brands may have realized that it has become futile to do so – instead, it might be smarter to become more memorable when your budgets are modest or consumers distracted. 

What better way to ‘stick’ then, than creating a story around your brand that becomes uniquely yours and occupies a special, emotionally charged space in your consumer’s mind? Scot Galloway, Professor for Marketing at NYU Stern argues in his new book 'The Four' that the technology behemoths of our age such as Amazon and Facebook have told their stories so powerfully that it contributes to their stratospheric valuations and access to the cheapest capital on the planet. 

The reason this works is because the human brain is wired to comprehend, and even crave stories.  

Here’s what your brain looks like when it is engaged in a good story: first a moment of tension or crisis in the narrative releases the stress hormone cortisol that focuses attention, then your empathy for the characters in a predicament spikes due to the release of Oxytocin, the feel good chemical. Finally, in the event of a triumphant ending, the limbic system is triggered to be awash with Dopamine that makes you feel more happy and optimistic. Take a look at how the Harvard Business Review describes this: The Irresistible Power of Storytelling to understand the mesmerizing hold adept storytelling has. 

More recently, brands have gone beyond simply crafting their story to being inspired by stories (their own and their customers’) in unorthodox ways. Here are a few of my favorite examples.  

B2B Marketing: B2B firm YKK, the world’s largest Zipper manufacturer created an anime series called ‘Fastening Days’ where the key characters Yoji and Kei use fantastical zippers to combat major challenges. The idea humanizes the humble zipper while making it a subject of discussion and passion amongst YKK’s customers’ customers.The YKK Story. 

Digital Marketing: In another B2B example that will deeply influence B2C marketing, Twitter in the UK recently combined text mining and qualitative analysis to determine what makes Tweets successful by studying the various types of tweets and the stories of passionate interest embedded within them. This allowed the Twitter sales team to better tell their client brands how they can build their story on the platform, leading to better traction. 

Breakthrough Innovation: Jaguar Land Rover used a unique method to engage and explore their future consumer by making them part of a club called #20extraordinarystories and spending 2 days with each respondent to create a video journal chronicle of their unique life stories through the eyes of the researchers. These insights and stories engaged high-value and hard to reach respondents while also allowing the broader JLR organization engage in the insighting process.

Redesigning Customer Experience: Philadelphia, a large Dutch institution for people with cognitive challenges and mental disability tackled the challenge of understanding their clients who often find it impossible to communicate. By training caregivers to capture the lives of their patients through videos and photographs, they were able to give ‘voice’ to their clients. This was eventually used to redesign the entire care-giving experience from training, to care methods, to evaluation and hiring care givers.  

Whether by mining masses of social media data, or using the psychology of belonging to allow consumers to express their journey better, or using pictures and videos to allow mentally challenged consumers to express themselves, a few brands are breaking new ground using ‘Storytelling’ as a powerful device to create empathy and unlikely connections between consumers and commerce. 

Additional reading for the master storybuilder:

• Pak Zak talking about his research
• New York Times on activating different areas of the brain
• New York Times article on how the brain reacts to metaphors
• Narrative as a basic organizing principle of memory