You hear a lot these days about how brands need to shift from just broadcasting sales messages to telling stories. This is especially true when you move into the digital environment or social media world. But, it's also true for traditional media messaging, too.
Your brand, like any fictional novel, is going to be much more interesting if you make its story more compelling. A compelling story is filled with trial, trouble and conflict throughout. A story where everything is wonderful from beginning to end may be happy, but it's also very boring. So, how are you telling your brand's story? Is it interesting? Or do you only tell of the good things that have happened? Does it captivate people's imaginations? Or does it leave them cold?
I was listening to one of Mitch Joel's Six Pixels of Separation podcasts the other day and he was talking with David Meerman Scott. Near the end of the podcast they began talking about this. It was just a small part of the podcast, but it got me thinking. Scott talked about how every good story, whether it's a novel, movie or whatever has the main character in conflict – in conflict with another person, a group of people, themselves, whatever. He went on to say, "that kind of storytelling is very rare in non-fiction books and very rare in corporate storytelling. you just don't see the element of conflict in there."
Scott went on to talk about how a corporate story could be more compelling. You can talk about how "such and such company wanted to do something, but everybody said don't do it, but they did it anyway and it became a big hit. That's interesting stuff, much more interesting than just a company did something and then they became successful."
So, you may think you only want to tell the good things about your brand and paint a picture of smooth sailing, but that's not good storytelling. If you want to engage people and get them emotionally invested in your brand, tell them some of the hardships you needed to get through to achieve the success story you want told. It's a way to get them to listen to the end and maybe retell the story. Plus, you'll stand out from your competition.
I consider myself a good writer and storyteller, but I hadn't consciously thought about looking at using some of the conflict building techniques of fiction into telling our client's brand story before listening to the podcast. You can bet I will now. How about you?
Mike McClure. Yaffe Exec Creative Director & Chief Storyteller
