CHAPTER 3

Humans and Storytelling

You are not welcome until customers like you. And they won’t like you until they listen to you. And they won’t listen to you if you open your pitch with bulleted copy points of your product’s superiority.

—Luke Sullivan, Hey Whipple, Squeeze This

Like most people, I’ve loved stories since I was a young child. I remember looking forward to weekends when I could hide in the basement and read comic books and fantasy novels for hours upon hours and escape into the world of great storytellers.

However, it was only when I was working on my MFA in screen-writing that I really started to think deeply about the construction of narratives and their roles in our lives. This analytical study has tarnished a bit of the glossy shine off of stories, but it has also given me a much more profound appreciation for the power of engaging narratives. So now, let us dive into the world of storytelling and start to think more about the meaning and role that narratives play in all aspects of our daily lives.

The List Tribe vs. the Story Tribe

In purely Darwinian, evolutionary terms, what purpose might there be in human beings being more receptive to stories than to a list of facts?

Well, let’s look back at the history of human beings and try to postulate an answer. What if, originally, there were two different types of tribes? Let’s call one the Story Tribe and the other the List Tribe.

Tony, the leader of the List Tribe, turned to his people and said, “Yo, peeps, here is a list of things to do when you see a lion.” He went on to articulate the 10 important things to do on his list.

At the same time, a few miles away in the jungle, Phil, the Story Tribe’s leader, said, “Hey, dudes, did I ever tell you the story about how I evaded a lion when I was young?” He went on to tell his story while all the tribe members listened with rapt attention.

Then, members of both tribes went out into the jungle. Eventually, each group bumped into a lion. When this happened, people of the Story Tribe instantly remembered the story of how their leader evaded the lion, and they mimicked his actions and survived their encounter.

On the other hand, when members of the List Tribe confronted a lion, they stopped and thought, “Hmm, what exactly were the 10 important things I am supposed to do now and what was the order again?” And as they attempted to recall their list, they were eaten and removed from the gene pool. As a result, the List Tribe soon disappeared, and today I think it’s fair to say that we are all the genetic offspring of the Story Tribe.

If we are all descendants of the Story Tribe and not the List Tribe, what does this mean for effective communication among fellow Story Tribe members?

Benjamin Franklin once said, “Tell me and I’ll forget. Show me and I might remember. Involve me and I’ll understand.” And that’s what a good Story Tribe member must do. You must tell a story that involves your intended audience.

If we agree with the assertion that stories are how we, as human beings, encode information that involves us and is memorable, then won’t the right story be the key to your audience appreciating, understanding, retaining, and acting upon your message?

Let me give you an example. I have done some work with the great company Panera Bread. They are always introducing delicious new seasonal sandwiches and salads. It would be easy to just list the new combination of ingredients on the menu, but they know that’s not enough. They are constantly telling stories about these ingredients and how they came to be part of Panera’s current menu. The company has even been known to offer a story section on their Website with the description: “From kitchen and cooking tips to the inspiration behind our food, these are our stories of care and craft” (www.panerabread.com/en-us/craftsmanship/stories.html).

A well-engineered story can transform an audience’s outlook, how they see you and your company, and their future choices about expenditures of money and time. Yes, of course, I know this sounds idealistic, but it’s also true. We define our reality in terms of stories, and then we act on them. We naturally communicate and share ideas and information via stories. This is what makes them so effective. As a result, stories are the single best inspirational, motivational, and instructional tool that we have. Period.

For example, when the probiotic drink GT’s Kombucha first came out, very few people had heard of Kombucha, an ancient Chinese drink made from fermented green tea. So each bottle featured a story of the origin of the drink; not how it was invented in China, but how GT, the owner of the company, started making Kombucha for his mother when she was battling cancer. When she beat the cancer, he decided to bottle it for a living. Sure, he lists the ingredients on the bottle, but it was his story that really got me interested in trying it. And now, along with many other Americans, I am hooked on it.

Here’s an interesting legal side note. I do not know the specifics of what happened, but recently, the GT story featured on the label has changed. It now says, “GT Dave began bottling Kombucha in 1995 from his mother’s kitchen.” It no longer mentions his mother’s battle with cancer. My best guess is that the wording of the original story was indirectly communicating that using this product can help one overcome cancer and could be construed as a legally suspect claim. So the story has changed to protect the brand, both in terms of legal issues and the brand equity. This, then, is a good lesson on the power of story and, at the same time, about how mistakes in a narrative’s construction can be potentially harmful if not fully considered in advance.

As human beings, we are physiologically programmed to tell and receive stories, and genetically programmed to learn through them. Before there was PowerPoint, before there were books or even any form of written language, how did people learn? They told stories.

We know of pictograms and cave drawings, but it appears that the mass of information was passed down through an oral tradition of storytelling. The repository of the wisdom of the culture was entrusted to the tribal storyteller. Even in cultures without a tribal storyteller, around the campfire, or the hearth, or on the hunt, elders told stories to youngsters in order to inform, educate, and entertain. Those who listened and learned from these stories survived and passed down through the generations a genetic predisposition to assimilate and remember stories.

Thus, the human species evolved as story-beings. Call us homo narrativus.

C’mon, let’s get irrational

Why stories? Why do they work? What do they do that lists don’t?

Well, in a nutshell, they speak to the non-rational, the unconscious, and the emotional side of us all. This is hugely significant because it is clear that we are much more driven by irrational impulses than we would like to think. When Daniel Goleman talks about what he calls “primal leadership,” he is speaking of this exact thing. Goleman states, “Great leaders move us. They ignite our passion and inspire the best in us. When we try to explain why they are so effective, we speak of strategy, vision, or powerful ideas. But the reality is much more primal: Great leadership works through the emotions” (www.danielgoleman.info/topics/leadership/).

And stories are a great way to access the emotions.

Sure, we pride ourselves on how smart, rational, and intelligent we are. We believe that the decisions we make are well-reasoned, logical conclusions resulting from the judicious weighing of facts. We believe that our memory is accurate, that we can look dispassionately at any and all subjects without bias and always reach an objective, well-thought-out decision.

Of course, this is completely false! It’s all wrong! Advances in science and research today have shown that so much of what we think and do has nothing to do with rational, logical, conscious thought. Decision-making is not so simple after all.

Studies of people with damage to the part of their brains that deal with emotions show that they are essentially incapable of making well-thought-out decisions and, in essence, are incapable of functioning and living ordinary lives. Instead of being more rational and better decision-makers, they spend hours trying to make simple decisions that you and I make in a matter of seconds.

As one of my heroes, copywriting legend Bill Bernbach, said, “You can say the right thing about a product and nobody will listen. You’ve got to say it in such a way that people will feel it in their gut. Because if they don’t feel it, nothing will happen” (www.brainyquote.com/quotes/authors/w/william_bernbach.html).

This point is well-illustrated in the excellent article “Deeply Understanding the Mind to Unmask the Inner Human,” by Katja E. Bressette, director of strategic initiatives at Olson Zaltman Associates. In this thoughtful article, Bressette uses stories and examples to demonstrate her point. In fact, she cites five interrelated insights about how the mind works. These insights, drawn from current advances in several behavioral science disciplines, are:

• “95 percent of human thinking and emotion happens in the unconscious.”

• “Humans think in neural activations (neural images), not words.”

• “Metaphoric thinking is the basic mental process.”

• “Stories are an integral part of making sense of the world, learning, and expressing ourselves.”

• “Emotion is critical to how humans think, behave, and interpret the world.”

I can hear the naysayers chiming in and saying, “Wait a second there, buddy. This is a list, not a story.”

Okay, yes, there are stories in her article, but in this case Bressette chose to convey the core learnings of her article with a list, and I have chosen to share her list with you. I think this is a good example of when a list is the appropriate choice over a story. Bressette is writing a scholarly article, not creating a sell piece for a consumer product. For her particular audience, this is the right choice. With that said, it must be noted that this list is unlikely to be easily retained by any reader.

In the end, whether a person chooses to convey information via a list or a story, it must be conceded that many aspects of our lives are affected by our subconscious.

Let me give you an example. How often have you been driving and talking on the phone (with a wireless headset, I hope) only to realize that you’ve gone 20 miles and haven’t thought about driving once the whole time? During that period, it’s really your subconscious that’s doing the driving. A series of autonomic actions have turned the car and pushed the brakes and kept you on the road without getting into an accident. All the while, your conscious mind was engaged in your phone conversation, not driving.

In many other aspects of life, as well, it is the subconscious that drives so many of our actions and choices. Why is this significant? Well, it’s through metaphors and stories that we are able to tap into the subconscious, into what some call the “reptilian” part of the brain where emotions rule.

In Talk Like TED, Carmine Gallo analyzed hundreds of TED talks. He discovered that after seeing all these presentations, the most successful ones were “65 percent pathos, 25 percent logos, and 10 percent ethos.” So yes, you need information, facts, and values. But the majority of what really sells and drives retention—the driving force behind your sales pitch—must be emotionally driven so that it appeals to the irrational. It’s about pathos.

Driven to story

Another wonderful book, Driven, explores human nature and human drives. Written by Harvard Business School professors Paul R. Lawrence and Nitin Nohria, the book says, “Stories are basic to human memory process. The mind establishes a story line, with the memory of one event triggering the memory of the next. Early humans passed on knowledge primarily through the art of storytelling.”

Nohria and Lawrence are studying human drives in terms of their marketing repercussions. But what they learned also applies to what you will do as a storyteller, because the more deeply you understand human drives, the better a storyteller you will be. If you truly understand human nature, you will also better understand the motives of your staff, clients, potential customers, and even the characters in your story.

Be a POSR

Human beings are not a tabula rasa, a clean slate. If you don’t believe me, have a few kids and then get back to me. When you see several children from different gene pools and social backgrounds all pull back in terror when they see a snake or hear a lion roar, it becomes clear that we all have some responses that are innate and not conditioned.

A good communicator knows this and always tries to be a POSR. In other words, he or she always tries to:

Play

Off

Stored

Responses

Take a lawyer as storyteller, for example. Great litigators are always thinking about questions such as what kind of language and stories will work best in the jurisdiction in which they are practicing. What are the unconscious biases in their potential jurors? What’s already in their audience’s minds that they can play off of? What emotional baggage does each jury member bring to the room? And how do they use it or defuse it?

Great advertising and marketing executives do the same thing. They are always scrupulously studying their target markets and shaping their message for that audience. Know thy audience and how to speak to them, and you will surely succeed.

The same holds true for any good storyteller. You must always be conscious of your audience. You must always think about which words to use or not use. And you must always base the kind of stories you tell on your intended audience.

You can’t just power through your story with the attitude “I am right and I know the truth, so I am going to force that truth on my audience, and they will completely accept it and love me, my product, and my story.” Effective business people know to avoid that type of approach, no matter how compelling and intelligent the story might be.

The four Fs and IRMs

Although everyone has stored responses based upon their own personal experiences, we also have other human responses that are more intrinsic and hard-wired into our systems.

A good communicator and storyteller intuitively knows that people are driven by the four Fs: Food, Flight, Fight, and F—er, I mean, Procreation.

What you may not know is that we are also driven by Innate Releasing Mechanisms (IRMs). The four Fs are fairly self-evident, and I will not explain them, but IRMs are a little less known, so let me clarify what that term means.

In essence, an Innate Response Mechanism is an automatic response to something that we experience. For example, as I just mentioned, a person pulls back in fear and shudders when he or she hears a lion’s roar or sees a snake for the first time. Our brains are more than just a bundle of learned responses; in some cases, the response is triggered by information that is hard-wired in our brains.

As a playwright, I have had the privilege of seeing this human hard-wiring in action. Whenever one of my plays is in production, I go to the theater and watch the audience watching my play. As I watch them, I learn a tremendous amount from their responses.

You see, the audience is always right. If their eyes are glazing over as they watch my play, I know I need to do a big edit and I need to do it fast. If it is a comedy and they aren’t laughing, I know I have a long night ahead of rewrites that will include crafting a lot of new jokes until I get it right.

The same is true for all people seeking an audience, whether writer, actor, advertising executive, human relations personnel, or any businessperson. Your audience is never wrong in the sense that if they don’t understand your story, it’s not their fault. You simply need to revise your telling of the tale. Sure, it’s the audience’s job to listen and try to absorb, but it’s your job as a storyteller to connect with them.

It’s your job to tell such a gripping story that they want to listen to you. Ideally, each time you share something new, they can’t wait for it to come out, because they know you are going to have something compelling to say and they want to listen to you.

This brings up an issue that I see with many of my clients. Is it up to us as the marketers to convince people of what they need, or do we have to respond to the needs of the consumers? I will once again refer to the wisdom of Bill Bernbach, who said, “We are so busy measuring public opinion that we forget that we can mold it. We are so busy listening to statistics that we forget we can create them” (www.azquotes.com/quote/684037).

I love this quote because it empowers us to follow our marketing instincts. Statistics and marketing research are incredibly helpful tools, but they are not an end in themselves. They are merely a means to an end, which is the crafting of a powerful and effective message that will set you apart from all others!

Before we move on to other points, I feel compelled to share one more Bernbach quote: “Our job is to sell our clients’ merchandise… not ourselves. Our job is to kill the cleverness that makes us shine instead of the product. Our job is to simplify, to tear away the unrelated, to pluck out the weeds that are smothering the product message” (www.brainyquote.com/quotes/authors/w/william_bernbach.html).

So, in the end, any good story, any good message, is less about you and more about your message and conveying it in a way that is fresh, original, and will stay with your customers.

Cool neurocognitive stuff

Ultimately, though, no matter whether we are reading a magazine, watching TV, or participating in a corporate meeting—in other words, no matter the venue—it is necessary to consider the nature of how humans store information once it’s conveyed.

First, if one studies memory, learning, and neurocognitive theories, it becomes clear that information is costly to obtain, costly to store, and costly to retrieve. It is also clear that human memory is reconstructive and contextual. Thus, from a neurocognitive viewpoint, information that is contextually grounded will store more easily in human memory.

Because you are part of a business looking to increase your audience and to inspire deeper audience engagement, think about these claims in the context of marketing and sales. In the marketing text Buying In, by Rob Walker, the author aims to show how meaningful objects are rarely chosen through rational means and, instead, are chosen through narratives that we generate about ourselves in choosing a particular product. Walker says, “Successful brands are able to create some sort of meaning for consumers. The ‘meaning’ will have value depending on the person’s experience with the brand, and if successful, the brand will hold value for that person throughout their life. It will come to mean something to them.”

We can’t help it. That’s what we do; we write stories to endow our lives with meaning. We are story-driven creatures who even create narratives about inanimate objects such as cans of cola or bags of cheese puffs! And it is the well-told stories about these objects that stay with us way past the expiration date on the bottle or the bag.

Think about it. When you are walking down the supermarket aisle and are confronted with a wide array of breakfast cereals, why do you choose one box over another? Sure, there might be price-point issues, but let’s say that if most of the bags are at similar price points, how does the average consumer differentiate?

Well, they unconsciously conjure stories in their heads of positive or negative experiences with the different brands and choose accordingly.

For example, I’m a Golden Grahams guy. The truth is that even though they seemingly purport to be a healthy breakfast cereal, Golden Grahams are as sugary as many of the other breakfast cereals, but I’m drawn to them because I spent many a happy day as a young man munching on them straight out of the box. Hence, when confronted with making a choice, without really thinking about it, I tend to go with the box that represents a return to the carefree and happy days of my youth.

The curse of bulleted copy

So now the next question arises. If stories are truly a powerful way to transmit information, why do so many people and companies rely on conveying essential brand information with bulleted copy and PowerPoint presentations?

PowerPoint is a technological advancement, but in terms of storytelling it could be interpreted as a step backward. PowerPoint’s emphasis on bullet points, information dumping, diagrams, pie charts, and pyramids can be visual and effective, but these elements, by their very nature, might also make PowerPoint antithetical to the narrative impulse in all of us.

In fact, it might be argued that PowerPoint’s greatest drawback is that it focuses the reader’s attention on the screen and away from the person who is talking. By its very nature, PowerPoint defeats the core objective of any storyteller: to enhance the relationship with his or her audience. In doing so, it leads to disengagement instead of connection.

Furthermore, does the nature of PowerPoint force us to think only of the presentation we are working on in terms of short lists of facts? Does our thinking actually shrink to fit into the narrow parameters of a bullet list? And, in so doing, does it limit the way we look at a presentation and the potential stories we could tell in that presentation? Bulleted copy is antithetical to good storytelling. It might very well get in the way of your desired emotional impact. They have the potential to close down the imagination of your audience instead of opening and enlarging it.

• If we keep writing in bullet points,

• one day we will become automatons who

• talk and think in bulleted copy.

The brilliant strategy planner, Martin Weigel, pointed this out to me. The bullet point format works as a list and as a list, it is inherently limiting. Bulleted copy would have ruined all of the great speeches of the past. This is a function of the fact that great speeches have an emotional content that bullet points can’t contain. Beyond the physical presentation of the speech, the content is more than something that can be boiled down to several bullet points.

Can bulleted copy convey Martin Luther King, Jr.’s sentiments about creating a better society in his “I Have a Dream” speech? What about Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address? The information in it could be placed in bullet points, but what kind of effect on his audience do you think that would have had?

When you have a big presentation for clients, consumers, or shareholders, will a PowerPoint deck be able to convey the emotional message that you need to get across in order to keep your job and woo your audience? Can bulleted copy ever be as equally inspiring as a heartfelt story told well and in your own voice?

As I was writing this section of the book, I took a break to check my e-mail and I saw a pop-up ad about Heinz Ketchup, one of my all-time favorite products. I have tried many types of ketchup, but I am a believer in Heinz. I love the consistency and taste of this product and can’t imagine eating fries or a hot dog or hamburger without it. I have been pouring bottle after bottle of their ketchup onto my meals since I was a little kid. Time and time again, people have made snide comments to me such as, “Hey, condiment boy, gonna put some french fries on that ketchup?”

And when I saw the Heinz ad, I couldn’t help but smile due to all the good associations that I have with their products. So, I decided to explore further. The ad mentioned a happiness contest Heinz was sponsoring.

Wonderful. Heinz Ketchup makes me happy when I eat and so I was motivated to explore and learn more. I assumed that Heinz was trying to emotionally differentiate themselves from their competitors by owning the emotional landscape of happiness. Good idea, I thought. I eagerly clicked the link and waited to see what would happen next.

The link was broken. Not good. Then I entered the Heinz.com Web address into my browser and got to their Website. Once there, I double-clicked on “Our Company” and I was taken to a page that looked like the following (this has been edited for brevity’s sake, but I just wanted to give you an idea of it):

Heinz at a Glance

• Heinz was founded in Sharpsburg

• Heinz products enjoy #1 or #2 market share…

• Heinz’s top 15 power brands account for…

• Heinz sells 650 million bottles of its iconic Ketchup every year

• Heinz is a responsible corporate citizen…

Now, all of this information about Heinz sounds good, but cumulatively, this type of bulleted copy has very little long-term impact on me as a consumer. It feels cold and, frankly, all a bit off-putting. It seems to be antithetical to the brand and the core concept of happiness.

On the opposite side of the Web page, however, there is more of a compelling story. If you go to the Website, you will see a story about Heinz and Home. It tells of Heinz’s passion for good food and how Heinz knows that you care about nutrition and your loved ones. It talks about not settling for anything less than the highest quality food and how Heinz has been part of families for more than 100 years. Then, it ends with an invitation to discover more about Heinz.

This is much better. Not a fully realized, emotionally moving story yet, but at least there are seeds of some emotional material here. I think there is potential in this idea of home and family to create some truly stirring brand narratives that would lead to much further engagement and connection with consumers. As well, it would help both the Heinz brand and consumers get closer to happiness.

In addition, I watched their corporate video, and it is clear Heinz is doing wonderful things to help starving children and the environment, but this also did not come through in their bulleted copy.

So, you need to be very careful with the use of bulleted copy and consider re-evaluating how you think of PowerPoint and how it should be used in your presentations. What if your next PowerPoint presentation merely used a series of forceful, image-based demonstratives without words? What if you provided the voiceover and let your stories resonate with your audience as beautiful images played in front of their eyes?

Or what if you turned off the projector altogether and just told a story about your next product—without any visual aids at all except the imagination of your audience?

It would seem revolutionary, even though it’s what people were doing in corporate boardrooms and sales meetings for hundreds of years before they had laptops or digital projectors.

You don’t have to spend your life as a bulleted copy automaton. You can quickly start to rethink PowerPoint as just one of many tools you can use to tell powerful, persuasive stories to your staff and potential hires, or to your clients/customers and potential clients/customers.

Prioritize your story and its theme, and watch how everything else will follow. And if you really take these precepts to heart, you might even be able to rewrite the story of your future and the future of your story.

I am not saying that you should never use bulleted copy again, but please use it judiciously. When you do use it, think about employing it to serve a higher purpose—that of the larger story and theme of your message.

Think about the nature of every slide. Does every slide have tons of information dumped onto it? You might think this is a good thing, but it’s difficult to process; thus, instead of engaging, it alienates your audience!

Does your slide have a good image on it? All slides should have a visual component that makes them appealing.

Does your slide have less than seven words on it? Less is more. You should never just read your slides. Instead, use them as a springboard for your discussion. Remember: You don’t want your audience paying too much attention to your slides. You want your audience paying attention to your message!

Does your slide ask a good question so that your audience needs to listen to you to get the answer? The slide should provoke thought and the desire for more information and clarification. It is this query that leads the audience to listen to you, the presenter, to get the goods, the solution, and the answer!

The Golden Rule of Storytelling

It should be pretty clear by now that a list of information or, for that matter, bullet points without stories and characters, has no emotional resonance and, thus, will not be very well remembered by your audience.

Instead, to more deeply connect with potential customers, please consider following Professor K.’s Golden Rule of Storytelling—a tool I’ve shared with my students and audiences for decades to help ensure storytelling success. It is simply this:

An engaging character

actively overcomes

tremendous obstacles

to reach a desirable goal,

and in doing so, the character changes for the better.

This is the goal of all stories. This is the gold standard. This is the ideal that all your brand narratives should aspire to.

You need to tell a story about engaging characters overcoming tremendous obstacles to reach desirable goals and hopefully, along the way, changing for the better. (And the bigger and more daunting the obstacle, the more compelling the story becomes.)

If you do this well, your audience will remember your story and you. After having consulted using this golden rule with novelists on 500-page books, with lawyers on three-hour courtroom presentations, and with marketing execs on 30-second TV commercials, I know that, regardless of the time you have to convey your story, it can be done.

Through the course of this little primer, I will give you a series of examples in which I will show how this Golden Rule of Storytelling is universal. All the various companies I’ve worked with have employed it with a variety of consumer products—everything from soap and shampoo to sneakers and bread.

So, rather than simply discussing how your products or services are cost-effective or eco-friendly or technologically advanced, consider telling specific stories of consumers whose lives were transformed by your products or services.

If you do that successfully, we—your audience—will care about you. We will create an emotional connection to you in the same way that a sports team creates an emotional bond with its loyal fans or a great restaurant creates a connection with its most fanatical patrons.

This is a viable, achievable goal if the right stories about you are told well and shared via the right communication channels. A well-orchestrated, systematic program of stories and messages told by you can literally change the way the world looks at you, your brand, and your company.

Before we end this chapter, I want to share a recent conversation I had with PR and marketing executive Kathy Copas about brand narratives today. Here are some of her thoughts:

RK: How do you see brand narratives today?

KC: I think the one thing we see pretty consistently in consumer behavioral research is that, in our increasingly fragmented society, what people are most seeking is an intangible called affiliation. That sense of affiliation, of relational connection with like-minded others, can most authentically and readily be achieved through story.

RK: How do you create brand narratives, especially in regards to social media?

KC: Calling forth those significant daily common life experiences via social media can both reveal and enhance brand identity. I like to think of creating digital narrative as shaping and stoking a virtual fireplace—a place to sit in a circle with others, swap stories, and reveal common humanity in a way that it leads to genuine personal feelings of affiliation with both product and product supporters. Once that sense of affiliation really catches fire, it will burn brightly and effectively with even occasional tending.

RK: Can marketers control brand narratives?

KC: I think presuming that any marketer can truly control how consumers alter brand narratives in this climate is naive. What an effective marketer or communicator can do is craft an effective space for brand narrative to naturally emerge.

RK: How would you define brand narratives?

KC: I would define brand narratives as positive product truths that are uncovered and nourished by cultivating genuine consumer affiliation with the product, as well as relationships with kindred users of that product.

RK: Can you talk about what kind of brand narratives you think are most effective?

KC: Stories of how a product or service positively and specifically impacted everyday life—that’s an obvious one. Stories of universal human experience. Stories of connection, of how a product/experience built affiliation with others and helped them to feel a part of something beyond themselves. Stories of transformation: illness to health, want to abundance, isolation to inclusion, despair to hope, and illumination of other basic aspirational human themes.

RK: Can you talk about how you think brand narratives have changed in the age of digital communication and social media?

KC: It is more about effectively uncovering the narrative from your current consumers, making it easy and even fun for them to share, craft, and own their message about why your product is different/better than a comparable competitor’s product. This is the only curation of message that has integrity for your potential customers. Anything else in this climate is just seen as unseemly, suspicious, and top-down. A big part of what you are doing with your curation of message in today’s climate is dismantling any hierarchical sense of selling, which is why uncovering and purveying genuine story is still so effective.

RK: Do you have a specific process in which you craft brand narratives?

KC: That would vary, depending on the product, service, or situation. But, I think the best brand narratives emerge naturally from product or service users. Sometimes, our very best strategy is simply to create and nurture the virtual fireplace for swapping stories and get out of the way and watch/listen for the most effective and real narratives to take shape. Then, we most authentically become carriers of story, purveyors of brand truths, as opposed to marketers attempting to sell.

—Kathy Copas, owner of Communication Services in New Albany, Indiana