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Story—The Center of All Play
There is one common element of every human civilization, about as far back as we can tell. As a defining principle it is unsurpassed. As a method for organizing and motivating people, its effectiveness has been demonstrated over centuries. Even when ultimately proven wrong or displaced by something newer, the basic principle remains unchanged.
Of course, we’re talking about stories.
Play is all about telling stories. Stories form the basis of beliefs, and beliefs dictate actions. This may seem like a gross simplification, but it is nonetheless true. Consider everyone’s favorite holiday guy, Santa Claus. Belief in Santa has driven the toy industry for years. Approximately 70 percent of toy sales in the United States occur in the weeks leading up to Christmas. And it’s not just kids. Belief in the need to give presents at Christmas plays a critical role in the overall retail business. And why? Because millions of people believe that giving presents is an essential and unavoidable—if sometimes frustrating—part of Christmas celebrations. But it wasn’t always thus.
The early Puritans in the colonies outlawed Christmas celebrations. The story was that this was a somber occasion. In the 19th century both in the United States and Europe, the fashion was to give cards, and an entire industry grew up around that. At the dawn of the 20th century, retailers were desperate to shore up their business, which flagged in the fourth quarter. The story may be apocryphal, but R.H. Macy is often credited with creating the modern practice of giving presents. It certainly makes sense. At the time, the fourth quarter was deadly for sales, particularly when he was selling dry goods. It worked, and the modern retail calendar was born with an emphasis on Black Friday and rampant gift giving. If there are indications in 2015 that this is starting to change with consumers waiting for the last minute for drastic price cuts and the rise of gift cards, that too is based on a story—that there are times when people can get the best deals.
The thing about stories is that when they are told and believed and shared and considered to be true, that’s when they gain power. Of course, if we’re going to be scrupulously ethical, stories would always be developed from empirical evidence. But, as we all know, that’s not necessary, nor is it consistent with human development.
Many of the earliest stories—what we now call myths—were designed to explain how the world works. Today, we think it’s quaint or amusing or downright ridiculous that there was a time that people believed the sun was drawn across the sky by a chariot. But they did. Stories exist within the context of our experience. They make sense of the inexplicable but within the context of a culture. One only needs to look at the various cosmologies of ancient cultures to see how stories of how the world works reflect the real world inhabited by the people who told them. As science developed and a new understanding of the world evolved, the old stories were, for want of a better word, put away. They became artifacts of a vanished culture. As demonstrable facts were acquired, the story had to change to accommodate those facts.
Stories are, of course, very powerful. One need only look at the religions of the world to see how powerful stories are. People go to war and die for them. They attack people whose stories are at odds with theirs. The fact that there isn’t a scrap of proof for any of them doesn’t matter. Entire cultures, structures, and economies are built on the strength of these stories, so the investment in maintaining and promoting the story is critical. Not only that, but training new people in the stories and fostering their belief so they will support the cultures, structures, and economies is critical for their continuance.
It is not my intention to pick a fight with any religion or to challenge anyone’s faith. My personal beliefs (and anyone’s, to be frank) are irrelevant to this conversation. The point, though, is to demonstrate the power of story in creating a reality that shapes how people act and relate to others, and how it can be used to unite or divide, create or destroy value of any kind. Indeed, story is far more compelling than fact in many cases. If it weren’t, the business of advertising would collapse in no time.
Before I talk about the role of story in play and its component parts, let’s just take a quick look at one of the other, completely secular, story mills of the modern world: the stock market. Now, you might be aghast that I would suggest something so important and monolithic might balance on something as ephemeral as a narrative, but that’s exactly what I’m saying. If you follow financial news, you’ve undoubtedly heard that such-and-such stock was down today on rumors of one thing or another. Or up. That story motivates behavior (buy or sell) and has a tangible impact on people’s portfolios. But it really comes down to speculating on a story. Yes, that speculation may be based on years of experience and market knowledge, but you really don’t know what’s going to happen.
Ironically, at least with relation to stocks, if you really do know what’s going to happen before the world knows and you tell your buddy, who buys or sells based on knowing the real story, then you’ve committed a crime. Despite the fact that they’re taking an action based on a story, the whole structure of the Wall Street game is that you’re allowed to have the story and act on your interpretation of it, but everyone has to get the facts at the same time, more or less. In committing the crime of insider trading, they’ve broken that rule and thus have an unfair advantage.
So if you’re with me thus far, you can see that civilizations, fortunes, relationships, and careers all rise and fall on stories. And you also realize, I hope, that belief in a story is often more powerful than demonstrable facts that potentially disprove the story. This is neither good nor bad; it’s simply a part of human experience. Moreover, you can use stories to create great good or great evil. If you doubt me, take a world literature course, or crack open a few Shakespeare plays. How many of the actions in Shakespeare are the direct result of stories? Pretty much all the great tragedies, the entire plot of Much Ado About Nothing, and the great triumph of Henry V. In this last instance, while the actual record of the battle of Agincourt doesn’t include a rousing speech by the king before the fight, the belief that God was on the side of the English certainly drove the conflict, and the English gave God the credit.
You could go on and on with this, but I doubt you’ll find many works of literature—from Hannibal to The Hobbit to Harry Potter—where belief driven by story hasn’t been a prime motivating factor. In his 1976 study, “The Uses of Enchantment,” psychologist Bruno Bettleheim gave a Freudian perspective on story, specifically, classic fairy tales, and suggested the vicarious experiences provided by reading these tales helped children grapple with conflict and the fairly sophisticated emotional experiences—death, abandonment, challenge, and more—in the abstract so as to be better prepared when they encounter those experiences in their lives.
Story is how we codify and contextualize what happens in the world and in our lives. It’s important to realize that it is never what actually happens but how we interpret events and memorialize them (for want of a better word) in story that dictate action and/or belief. Ask yourself how often you have seen two vastly different interpretations of the same set of facts, and you’ll soon become a believer in the power of story.
Story in Play
That said, it’s axiomatic that all of us are storytellers, and understanding the uses of story in children’s play can be helpful as we develop and tell our personal stories or our business stories, and it can help us use story effectively as adults.
Children tell stories to make sense of the world—to figure out where they fit in the context of a family, school, or culture. They tell stories as part of developing their personalities, as a form of competition or an essential defense. They create stories to have imaginary experiences that, even though they know them to be untrue, still create a real experience, which would otherwise be beyond their years and physical development and, quite often, impossible for humans. (This is the basic premise of Bruno Bettleheim’s work mentioned earlier.) In the creation of their lives, children’s stories become the ultimate user-generated content, to use a contemporary phrase.
When it comes to toys, action figures and dolls offer two kinds of toys that most children engage in. Although which toy a child plays with is often a function of gender and the play may appear different, reflecting inherent gender differences, the stories serve exactly the same developmental purposes.
These toys, to be completely literal, are nothing more than inert lumps of plastic; they couldn’t be more lifeless. It’s the child’s imagination that gives the toys any kind of life or power. Each child’s imagination is unique, and thus, though there have been billions of Barbie dolls sold, each one is similarly unique because of the power invested in it by the child playing with it. In this way, toys are totems in the Freudian sense. The child projects his or her reality onto the toy to give it life.
Think of it this way: When a child is 6 or 7, his or her life is completely dominated by the parents or caregivers. It’s an endless stream of “Eat your lunch,” “Get in the car,” “Hurry up,” and so forth. But it is also at just this time that the child is beginning to develop a sense of him- or herself as a separate individual. The fantasy of having superpowers to be free from all of this control is quite liberating—while at the same time being safe because in actuality the child is still quite dependent at that age. Superpowers allow children, at least in the imagination, to overcome the inescapable limitations of being a kid. In this imaginative exercise, the feeling of confidence is real, regardless of how the child got there, and it can be stored away for future use.
Story in play also helps children make sense of what they’re experiencing, to process emotions and information, and always reflects the individual’s perceived reality. Many years ago, I was observing a little girl who was playing with her Barbie dolls in the play scenario that she had created: Three blonde dolls were teasing the one brunette doll—ostracizing her, really. The brunette doll, however, stood her ground in the play scenario. As you might guess, this reflected a situation she was having as a new kid in her preschool who was trying to make friends and fit in. Play, in this instance, provided a literal rehearsal for her life. Whether she ultimately solved this issue is not necessarily relevant. The point is the story and the play around that story allowed her to have an experience of processing her emotions and the situation, and figuring out various ways of dealing with the situation. There was no risk, as she controlled all the variables at that time and could try on various different responses and outcomes.
Story is also a key component of social interaction among children. When a kid in a playgroup, for example, gets everyone to play Batman, each child becomes invested in the story. They create a reality around the story that, though it exists only in their imaginations, forms the basis for interaction and play. More importantly, they are all working from the same inherent story of the Batman character and his world because they have internalized their versions of the story as part of their individual experience of the story from other sources. And that’s when something amazing happens: As the story becomes more and more real to the players, they begin telling the story themselves, adding their embellishments and personal information. The story no longer belongs to one child; it belongs to the group. At the same time, it’s important to remember that, though there is a group narrative, how the different elements of that narrative are perceived is going to vary.
Not surprisingly, this can lead to conflict. Arguments can erupt among children when their personal version of the story varies from what the group is doing. For example:
“Batman can’t do that!”
“Yes, he can.”
“No, he can’t.”
Although this may sound like childish bickering—and it is, actually—the larger purpose is to be able to align story elements so the process can move forward. This type of argument usually leads to negotiation and resolution of one sort or another, and either the play continues with some variation or it falls apart. Adults viewing this kind of dispute tend to become uncomfortable and want to swoop in and resolve it. Of course, this is probably the worst thing an adult can do. Provided that the argument doesn’t turn violent or devolve into name-calling or some such, this is a time when kids learn to resolve issues among themselves.
One of the greatest disservices one can do to children is not to allow them to resolve their playground issues themselves. And yet, we see this all the time. Adults who believe that conflict is somehow damaging to children fail to understand that what’s learned on the playground in a relatively safe environment sets the stage for future interactions. A child conditioned to expect outside intervention for conflict resolution is ill equipped for the adult world.
Story in play, finally, sows the seeds of self-perception and self-knowledge. The stories children tell about themselves and that are told about them are the essential building blocks of identity. Humans are changeable, but stories tend to stick around and acquire a level of permanence which, though not necessarily accurate, is responded to as if it were immutable.
Try this little exercise: Think about the last argument you had with a friend, spouse, or co-worker. What prompted it? I’m guessing it had something to do with a story you created about an action that person took. Did your spouse forget to do something that prompted you to say, “You always do X!”?
Now, think about it: If your partner always does something, should you be surprised and angry when he or she does it? So my question for you is: What is the story that you are telling about your relationship?
Similarly, in the workplace people get reputations because others tell stories about them. Those stories become enshrined as myths, and those myths get believed and become a reality unto themselves.
If you have siblings, you probably have a family hierarchy where each one is known as “the __________________________ one.” (Feel free to fill in the blank as it relates to your unique situation.)
These stories have become your reality from repeated telling, though that doesn’t necessarily make them true. Yet, you most likely respond to every person and every situation through your response to those stories.
We all can agree about the details of the Superman story—flying, strength, avoiding Kryptonite, and so forth—because someone else made up the story, and willingly suspending disbelief is part of the fun of engaging in his adventures. It’s more difficult to see what might not be true in our own stories when we’ve made them up. If we are highly responsible, detail-oriented people, we don’t think that remembering to pick up the dry cleaning is a superhuman feat. But that’s just our own story. It might actually be very difficult for someone else. It may not be their play style, to continue what was described earlier.
Now, imagine how you might rewrite the story so it takes into account the person who simply can’t remember to pick up the dry cleaning. You can still be the hero, but perhaps in this revision you’re rescuing the person rather than destroying them with a death ray. You can make it up any way you choose, but the stories are going to have different outcomes, and as with the play scenario described previously, that’s going to set the stage for the next chapter in the story.
The points of this exercise are to begin to understand the ways in which we make up our lives and to realize our own power as the storyteller, or the person behind the play. What you have imagined affects your behavior and interactions. And that most of the time, what we consider “reality” is something we made up.
So, you might say that we are always playing in the purest sense of the word. Reality, and anything we do, begins in the imagination, and the stories we create and tell, as we’ll see, are one of the most important parts of play—and the one we don’t leave behind as we go from childhood to adulthood.
The Structuring of Stories
When you come right down to it, all business is telling stories. And story impacts all aspects of businesses for companies and for individuals. Isolating the ways in which story can be crafted and used is an essential tool that can make the difference between success and failure.
Let’s just look at one critical area to start: company valuations. Company valuations are based on actual past performance. But what about the future? How does a CEO mitigate a stock slide after a damaging quarter? Through story. He or she can’t know wholly what the future looks like and probably has incomplete information about it, but a well-crafted story that is both believable and targeted to the correct ears can save the day. Investors don’t want to hear that a CEO has lost his or her way and has no idea how the company is going to pull out of a current downturn. Even if that’s partially true, that’s going to cause a panic in the investment community. And so a story is crafted that people want to hear that allays fears, offers hope for the future, and is plausible. If you doubt this, go read the press releases from companies that have had bad quarters and ask yourself how many of these things are really knowable. As with Shakespeare’s Henry V, mentioned earlier, the story was what inspired the belief to fight; it certainly wasn’t the facts. Taking just the facts—outnumbered, faced with illness, up to their knees in mud, and so on—no rational person would have stuck around, regardless of the fact that Henry prevailed. And that’s one of the key powers of story: It overrides the rational.
In fact, all of reality is telling stories. The stories we tell today become our reality. The more we tell them, the more real they become, and people begin to act as if the stories are real. And sooner or later those stories are real.
This is where engaging in the storytelling nature of play is so essential to success in business. How you tell your stories, to whom you tell them, and the nature of the story are all elements that need to be addressed—along with the fact that stories change over time.
It’s probably an exaggeration, but for many professions, and certainly in marketing and product development, as we’ll discuss shortly, storytelling is probably a significant portion of your job. The current buzzword is “narrative,” but that’s just a more formal way of saying “story.” Really.
So, let’s look at what makes a good story. Children’s book author Bill Doyle, who has written several successful series of chapter books, describes stories with a hand acronym: COWS, which stands for:
Conflict
Omit Yourself
What Do They Want?
Stakes
Conflict
This is essential to any story, or else why would you even bother reading? Conflict is what engages people and involves them on a personal level. Will Dorothy beat the Wicked Witch? Can Harry Potter overcome Voldemort? As Doyle says, “a gently flowing stream may be lovely to look at, but will it hold your interest for hundreds of pages or three hours?” And, of course, the answer is no.
We tend to think of conflict as a negative, but is it? Conflict can be full of anger and aggression, but more often than not it’s more benign. In everyday life, it is simply what leads up to the point of choice. It is seldom as dramatic as in fiction, but it is nonetheless real. It can be as seemingly rational as a consumer choosing which television to buy from the plethora of brands available or what to select from a menu.
For marketers in particular, identifying the conflict is essential if you’re going to tell a compelling story. It goes beyond simply identifying who your competitors are; it involves delving into your competitors story as deeply as your own. Only then can you craft a story that creates conflict in a consumer’s mind. Marketing expert Jennifer Deare, who has specialized in developing successful competitive programs for a variety of consumer products companies, notes that in telling a story, a marketer has to analyze the competition and the market situation in the context of the product they are trying to promote. The goal is to identify potential weaknesses that can be leveraged in promotion, essentially creating conflict for the consumer by sowing doubt. “Of course, you can’t just come out and say, ‘X brand is evil’ in the way you can in a story,” she says. Instead, you have to analyze your competitors’ stories and find a way of telling your own that opens the door to another way of thinking about a product or service. This leads logically to the next element Doyle identifies as inherent to a good story.
Omit Yourself
In terms of fiction, this means that if you, as the author, are a character in the story, the observational position tends to undermine the effectiveness of a story unless that character takes an active role in the events. The essential lesson of this is to try to eliminate anything that tends to slow down narrative.
The translation to business applications is slightly subtler than the issue of conflict, but it is nonetheless critical, particularly in marketing, where companies sometimes get so caught up in their own brand identity and imagery that they lose sight of what their customers’ experiences are.
A major toy brand was experiencing lackluster sales and struggling in a changing marketplace. The internal conversations were about what the brand meant, and weeks and months were invested in a discussion about the brand that was never resolved. Product suffered in the meantime because the story they were telling had no relevance to the consumer. Only with a change of management and a renewed attention to the customer experience did the brand begin to rebound. Essentially, they had dug themselves an intellectual hole that allowed them to fill countless decks, have seemingly endless meetings, and yet not move forward.
I don’t want to pick on one brand. This type of thinking is very common. And it happens, in our experience, because people are afraid to take a stand. It’s far easier to talk about things in the abstract and make everyone feel good than it is to take an action that might very well fail. This is the avoidance of conflict and the admission of not knowing, which makes a pretty lame story, when you come right down to it.
So, how do you as a businessperson omit yourself? It may at first seem counterintuitive, and, in fact, you can’t really omit yourself, or your product or company, from a conversation, which for purposes of this discussion we’ll refer to as a character. In this case, you have to give the character something to do.
On a practical level, one of the things we have insisted upon is the limitation of internal conversations about such things as “Brand DNA.” What does that mean, anyway? When I have to sit through endless presentations about minutiae that don’t relate to getting the job done or selling a product, my eyes tend to glaze over. This is talking to oneself, and many people do it because it’s safe. Yes, I know that in a presentation, it’s important for the client to know you understand who they are. But, really, take a hint from the best stories: Show me; don’t tell me. Or, better yet, cut to the chase. The problem, of course, is that if you’re not regurgitating or navel gazing (sorry to all you “strategic marketers” if you take umbrage at that statement. That’s how so much of this stuff is only valid when it gets you closer to action.), you’re going to be forced into making a commitment, and that’s scary because it goes back to the topic we discussed earlier of not knowing precisely what the results are going to be.
Stories—and especially stories in play—are about action. When you watch kids engaged in role play, which is simply the process of pretending to be characters, whether of one’s own devising or based on entertainment, you quickly see that there is very little time invested in the setup because they all know the backstory, as it were. For business-people—and marketers in particular—the less time you need to spend in setup, the more time you can spend playing.
In practical terms, we generally advise no more than three to five slides or pages in a proposal to set the stage in a meeting, and then only when there are people who don’t know the story.
This is truly omitting oneself and clearing the path to get right into the play. When we suggest this to clients, we sometimes get pushback about people who might not be prepared for a meeting or need more information. That should happen before the meeting begins. Think of it this way: When a child joins a group of kids playing, there’s very little time invested in bringing the new kid up to speed on the backstory. He or she either jumps in and makes the most of it, or removes him- or herself from the game. If the kid wants to play with these others again, you can bet he or she will watch the show, read the book, and be prepared to engage.
This shows up in creative meetings all the time. When we run brainstorming sessions for clients, everyone invited receives the briefing materials prior to the session. Those who’ve taken the time to prepare generally perform much better and offer more in the creative meeting. Those who do not find themselves running to catch up, don’t participate fully, and aren’t ready to play—often in front of their boss and perhaps their boss’s boss.
The bottom line is that it’s your job to be fully invested in all of the goals and stories that impact your job function. Just like kids at play, no one is going to do it for you.
What Do They Want?
This is the primary driver of every story—and much play. In business and/or marketing terms, it’s often referred to as the objective. Getting what you want, or falling short, is the prime determinant of a story and certainly whether or not it’s interesting. If we don’t care if Hamlet avenges his father’s death, Harry Potter defeats Voldemort, or Neely O’Hara makes a comeback (to run the gamut from the sublime to the ridiculous), the story falls flat.
In play, kids are intently objective-focused. If you’ve ever tried to wrangle a toddler determined to grab something off a table, you’ve experienced this firsthand. You move the kid away. He or she comes back. You try again. He or she tries again. You move the object to a higher place, and you see a pair of little eyes follow your actions.
Skateboarding is another great example. Kids will practice a trick for hours, knowing that they may or may not hit it.
The point of both of these examples is that clear objectives are essential for any aspect of business. When we review marketing programs, it’s also one of the largest things that’s lacking. It comes down to a deceptively simple statement of what you want to accomplish, but there’s another factor that has to be included: It has to be measurable.
When the kid hits the skateboard trick, the objective is achieved. It’s absolutely unambiguous. When the toddler does or does not snatch the figurine from the coffee table, the result is clear.
Muddy objectives—those that are not specific and measurable—tend to lead to muddy processes and unclear results. Yet, we constantly find that unclear objectives are far more the norm. In probing this issue over the years, largely with marketers, it becomes clear that there is often an investment in, for want of a better word, squishy objectives. They minimize accountability, and provide “cover” and wiggle room. This is, perhaps, an understandable position. We once asked a middle manager at a major company what his career strategy was, and he replied, “Keep my head down and don’t get blamed.” It worked for a while. He survived the first three rounds of cuts, but ultimately he lost his job and had a difficult time finding another one.
And you wonder why people wish they could be kids again. Can you imagine a kid spending an entire afternoon trying to master a skateboard trick without actually doing it? Where’s the fun or investment in that? Now, in the instance of the middle manager, you might easily say his objective was not to lose his job. Fine. But who wants someone on their team like that?
The point of clear objectives in crafting your story is not wholly whether or not you achieve them. They are a guide that allows you to determine progress and change course as you go. In a story, it’s those twists and turns that add excitement. Just think of all the times Jason Bourne and Indiana Jones have to change course. They don’t decide to sit it out or get killed when things don’t go according to plan. They have to figure out a new way to get around things. This is the adventure that kids play. Particularly in action figure or role-play, the child always imagines him- or herself as the one who can overcome the obstacle. Now, there are very few business or marketing challenges that are literally analogous to being crushed by a runaway boulder. But, actually, think about that. Declining sales lead to decreased revenues and lead to depressed stock prices. And your business, or career, is crushed.
Business, like the imagination, thrives on being fluid and responsive. Market conditions are constantly changing. Competition is cropping up out of nowhere. Even when people set clear and measurable objectives, one of the consistent problems we see is that reviewing them doesn’t become part of the daily process. A client sets an objective, develops a plan, and goes for it. Only at the end of the process do they stop to see whether or not they’ve achieved it. As any kid trying to hit a skateboard trick knows, there are hundreds of chances to refine what you’re doing and get you closer to achieving your objectives.
Defining “What do they want?” or objectives is generally the first step in telling a story. After all, what we’re talking about here is what leads up to telling the story—starting the adventure.
Stakes
A key element of any story is the stakes. That is, what’s at risk if the objective is not achieved? If Dorothy doesn’t get the broomstick of the Witch of the West, she can’t get home, for example. They are what drive a story and add tension to it. They provide resonance and context for objectives. In a business context, the stakes are often rather obvious: gained market share, increased sales, and so forth. In a story, the stakes work in conjunction with what each character wants to guide action.
In business, identifying and analyzing the stakes should become central to guiding action. Like the objectives, stakes can focus and inspire action. Especially in marketing programs, you always have to consider the stakes and whether or not your efforts are going to help you achieve your objectives.
When I was working on a dog food account years ago, there were many attractive opportunities, but the central question always came down to “Does it sell dog food?” If we didn’t sell dog food, we lost. More importantly, if we couldn’t show how it was going to sell dog food—and sell enough to offset the cost of the program by a significant margin—we didn’t do it.
Similarly, we see all kinds of promotions that gratify the egos of executives or marketing managers, cost a great deal of money, and don’t move the needle one bit when it comes to sales. Everyone gets to congratulate themselves on an event that may have come off well, but if it doesn’t achieve measurable results, it may have been a waste of time and money.
The point of this is exercise is to encourage you to be ruthless in defining and telling your story. Children engaged in story-based play tend to be very focused and driven. There are many reasons we lose this in business: politics, expediency, an unwillingness to create conflict, and so on. However, what story worth anything has ever existed without conflict?
Knowing Your Audience
There is an old show-biz adage: Give ‘em what they want. This couldn’t be more relevant to business. Although your story may strive to create a need in a consumer’s mind where none existed previously, you must also speak to that consumer’s mindset and understanding. We’ll talk more about this when we talk about research a little bit later on.
For the moment, though, consider how children become engaged in something during play. Something in a story grabs their attention, and they are sucked in. To fully appreciate this, however, you need to understand how children perceive things. A story that is too complicated or not relevant will be ignored. Children in play feel no compunction to address or even acknowledge something that isn’t directly relevant to them.
Guess what? Neither do adults. The difference is that children don’t have the developed social structure that expects them to at least make an effort.
So, you have to tell your story in a way that, like any toy, inspires your audience to tell the story themselves—for, as with kids, it’s the stories that they make up that have the most power. Just as a kid brings Barbie or Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles to life by retelling and adapting the basic story to their own experience, so too much of your job as a marketer is to get people to tell your story in their own way and in their own lives, which leads us to…
Brands as Stories
For businesses, the story is the brand. And brands have never been more important than they are today. In a crowded, competitive, and fragmented market, telling the story is not enough. You have to use the story to invite customers to play along—to make them want to play along and make the story their own.
In fact, every brand, like every superhero, has its own established story—a kind of mythos, really—and when that story is deeply understood both at the business and the consumer levels, then it’s possible to play—to elaborate on that story.
That’s the power of story in the process of branding. It’s not just the one-way telling of the story that gives a story life and truth; it’s the moment at which the consumer starts telling the story for you. It is, in the purest sense, the evangelizing of consumerism.
Marketers can impose all the stories they want on the public, but until the point when the consumer takes over the storytelling role, there is no brand. We define a brand as an ingrained belief in and expectation of a specific experience developed over time. It is only when a story passes into myth that a brand can be considered established.
As any marketer knows, brand loyalty is a very powerful thing. And it’s not empirical data, but experience augmented by belief that creates it. Does Tide really get my clothes cleaner than another brand? I have no idea, and neither have you. Or at least, I doubt you’ve ever done the kind of scientific analysis that would give you that definitive answer. You see clean clothes after doing the laundry, and you believe that Tide did that. You might even have tried another brand and thought the clothes were not as clean. Was that true, or was that a reflection of your disappointment that they were out of Tide at the supermarket? You’ll probably never know. And there is the essence of advertising and marketing since the dawn of the industry. An individual’s belief and natural inclination to create stories around everything in his or her life are the greatest selling tools there are.
Kids from the 1960s probably remember a brand of sneakers named PF Flyers. A second-place brand to then-leader Keds, PF Flyers emerged from relative obscurity with a single advertising claim: They make you run faster and jump higher. This message repeated over and over on Saturday morning television inspired an entire generation of kids to demand PF Flyers with the dream that they would go from being the last kid picked for a team to a star athlete just by tightening their laces.
The idea of an object conferring superhuman power is a staple of literature—and a favorite fantasy. Don Quixote waylaid a barber and tried to take his shaving basin, believing it was the golden helmet of Mambrino that would make him invincible. Harry Potter had the cloak of invisibility. Tolkein and Wagner were partial to rings. Dumbo had his feather, to dip into anthropomorphism for a moment. Finding a way to overcome our real or perceived vulnerabilities is a driving human characteristic, and the idea of some object imbued with totemic power is an integral part of the wish fulfillment that is at the heart of stories and brands.
The real world of 1960s marketing and the world of mythical creatures splashing about in the Rhine share the power of story in bringing both to life. Many kids were disappointed that they still did not excel on the playing field, and today marketing to children in that way is forbidden.
It is still a staple of marketing and advertising. The energy drink Red Bull marketed itself under the claim that it “gives you wings.” Most reasonable adults would acknowledge that this was an abstraction and grant the brand poetic license. Not Benjamin Careathers, however. In 2013, he sued the brand, saying that, having consumed it over time, he did not acquire wings or even increased, wingless, performance. The suit was settled out of court and cost the company about $13 million in potential refunds. What’s important about this—over and above the fact that Red Bull has not been proven to deliver anything more than a generous serving of caffeine—is that it was never the actual product that was being challenged: It was the story.
It is the belief in a story that gives it its power to control action. In his 1889 short story “Gooseberries,” Anton Chekhov makes the point in a typically trenchant fashion. A wealthy nobleman has succeeded in growing gooseberries, and they are served to a guest with great ceremony. The nobleman eats them with relish, asserting their superiority in every respect. His guest, the narrator, however, finds them “hard and sour.” He quotes Pushkin, saying, “The illusion which exalts us is better than ten thousand truths.” This throws the narrator into despair, as he cannot rationalize the happiness that belief in the illusion offers against “the silent protest of statistics.” Ultimately—this being Chekhov, after all—he comes to believe that happiness based on beliefs is a type of “general hypnosis.” And indeed it is.
Call us wizards, spellbinders, or hypnotists, that is the role of marketers. Chekhov’s narrator is forced ultimately to admit that the illusions do no harm and may, in fact, create a foundation for greater happiness.
It should be clear by now that a powerfully crafted, well-told story embraced by consumers will always trump literal truth. Sub-Zero refrigerators cost thousands of dollars, are often plagued with problems, and are difficult to maintain. A Kenmore refrigerator costing a fraction as much will keep milk just as cold, but it has no story that enhances its value by a factor of eight or more. Yet Sub-Zero is booming and families are stretching their budgets to have that $7,500 fridge in the kitchen. Why? Because they are involved in the story. They now tell the Sub-Zero story to themselves and to everyone in their sphere of influence.
These stories have very real results. Pick a successful brand and take apart its story. Delve into the characters and largely the character of the consumer. Penetrate his or her beliefs and how to speak to them. Then look at how you tell your own. It all starts with the very same spark of imagination a child discovers when he or she says, “Let’s pretend….”
Social Media: A New Playground
In this marketplace where commodities reign and the DVR allows commercials to be zapped, marketers have to become wizards and develop new tactics. In other words, they have to learn to cast spells, and they have to use newer, rougher magic to bypass a consumer increasingly tuned out from traditional advertising.
Enter social media. From a storytelling standpoint, this is unprecedented because it allows the individual voice to be magnified exponentially. It’s also fraught with dangers because it takes the control of the storytelling out of your hands, to some extent. This inevitably changes how your stories are being told, and it significantly changes your role as the storyteller.
The world of social media is a crazy sandbox, which at times seems tailor-made to drive marketers and companies crazy.
As online and social media continues to develop and evolve, we see dynamic evolution of platforms and interaction that boggle the mind. Things are changing every six months, give or take, and it forces a level of fluidity on companies that doesn’t fit easily in many business structures.
Yet it’s critically important. For the kid who is responding to changing conditions, new ideas, or different input, shifting gears is often quick and without a lot of questioning. Now, I’m not suggesting that a company abandon all structure, but the world of social media is rough and tumble, and if you don’t keep up, you’re out of the game.
The thing about social media in the context of storytelling is that it’s a two-way action. The story you’re telling is not always the one that’s being responded to, but you have to be ready for everything that’s thrown at you, from customer outrage to change.org petitions to—yes, it happens—stalking.
Most importantly, the old methods aren’t working, and it’s a world full of new rules and new language. Most importantly, it’s a world that’s dominated by young people. They’re native to a lot of these technologies and platforms, adopt them early, and master them quickly. Their insights and ideas are invaluable, and they have an inherent understanding of how storytelling is changing. Whether Instagram, Snapchat, Facebook, Twitter, or other platforms, social media is changing the rules of engagement and giving formerly relatively passive, consumers a more active role in the overall storytelling.
It’s imperative to know how to manage this. Take the company that wants to approve six months of tweets at one time. That’s hardly realistic given the nature of Twitter, but fully understandable in the realm of corporate responsibility and legal protection, and avoiding situations like the Red Bull lawsuit mentioned earlier. The rules have changed, though, and structures must change to reflect that.
In this new world, storytelling and play really can really shine. As mentioned, when you have your audience so enrolled in your story that they’re telling it form their perspective to people who listen to them, that’s a success. Take a look at all the LEGO videos on YouTube, for example. These are things that company would not, and potentially could not, do. Fans posting their work—literally playing with the brand—help keep it top of mind and build a community around it.
In 2103, a small craft toy called the Rainbow Loom created a sensation among kids. It was never advertised on television at the outset, and it was about as low-tech as you could imagine. It was simply rubber bands, a pegboard, and a crochet hook. With these, kids could make all kinds of elastic bracelets and other items. These were then shared and given to adoring parents and grandparents, who dutifully wore them to work. Yet it was storytelling that fueled the craze and kept it going for more than a year. Despite the low-tech nature of the toy, it was technology that drove the craze, specifically YouTube videos created by its legions of fans. More than 150,000 videos were created and shared, many of them how-tos, which effectively established a community around this product. By the end of 2014, the craze had passed and the market moved on, but this is a tribute to the power of an engaged consumer telling his or her own story.
Chances are if you never heard of the Rainbow Loom and didn’t watch any of the videos, you’re like the child who is able to filter out that which has no direct relevance to his or her life. It’s that simple. Now, what social media has created is a community that leverages the most high-tech form of communications for a decidedly low-tech product. This puts huge demands on social media marketers to be more fluid than ever before and not rely on the tactics of what is often considered “traditional” media.
There are also dangers and pitfalls because, as many people know, the Internet can get ugly. This is an environment where opinion dominates fact. Just look at the stories told about vaccinations: A study indicates that vaccinations may cause autism. It’s picked up by a celebrity who uses social and traditional media to spout this, convincing parents not to vaccinate their children. Even when the study is proven to be flawed, the story and the opinion persist. In 2015, we have outbreaks of measles, whooping cough, and potentially, polio.
There is also a great deal of misinterpretation of things like “Likes” on Facebook, or up votes, or some such. Although these are bruited about by marketers as indications of the popularity of a brand, they do not signify anything more than a passing engagement. Because it’s generally impossible to determine what motivated someone to click on something, the numbers ultimately are essentially meaningless. That doesn’t mean that people aren’t spinning them like crazy. What’s required, though, are somewhat more sophisticated numbers that actually measure engagement over time, rather than a fast-twitch mouse click. Our goal here is not to talk about data mining but to encourage you to find out how successfully your story is being told. Fortunately, there are many metrics available that savvy companies are employing to go beyond the superficial numbers.
The other major change that social media has brought to storytelling is that it is more a dialogue than ever before. True, the dialogue can sometimes be frustrating and chock-full of idiocy. Just read the comments of most political blogs and you’ll see a combination of ego, ignorance, and illiteracy that is at times staggering. Though most of this is discounted, reviewing these over a period of months from all political positions indicates that, regardless of political positioning, it’s so much shouting in an echo chamber, but it still indicates how anyone with a keyboard and an opinion can potentially derail your storytelling.
For marketers, however, it’s important to be vigilant about how your story is being told. Responding to complaints within 24 hours, answering accusations, and taking what control of the story you can is essential—particularly so given that broader, more mainstream media will pick up on things like petitions at change.org, and your story can soon take on a life of its own. How you manage that is critical, particularly because, especially in the world of social media, outrage is often the default emotion. I’ll leave it to someone else to break down the sociology of this in today’s world, but we suspect it has to do with a phenomenon we call attention deficit disorder—as in “I’m not getting enough attention.” I mean this glibly and in no way want to imply that the medical condition of ADD is not serious, but in a culture when anyone with a keyboard potentially has a national or even international audience, keepers of stories can’t afford to take their eyes off how their story is being appropriated and retold in the market.
In 2012, toymaker Hasbro was the subject of an online petition that garnered more than 40,000 signatures from a little girl who felt the pink and purple Easy Bake Oven negatively stereotyped gender and alienated her younger brother, who wanted to play with it as well. The colors, however, indicated that it was just for girls. Out of the nearly 320 million people in the United States at the time, 40,000 are a barely measurable percent (0.0125). Still, as we’ve been saying, stories don’t care about statistics. The story was picked up by news organizations across the country, and Hasbro was pilloried for being insensitive to children. Hasbro’s marketing team even got famous male chefs to say that they had wanted Easy Bake Ovens as kids but their parents hadn’t given them to them because it was a toy for girls. Ultimately, the company invited the little girl and her family to Pawtucket, where they gave her a sneak peek at the black and silver Easy Bake slated for introduction later that year.
Here’s how the story got played, and—spoiler alert—it had nothing to do with reality. The little girl was presented as having an impact on a great big company, mustering the force of consumer outrage at the great big company’s insensitivity, and educating them about being more aware that today’s boys aren’t crippled by traditional gender roles. Hasbro was seen as taking this issue seriously and acknowledging the little girl, and was, perhaps, a little humbled in the process. As it got played in the media, it was a happy ending, and the story was over. The little girl was seen as the hero of the story, Hasbro emerged as newly enlightened, and the comparatively sleepy Easy Bake Oven had a refreshed and positive image.
Why did this work so effectively? Well, first it played into several popular stories in our culture: the David vs. Goliath type of myth; big companies are insensitive to little people and out of touch with the contemporary world; “a child shall lead them.” Blah blah blah. The media picks up on these stories because they know they’re popular, and will trigger responses, and get people talking and keep them watching their advertisers. It’s classic storytelling with all of the elements of a good story we discussed earlier.
Here, however, is the reality, and the outcome described above is a tribute to the skill of Hasbro’s storytelling, and a bit of serendipity. The Easy Bake Oven was introduced in 1963, and over the years the many redesigns have had more to do with kitchen décor than gender. Given the boom in black and stainless appliances, the Hasbro designers planned to introduce a version that would be more like the kitchens kids saw around them (just as the teal version in 1963 reflected a very popular kitchen color at the time). The product had been in the works for more than a year, and we had seen a prototype well before the crusading tween ever started her petition.
But here’s where the brilliance comes in: If one goes back and reads the statements that Hasbro made on this issue, the company never publicly addressed the gender issue, other than to note they had used images of boys on packages. When the little girl saw the black and silver oven, she took over the storytelling. It was her bias that pink was for girls and black for boys that took over the story. (How that story became entrenched in our culture and accepted as true could be the subject of another study altogether.) It was her feeling that she’d been acknowledged that colored (pun intended) everything that she saw. Like the nobleman with the Gooseberries, she made what she experienced fit the storyline that she had in her mind—as did the media. Having been cast as the hero with clear conflict, the stakes were that she remain as such, so she ensured that everything could be manipulated to provide the perception that she got what she wanted. What mattered was the happy ending, and everyone got what they wanted.
For Hasbro, it cost them virtually nothing, and I by no means want to imply that there was anything cynical or manipulative in what they did. They simply understood the stories that were being told and recognized that their involvement—and not hiding from it—would give them a role in the story that was going to be told whether or not they got involved. Just to look at one element of the story—that the company was out of touch with contemporary gender roles—is really a no-win if they engage in that story. So, instead, they brought the girl who had accused them to their offices, showed her something new, and let the girl tell the story. Yes, it’s a classic PR move, I suppose, but at the same time the company never took a public position. In this case, for the “hero” to discover for herself that she has gotten what she wanted, however that came about, is much more powerful in a storytelling vein.
As difficult as these situations can be for companies, you really have to keep them in perspective. At one time or another, you or your company may get caught up in a story that is not of your making. How you respond determines the difference between a success and a failure, and as we keep saying, the story can often be more powerful than the truth. Any marketer knows it is the rare consumer products company that is completely out of touch with its consumers. They spend hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of dollars to learn about their consumers. It would be foolish not to. Hasbro, in particular, has been highly successful at leveraging consumer insights into successful products. Those facts, however, can’t always compete with a popular story. Knowing how to manage that story is where the real play comes in. Being willing to work with the parameters of a story and its own, for want of a better word, integrity is essential and requires imagination. Companies get bogged down when they try to take a hard corporate line. Remember: You can’t battle an entrenched story with facts. Perhaps in court, but not in the marketplace.
The ultimate reality, however, is that whatever the stories, when you’re selling a product, the market always decides. One year after Easy Bake–gate (sorry, couldn’t resist), the story was virtually forgotten (for now). Oh, and the pink and purple Easy Bake Oven outsold the black and silver one by a hefty margin.
We overlook or devalue the power of story at our peril. Stories are powerful and personal. They are how we understand the world and build our identities. We start them as children, but we tell them throughout our lives. They can drive us, or drive us crazy, and they shape our reality. You are, in fact, your own Scheherazade, whose stories not only enchanted a king but kept her alive as well.