Unlocking the Power of Storytelling for Marketers

In a 1991 episode of  ‘Star Trek: The Next Generation’, ‌ Captain Picard is stranded on a rogue planet with an alien from an unknown civilization. As the pair work together to escape, the protagonist frustratedly repeats strange and seemingly meaningless phrases to no avail. Soon it becomes clear that while his counterpart’s individual words can be translated into English, their syntax and sentence structure cannot. The result is a sort of long-form pig latin which is vaguely recognizable but has no real meaning without some type of Rosetta Stone.

We eventually find out that each of these phrases refers to a well-known story from the alien’s own civilization and are meant to be used as similes. In other words, the entire language is based on stories. The pair are eventually rescued, and with a database of the civilization’s stories in hand, the captain is able to begin translating in earnest. The episode ends with a poignant moment in which the captain gifts his new friend the Enterprise’s vast database of stories from around the galaxy as an offering of goodwill.

While we speak many different languages here on Earth, the episode presents some interesting points. Namely, that stories so consume our lives, we almost take their impact on our day-to-day lives for granted. You may wake up and describe a dream to a friend, a story. Read the morning paper, a story. Listen to a podcast at the gym, a story. By lunch, you’ve heard a presentation, a story. Chatted with a colleague about their terrible boss, a story.  And so on until you go to bed each night.

This is all to say that an alien, having crash-landed on Earth, may find themselves in a similar predicament as Captain Picard. Stories aren’t just a part of our everyday experience; they represent the bulk of it. Because of that, they ‌also underpin the communications ecosystem. As a marketer, you need to understand both why stories matter to effective communications, and how they can be leveraged to align them with your target audience. 

What is a Story?

To leverage stories, we have to understand what they are. A story can be as grandiose as a novel or as simple as a mnemonic device. For example, the one used to teach the musical staff: “Every Good Boy Deserves Fudge”. No sooner have you heard the phrase than your mind begins adding details. What does the boy look like? What’s his name? How is he dressed? Your brain then answers these questions by drawing an image.

“With stories, we can reflect values, emotions, and interpersonal dynamics in a way that helps audiences feel an experience rather than just hearing about it.”

Mnemonics work because they encode seemingly mundane bits of information about the world around us into a format that our brain has evolved to retain by associating them with different memories. The same information received as part of a story is even stored in different parts of the brain – the neocortex – than one learned through recitation or rote memory – the hippocampus. This is, of course, a vast oversimplification of the memory processes involved, but is enough to serve the point.

Anthropologists agree that differences in the way we learn from stories is more than just a strange evolutionary quirk, though. Storytelling has evolved as a sort of vehicle through which we convey an enormously wide range of important but difficult-to-communicate ideas. With stories, we can reflect values, emotions, and interpersonal dynamics in a way that helps audiences feel an experience rather than just hearing about it. These capabilities, in turn, allow us to field a much more nuanced set of social interactions. They are a key part of the survival mechanism, part of our socialization and bonding process, and in some ways differentiate us from other species altogether.

All of this should be of unique interest to marketers because it means that we have another, more powerful tool to align a product, service, or brand with its target audience than simply what it does. Stories give us a way to deliver emotive, first-hand experiences with a product and how it impacted the lives of its users.

Marketing as Stories

Marketers have been absolutely pummeled over the last decade by a stream of subject-matter experts telling us about the importance of stories in marketing. That proselytizing tends to paint in broad theoretical strokes, though and without much emphasis placed on day-to-day execution. The result has been a barrage of keyword spam and video content that does more to bore and frustrate audiences than to drive greater alignment with them.

To use stories in marketing, start with the idea that people (like ogres and onions) have layers. There’s “why” people need your product, “how” it will benefit them, “what” they are getting, etc. Young marketers tend to reverse that, without realizing that “what” only gets buyers to the shelf, not the register. The “what” of a product is easily reproducible and generally doesn’t influence a buyer’s decision making process as much as one might think. Whether or not a buyer needs a thing is usually the least impactful reason for buying it. 

Instead, think of stories as a positioning tool to nudge your product or services into closer alignment with your target audiences’ unique values or identity. For example, say you’re selling a chicken salad wrap in a health-conscious Beverly Hills cafe. Do you have to convey the life story of the chicken on the label? No, but remember that stories come in all shapes and sizes.

For example, people process images at about 6000x the rate of words. A colorful hand-drawn label with information conveying a country farm with happy, grass-fed chickens, on top of brown butcher paper may convey a rich story about ‌the quality and independence of your products as well as your commitment to sustainable farming using design.

Here are three practical tips for using stories in your marketing efforts:

• Use story to reflect your buyer’s challenge back to them. That creates adjacency and speaks to your unique understanding of and familiarity with their unique pain points
• Use story to do more than highlight your product or service. Show buyers what goes into your process and why, including how that makes them better.
• Use story to convey outcomes, not objectives. Most audiences describe their needs in terms of pain points. However, they tend to buy on outcomes. 

Stories are most useful in what CPG folks call the “first moment of truth”. That is the period after a buyer has established a need, but before they’ve selected a path forward. Trust, adjacency, and familiarity go a long way in buyers’ decision-making process.

Advocacy & Storytelling

It costs about 5x more to earn a new customer than it does to retain an old one. So it’s no surprise that one of the first places leaders look to grow the bottom line is their existing customer base. The post-purchase lifecycle that defines this progression from buyer to brand loyalist varies between industries, but generally involves a series of progressive upsells, repeat purchases, etc.

Yet, it’s not the fullest possible arc of a customer’s relationship with your brand. The final steps of this journey, known as ‘advocacy’, use peer-to-peer relationships in order to grow your products and services effortlessly. When implemented successfully, they can also play a major role in reducing the cost of earning and marketing to new customers. If brand loyalty is gas on the fire, advocacy is jet fuel. The difference between them is effective brand storytelling.

Marketing leaders sometimes boil advocacy down to a simple promotion or referral discount. At the end of the day, though, it has almost nothing to do with attractive pricing and everything to do with the ability to align your brand with your buyers’ aspirational values. This reality has been proven repeatedly by companies whose products sell well above their face value and amplified only by great brand storytelling – from Chick-fil-A to Gucci.

Using storytelling to seed advocacy by proactively shaping your brand experience: First, define your audience’s core values. This isn’t the product or service you want them to buy; it’s what they value in a relationship: Honesty, responsiveness, humor, attention to detail, et al. Next, demonstrate an understanding of their core challenge by communicating these values through your content and messaging (this is an implicit rather than an explicit process). Finally, overdeliver on these values at every touchpoint in your customer journey.

Done right, your brand ‌will become more than another store or services provider; it will become an outward expression of the buyer’s own desired inward character traits – all thanks to storytelling.

At the end of the day, you are either a storyteller or a part of a storytelling economy. Marketers who learn how to tap into the stream of stories that shape, give color to, and reflect our lives, will reach buyers more quickly, more often, and more successfully. Invest in better content and storytelling and you’ll grow faster.