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Stop me if this sounds familiar: Audiences are fragmenting, budgets are being spread ever more thinly, your marketing message is increasingly harder to get across and the CFO wants to know your marketing ROI today. Well you’d better get used to it: Welcome to the Post-Advertising Age.
This is the age in which the brands that succeed are the ones that tell the best stories—it’s as simple as that. But before you run off to your marketing team and rustle up some stories by lunchtime, stop, listen and ask yourself: “Does my brand have a story platform?” Or maybe you should first ask, “What the heck is a story platform, and how do I develop one?” A story platform is the brand equivalent of an editorial platform—the foundation of any magazine, newspaper or web site—and it works in exactly the same way.
A story platform helps you define what you want your content to say about your brand. It provides you with guidance for collecting stories from your audience or clients that highlight the unique qualities of your brand and helps to leverage these stories for maximum brand awareness. Quite simply, if you don’t have a story platform, your customers, prospects and competitors will—sooner or later—trumpet the inauthentic nature of your brand and, like the walls of Jericho, your brand will come tumbling down.
Avenue A’s 2008 Digital Outlook Report had this to say about the subject:
Narrative is the experience. As the Web becomes the preferred destination for brand exploration, digital experiences must become richer, deeper, and more able to tell compelling stories. If your brand experience depends entirely on pages and clicks, it’s time to wonder, “What is my story?”
We all know that intrusive advertising is dead, and most of us are realizing that the only way brands can connect with customers is by providing informative or entertaining content, or both. In other words: Storytelling is key.
In fact, there’s a growing body of research that points to the power of narrative as not just a way to engage people, but as the only way to change deeply entrenched views. As Yale psychology professor Marcia K. Johnson states in Narrative Impact: Social and Cognitive Foundations: “Stories are a particularly compelling source of information and…public narratives have the potential to have a profound and far-reaching influence on what we remember, know and believe.”
So back to the What’s your story? question and why you need to be rethinking your brand using a narrative approach. To be credible, your brand has to have an authentic voice. To be real rather than the illusory aspirational vaporware that many brands have become, all brand communication must emanate from an authentic story platform. The only way you can unearth yours is to listen to the stories your customers, employees and competitors are telling about your brand. You could call it investigative journalism, you might also term it corporate anthropology, but it’s the only way you can unearth the authentic story behind your brand. When you examine where your customers are getting their information and add that to the way they experience the brand, you can build a credible story platform that differentiates you from your competition and establishes your authority to publish content.
I should also mention that how you listen to stories is of the highest importance in this process. It’s not enough simply to ask a bunch of questions, arrive at an aggregate score and call it a day. Sure, there is a place for data-driven results, but they can never tell the full story. A recent story-listening exercise with the Australian military highlighted the amount of additional information that can be gleaned through stories by studying two parallel approaches. The first approach gave respondents a standard set of survey questions, which asked them to rate questions relating to morale using a numerical scale. The other approach was a narrative approach. When the time came to present the findings, the survey showed that morale wasn’t bad, and there were only a few minor issues. This was news to the team that took the narrative approach to their research. What about the story of the guys on the frontline having to drink their own urine when supplies broke down? What about the story about…? You get the picture.
The Australian military study brings me to a great example of brand creation through listening and storytelling: Sheffield. In the heyday of the British Empire, this northern English industrial city represented a global guarantee of quality and reliability. “Made in Sheffield” was once one of the world’s most valuable brands.
Today, however, despite being the fifth largest city in the U.K., Sheffield rarely ranks in the top 10 for consideration for inward investment in the U.K. The perceptions of the city are stuck in a Full Monty world, a world in which a heroic working class struggles to get by amidst rampant unemployment and declining heavy industries.
The truth is quite different. Sheffield is a beautiful, thriving city of fine architecture set against the backdrop of the U.K.’s most popular national park; it produces more advanced steel than at any time in its history; it has great music and culture, a highly educated workforce and two world-class universities. All this needed to be communicated. Creativesheffield, a team appointed to advance the city, chose our company, Story, to partner with them to showcase the real Sheffield.
Our approach was to create an authentic story platform that came from the experiences of Sheffielders, experiences that show how life and work really is in the city today—rather than from the perspective of an inaccurate and outdated 1970s lens. In a world tired of old-fashioned advertising—with vacuous slogans and empty promotion—the differentiation of the Sheffield brand depended on finding and shaping the stories of the city to reflect its complex, yet unified identity.
In order to achieve this goal, we used all relevant media, from street signs and billboards to a mosaic of online social networking media, to connect with Sheffielders. We found that the authentic voice of Sheffield was pragmatic and entrepreneurial, a city of problem solvers and creative doers.
One of Sheffield’s first ventures under its new brand identity was the incredibly successful summer “Wednesday Live” campaign, which highlighted the city’s attributes and helped double attendance in the city center, boosted trade and created renewed buzz and optimism. The city is about to embark on its broader campaign to attract investors.
So, in short, before you even think about becoming a content marketer, before you even think about creating a single piece of content, ask yourself, “What is my story?”
Simon Kelly is chief operating officer at Story Worldwide. In 1997, he spearheaded the launch of the Custom Publishing Council and in 1999 he was named to the Folio: 40 for his work integrating print and web content. |
