Following is an excerpt from Storytelling. Telling and Selling Your Brand Story
By Jim Signorelli, which will be published this fall.  For more
chapters, or to order an advance copy, visit www.eswpartners.com on or
after June 10.
 
So what is a story anyway?
My
journey helped me to see that if it  looks like a story, sounds like a
story, and acts like a story, it could very well be a duck.

Mistaking
a story for something that is a non-story is common. “Story” is an
oft-used word to describe a number of different types of communication.
There's the story that is anything from a little white lie to an
egregious fabrication. It could be the single-sentence dismissive,
“What's her story?”
A common definition for story is anything with a
beginning, middle and an end. Days have beginnings, middles and ends.
So do peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, but they aren't stories.
Needless to say, that definition didn't work for me.

Is a joke a
story? A song? Is a news story the same as a short story? Do stories
always have to be narratives? How does one really know a story is a
story, in the truest sense of the word? Is there a “truest sense" of
the word?” And even if there is, what difference does it make?

Actually
the last question is easiest to answer. If this book were about
identifying venomous snakes and you were going for a hike in the woods,
you'd probably want to get a fairly precise understanding of which
snakes are venomous and which aren't. Now defining stories may not be
quite so life-and-death, but I think you'll see that moving beyond a
casual understanding of what stories are can be enormously beneficial
in creating a meaningful brand. 

So with the easier question
out of the way, let's move into the challenge round: “What is a story
anyway?" To answer this, it's fitting that I tell you a story about how
I arrived at the definition.

Once upon a definition search
All
told, I counted 82 separate definitions of stories — some similar but
no two exactly alike. There's the dictionary definition that a story is
a connected series of happenings, fictitious or non-fictitious. If
that's true, then the following would qualify as a story: John went to
the store. Then he walked into the store. Then he bought something.
Don't wait for the movie.

Then
there were the poetic definitions like, “Stories are nourishment for
our hungry souls.” But what if my soul isn't hungry? Is it still a
story?

Finally there are the definitions that come with a free
dose of brain pain. “Stories are narratives with a plot and characters
generating emotion in narrators and audiences through a poetic
elaboration of symbolic meanings (Yannis Gabriel, Myths, Stories and
Organizations). Gets you right in your undernourished soul, doesn't it?

While
doing what I thought was a yeoman's job of researching stories, I came
across the remarkable work of Kendall Haven. I've never met Kendall,
but I'd very much like to someday. He is a graduate of West Point,
holds a master's degree in oceanography, and spent eight years as a
senior research scientist for the Department of Energy before finding
his true (and unlikely) passion: storytelling. If anything, Kendall
himself is a story about the determination it can sometimes take to
find what it is you want to do with your life. He found it. And in a
very big way.

If I buy one more book on the subject of stories,
I'm going to have to take out a second mortgage to pay my Amazon bill.
That said, the book that I always find at the top of a very large pile
is Haven's Story Proof: The Science Behind the Startling Power of
Story. It's the result of more than a decade of research on stories —
what they are, how they work, why they're important (the whole story,
so to speak).
The impetus for all this work came while Haven was
conducting workshops for NASA on the application of stories to science
writing.  Someone from headquarters said something like, “Stories to do
science writing? Hey fella, that's not how science writing works.”
Determined to prove that there was a very real and practical
application to science writing, Haven embarked on a journey to prove
his point. As I write this, I only hope that my own journey doesn't
take as long as his.

In this delightfully easy-to-read, uber
informative book, Haven digests his findings from over 300,000 sources
on the subject of stories. Okay, it doesn't quite read like an Indiana
Jones adventure but, in an entertaining way, this book sifts through
lots of erroneous information about what stories are (and aren't).
Haven's definition is artfully simple and very practical:

Story: a narrative about a character overcoming some obstacle to achieve some important goal.

Stories
can be as long as War and Peace, as short as Little Red Riding Hood, or
as obtuse as Ulysses. They can be factual, fictitious or as exaggerated
as water cooler gossip. As long as we find a person, real or imagined,
moving through some problem towards some goal, it's a story.

None
of the elements of a story need be explicit; rather, a story can place
the responsibility for narrative in the hands of its audience.
Hemingway often stated that the best story he ever wrote was six words
long: “Baby shoes for sale. Never worn.” These six words describe an
outcome and leave the narrative to us.

What makes a good story?

As
much as I like Haven's definition of story, neither it nor the 81
others I came across actually define what a good story is. And for good
reason. Defining a good story is like explaining why the color
chartreuse is a good color. What makes a story "good" is obviously
audience dependent. My wife thinks Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice is
a good story. I've never read the book nor seen the movie, but from
what I've heard about it, I think it would look funny sitting on my
favorite movie list next to the likes of The Big Lebowski and Body Heat.

I
would argue, however, that there is a more objective way to decide how
we might collectively label a story good or bad. It’s done by
considering any story's “stickiness factor.” The notion of “stickiness"
was first described by Malcom Gladwell as the characteristic of  any
message that makes it memorable. “Good” often has to do with a story's
ability to “stick.” Yes, bad stories sometimes stick as well. But the
stick of bad stories has an additional characteristic that lessens
their ability to stick in a positive way. It's called stink.

A
lot has been written about what makes ideas stick. In fact, at the time
of this writing there was a best-selling book by brothers Chip and Dan
Heath titled, Made to Stick, Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die, that is dedicated to this subject.   For stories, stickiness is a function of two measures. The first I call performance, and it has to do with how well a story involves its audiences. The second I call power and it is a measure of how much we become involved in the story.

Thus, for stories: Stickiness Factor = Performance + Power.

Let’s look more closely at how performance and power are achieved.

Performance
Performance
has to do with the way elements of a story are combined to engage or
keep us interested. Through a series of events that occur in any story,
the story either performs well or it's a dud.  Suspense, humor and
surprise are performance techniques that work, separately or together,
to transfix and sustain our attention and make a story worthy of our
time and energy. Performance stories are the kind I read on beach
vacations when the biggest problem I want to solve is choosing between
SPF #15 or #30. Pure performance stories are often referred to as
“page-turners” or, in movie parlance, “good escape flicks.”

Power
Power,
on the other hand, has to do with how meaningful the story is for us. A
story's ability to shape, reinforce or challenge what we hold as
important as a belief is a measure of its power. The Old Man and the Sea was
an especially powerful story for me growing up, because it helped shape
my beliefs about determination. These are the stories that somehow move
us. They make us think.  And the most powerful of stories provoke
strong emotional reactions, not just during the time we’re active
audience participants, but long afterwards, as well.

Stickiness Factor
Going
back to the example of Pride and Prejudice, my wife, who would stay up
all night reading that book, would certainly give it a very high
performance score. For me, who would fall asleep reading the book
jacket, performance would probably be rated a big minus.   As for
power, I can’t speak of any meaning derived from Pride and Prejudice
since I didn’t get past page one.  For my wife, on the other hand, I
can only assume the story was very powerful.  I’m not sure what the
exact relevance of the story was for her, but judging from the box of
tissue she blew through while reading it, I can only surmise that she
derived special meaning from the book.  I’m fairly certain that If she
were to score this story on the basis of performance and power, she’d
score the “stickiness factor” very high.   Both of us have our own
subjective reasons for deciding whether Pride and Prejudice is a good story, but it is possible to apply measures that help explain why it stuck for her, and stunk for me. 

How does this connect to marketing?
Now
that we've established what a story is and attempted to arrive at some
notion of what good stories are, as a marketer, you’ve no doubt waited
patiently for the big ‘so what?  Here it is:

There is an uncanny resemblance between what we as marketers and story writers do. 
First,
we work with the same basic story structure, whether we’re conscious of
doing so or not.  I will further argue that by thinking of marketing as
a form of story writing, there are a number of important lessons,
insights, and principles that give rise to themselves. 

Working
with our definition of story, “a narrative of a character overcoming
some obstacle to achieve some goal,” take out the words “a narrative
of” and insert the words “selling to” and you have a pretty accurate
definition of marketing.  

Our character is our prospect who
has a need that our product or service can resolve.  Whether we are
successful or not depends on how we tell our story.  And just as with
narratives, our story’s success will depend on measures of performance
and power.  

Performance and power applied to marketing
Performance,
to the marketing story writer, is how product, price, promotion and
place engage, enlighten, and ultimately satisfy the prospect’s need.  
Performance is a function of how well that need is understood and how
well the understanding of that need is manifest through all prospect
touch points, or chapters, of the marketer’s story.     However, as
we’ve seen with stories, performance is but one of two ingredients that
comprise the so-called “stickiness factor.”  For marketers, products
and services that achieve high performance scores are like stories that
become mere page turners.  Take any successful marketing effort and
you’ll see that it is successful beyond performance measures.  Harley
is more than a “good” motorcycle, Southwest Airlines is more than a
“good” airline, and Nike is more than a “good” brand of sports
apparel.  That’s because, in addition to achieving high performance
ratings for their products and services, they have also achieved strong
power ratings, as well.

Arguably, power is the element that many
marketers often overlook. I will also argue that it is the lack of
story power that causes good products to fail.  Oldsmobile was a
perfectly good product for the price, but failed.   New Coke did very
well in taste tests before it was launched, but failed.  McDonald’s
Arch Deluxe, may have performed well as a product for more
sophisticated palettes, but it too, failed.  Power has to do with
meaning.  In these examples and countless others, meaning was
overlooked, force fit, or not even considered.

We see an
inordinate amount of advertising every day.  How much of it is
meaningful? By that, I mean how much of it communicates something that
goes beyond attributes and benefits in ways that support beliefs and
values that resonate with prospects?  Performance without power may
cause the marketer’s story to stick short-term, but until the meaning
of that  story finds a place in the hearts and minds of prospects, the
most that can be achieved is a short-term blip on the revenue chart.  
This is one of the reasons why many sale promotions result in
“boom-splat” returns.  A lower price might very well generate trial,
but unless the prospect can lock into some deeper meaning while
engaging in the product’s story, sales continue to become more a
function of price than anything else. 

As you will see in later
chapters, the power challenge is complicated by the fact that as with
story themes, the consumer, not the marketer, must define power. 
Telling the consumer what the theme of the product or service is, is
tantamount to the storyteller pronouncing the purpose of his story.  As
human beings, we have a natural resistance to being told how to think
and feel, or what to believe. Consequently, power is given not taken by
audiences for stories, and products and themes.  But let’s not get
ahead of ourselves.

Let’s now look at story structure to see
just how marketers can manipulate the elements of their stories to
enhance both the performance and power of their stories.