Storytelling

Blogging Storynomics 4

May 10, 2018 by Richard

[dropcap]W[/dropcap]elcome to post numero quatro where we reveal some of what’s going on in Robert McKee’s new book, Storynomics: Story-Driven Marketing in a Post-Advertising World. So far we’ve covered marketing deception around rational and emotion communications. We’ve touched on what defines a story. Why is that different from narrative? And quite fascinating to me, we’ve touched on The Evolution of Story and the story-making mind. I was quite moved when I came across the notion of the dawn of self-awareness, the first sense of “me” and how story-making emerged to help early humans make some kind of sense of the world around them. What follows is material from Chapter 4.

THE DEFINITION OF STORY

Excerpt:

To master storified marketing, CMOs need solid working answers to fundamental questions: “What exactly is a story? What are its primal components? How do these elements interact within a story? How do I create a powerful marketing story?”

Me–> I’d say that it’s not only CMOs who need these answers, it’s every marketing writer, communications professional, PR person, startup entrepreneur, business owner. If the whole marketing narrative is broken, we all need to understand how to create and use stories. Onward into a list of what a story is not.

Me–> A story is not a process, or a hierarchy, or a chronology, and you can see McKee’s blood boil on videos when he gets to this, a story is not a journey.

Excerpt:

Euphemisms, such as journey, separate the mind from the unpleasant realities around it, and, like genteelisms we use when we toilet-train chidren, they have a place in polite society. But the protagonist of a well-told story is not a passive passenger; she struggles dynamically through time and space to fulfill her desire.

“I find that most people know what a story is until they sit down to write one. ”

~ Flannery O’Connor

Me–> Okay, now we have to pay attention. This has been wildly misunderstood by almost everyone, including yours truly.

Excerpt:

STORY IS NOT NARRATIVE

Many marketing campaigns have flopped because an ad agency didn’t know the difference between narrative and story. Narrative may sound academic, even scientific, but in a business context, the term is neither logical nor precise. It’s use commits a categorical error for this reason: All stories are narratives, but not all narratives are stories. The four misnomers above, process, hierarchy, chronology, journey, are narratives, not stories.

Narratives tend to be flat, bland, repetitive, and boring recitations of events. They slide through the mind like juice through a goose, and as a result, they have little or no influence on customers. Stories, on the other hand, are value-charged and progressive. The mind embraces a well-told story; the imagination is its natural home. Once through our mental door, story fits, sticks, and excites consumer choice.

The next time you’re bored to the bone by somebody’s ‘story,’ in all likelihood you’re not being told a story. If you were, you’d be listening and engrossed. Instead the guy is torturing you with a narrative, probably a repetitious recitation of “….and then I did this, and then I did that, and then I did the other thing, and then and then and then…”

[dropcap]A[/dropcap]s to the concept of narrative and story. I thought hard about this in a book I co-authored recently. The book is Established; Lessons from the world’s oldest companies. My chapter, The Brush, the Mallet, the Chisel, the Letter, was a kind of history, or chronology—a narrative, if you will—about the founding and survival of the oldest operating American company, The John Stevens Shop of Newport, RI. I kept fighting the exact problem McKee lists above, ‘and then this happened, and then that happened, and then this happened, and then that…” The way I solved it, I think, was to let my utter fascination and love for the entire story come through. I lingered on the space itself, the people in the story, and the incredible skill they have and the generational aspect, three generations of men, twice over, who owned and ran this shop. But it’s probably fair to say I did not storify this piece, mainly because to do that, felt not quite right for the material I had. As my friend Nick Parker has said, ‘there’s an open question as to which sorts of content or material are ripe for a storytelling structure.” Agreed.

Blogging Storynomics 3

May 4, 2018 by Richard

[dropcap]T[/dropcap]his is the third post in an ongoing project to unpack Robert Mckee’s new book, Storynomics: Story-Driven Marketing in a Post Advertising World. The

In previous posts, we’ve talked about how rational based communications, are really just rhetoric, and emotional communications, have veered into manipulation of consumers, playing on fear and envy. Which is part of the reason why marketing and advertising are in such dire straits. We’ve also touched on the elements of a story– action, reaction. changing value charges, roles, conflict, turning points, emotional dynamics.

So let’s look into Chapter Three; The Evolution of Story. As you might expect from McKee, he structures some of this material in the form of a three act drama.

Excerpt:
“…a three-act adventure that begins with the birth of consciousness. It builds as the mind battles for survival, and climaxes with the triumph of storified thought.’

Consciousness is kind of the inciting incident here. The moment when everything changes and the protagonist is thrown into a whole new world, which in this case is being self-aware.

“We tell ourselves stories in order to live.” ~ Joan Didion

ACT I: THE FIRST HUMAN THOUGHT

Excerpt:
The silent awareness of “Me” suddenly transformed a brain into a mind and turned an animal human. Animals react to the objects around them, but the human brain turned itself into an object. Consciousness, in effect, split itself in two.

When self-awareness invaded the first human mind, it brought with it a sudden, sharp sense of isolation. The cost of self-consciousness is a life spent essentially alone, at a distance from all other living creatures, even your fellow human creatures. With that first, primordial I am, moment, the mind felt not only alone but also in terror. For self-awareness brought another, even more frightening discovery, unique to humanity. time. The first human being suddenly found herself alone and adrift on the river of time.

ACT II: THE SECOND HUMAN THOUGHT

“…What’s more, the mind discovered that not only is the future in doubt, but the surfaces of people and things cannot be trusted; that nothing is what it seems. What seems is the sensory veneer of what we see, what we hear, what people say, what people do. What is hides beneath what seems. For truth is not what happens, but how and why what happens happens. With neither science nor religion to explain life’s unseen causalities, the suddenly self-aware mind must have roiled in confusion as chaos, enigma, meaninglessness, and brevity made life unlivable. The mind had to find a way to make sense out of existence.

ACT III: THE STORY-MAKING MIND

Two pages in we get going…

Excerpt:
Because a well-told story wraps its telling around emotionally charged values, its meaning becomes marked in our memory.

Excerpt:
The form of story, at its simplest goes like this: As the telling opens, the central character’s life, as expressed in its core value (happiness/sadness, for example) is in relative balance. But then something happens that upsets this balance and decisively changes the core value’s charge one way or the other. He could for example, fall in love, (positive) or out of love (negative). The character then acts to restore life’s balance, and from that moment on a sequence of events, linked by cause and effect moves through time, progressively and dynamically swinging the core value back and forth from positive to negative, negative to positive. At climax, the story’s final event changes the core value’s charge absolutely and the character’s life returns to balance.

Blogging about Storynomics 2

May 1, 2018 by Richard

[dropcap]I[/dropcap]n our last post, we talked a little about rational communication, rhetoric, and, emotional communication, and what constitutes the current problem. No one believes marketing and/or advertising anymore. The remedy, per Robert McKee and Thomas Gerace, in Storynomics: Story-Driven Marketing in a Post-Advertising World, is story.

Excerpt from McKee:
A well-told story captures our attention, holds us in suspense, and pays off with a meaningful emotional experience. Emotional because we empathize with its characters; meaningful because the actions of our protagonist deliver insights into human nature. The word itself, story, confuses many marketers. Some, for example, use the words content and story as if they were interchangeable. As as we’ll discover, that’s like conflating paint in a can with a masterpiece on a wall.”

The other, frequent point of confusion, is between story and narrative. There are key distinctions. Hugely important differences. Of which more, later.

Here we go, this bit is where our book gets in gear and begins to really move.

McKee excerpt: In short, story is the ultimate I.T. I in that storytelling demands information–a wide and deep knowledge of human nature and its relationship with the social and physical realms. T in that a well-told story demands skillful execution of its inner technology, its mechanism of action / reaction, changing value charges, roles, conflicts, turning points, emotional dynamics, and much more. A craft underpins the art.

Storify is the word that McKee and Gerace give us to describe marketing that encompasses story structure. You got to storify it!

Here is where we begin to see some clarity around what defines a story. Story involves just what has been said above. Action, reaction. Changing value charges. Roles. Conflict. Turning points. Emotional dynamics. None of which apply to narrative.

“After nourishment, shelter and companionship, stories are the thing we need most in the world.” Philip Pullman

For me, the interesting idea running through this approach to marketing is how to apply it. Where and how can you apply a storytelling structure in your business communications? What specific pieces of content can you storify? If we’re talking about content marketing which underlies all this due to Thomas Gerace’ role at Skyword, then there are numerous avenues to work with. Customer stories, also known as case studies, are prime territory. Ads can certainly fit that bill. Corporate history can definitely be storified.

I wonder? Can you storify home page content? Can you hook a reader on the home page with a brief story, maybe as brief as six words? Ten? Stay tuned for post number three coming your way soon. Should be good, ‘The Evolution of Story’ is chapter three.

Blogging About Storynomics 1

April 29, 2018 by Richard

[dropcap]T[/dropcap]his is the maiden voyage of a series of blog posts about storytelling in marketing. First up is Robert McKee’s new book on storytelling for business, Storynomics: Story-Driven Marketing in a Post-Advertising World. If you don’t know McKee, he is longtime screenwriting guru whose name is linked to a truckload of award-winning films over the past several decades. He’s an astute observer, a precise writer, and is wicked knowledgeable about how stories are put together, what constitutes a story and now, how the business world can put stories to work. The number one reason this book is important is trust. No one believes marketing anymore.

I’ll mark specific passages of the book with Excerpt and I’ll indent so you know where I’m pulling from the text.

Excerpt from McKee:
THE TWO TYPES OF MARKETING DECEPTION
Historically, marketers have driven sales through two types of pretense, one rational and the other emotional.

1. Rational Communication
Classical marketing theory asserts this premise: Human beings are rational decision makers who, when faced with an important choice, gather relevant facts, weight alternatives, then choose the best option. Therefore, to persuade consumers, present your claims in a factual, logical, scientific manner. That’s the theory. In reality, what advertising passes off as logic, is in fact, rhetoric. Science seeks the truth, rhetoric seeks the win. Now more than ever, marketing via rhetorical argument provokes skepticism in the mind of the customer and a negative attitude toward your product or service.

So we get to the problem pretty much right off the bat. Classical marketing theory asserts that human beings are rational decision makers. Ha! I think classical marketing theory has it backwards. We use our emotions to make decisions and use our reasoning powers to justify doing the thing we want to do. So let’s get to that.

McKee excerpt:
2. Emotional Communication
“At the heart of an effective creative philosophy is the belief that nothing is so powerful as an insight into human nature, what compulsions drive a man, what instincts dominate his action, even though this language so often camouflages what motivates him.” ~ Bill Bernbach.

One of the ideas that emerges in this section speaks to Bernbach’s approach to clients. He didn’t talk about advertising but the art of persuasion. ‘Ads needed to touch people’s basic, unchanging instincts — their obsessive drive to survive, to be admired, to succeed, to love, to take care of their own.’

We all know this, we’ve all lived with it, and worked with, and even succumbed to these ideas. The curious thing about all this is there’s a deeper thing going on. That thing says, Paul Bloom, professor of psychology and behavioral science at Yale, in his book How Pleasure Works is this: ‘What matters most is not the world as it appears to our senses. Rather, the enjoyment (or suffering) we get from something derives from what we think that thing is.’ What follows are citations from research and various experiments that demonstrate that our reactions are lashed to the mast of our beliefs. If we believe we’re drinking more expensive wine, we like it more. It works for pleasure and for pain.

The problem is that this sort messaging infrastructure, toying with people’s emotions, is manipulative and is a good part of the reason why advertising and marketing are in so much trouble.

Stay tuned for the next post. Thanks for reading.

The low spark of low-heeled boys

April 15, 2018 by Richard

[dropcap]I[/dropcap] woke up in the Emergency Room. St. Anne’s Hospital. Where I was born. My mother and my sister were in the room. I still remember the nurse. “Is he a user?” I’d passed out and fell backward onto the sidewalk and hit my head full on. As I lay there, writhing and convulsing, my girlfriend called an ambulance.

I had a bit of a secret. Poorly kept. The situation was delicate, touch and go. I conjure up an image of my teenage self sprawled out on a lawn, at some outdoor concert, half conscious. Don’t know what this bird flew into, but shit don’t look good. The world was spinning faster and faster. Try and keep up. High-school in New England. A mean, beat down, beaten up, mill town south of Boston. Cramped tenements. Chain link fences. Small bore gangs of Irish, Poles, Portuguese. A lost American city. Lost American boys.

Croke was tall, lanky, dispirited. A lad in a brown leather jacket and jeans, with shoulder length, dirty blond hair. I can’t remember Croke being much of a threat to anyone but himself. Croke loomed large at school and on the street. Mainly because he had a monster heroin habit. More than once, I saw Croke being dragged down the hall, his arms around the shoulders of two burly teachers, his feet dragging behind him. Eyes rolling around in his head. They struggled to get him out of the building, down the stairs and stuffed into a cab. Next day they would do it all again.

Dope was easy to get. Like buying a bag of chips. Like whistling at a pretty girl. Dope was language. Fuck you, it said. The men’s bathroom in high-school was part of the franchise. Mom’s sandwich baggies filled with Tuinal, Seconal, Quaaludes, heroin, speed. The cost was low — lunch money low. You could get anything you wanted at Tadeusz Kosciuszko Square five minutes from my house. The Square. At the Square, you could buy your way into your own imprisonment beneath a statue of a Polish hero of the War of Independence. The irony was lost on us. We weren’t interested in independence. Ours was a more noble conflict — obliterate the self. That stealth army spreading a miracle of warmth across your tender groin, courtesy of Adolph von Baeyer, inventor of the barbituate. Just take me out, Adolph. Across from the Square was Joe Gow’s, where you could get a greasy chow mein sandwich in wax paper and a coke for two-fifty, when you resurfaced and got hungry.

Killer Cabral. I don’t know if Killer had killed anyone when I knew him, but the chances are good, or got around to it in due time. I have one memory of Killer. I’ve got my mother’s car for the night. I’m seventeen. Killer is in the back seat — this is an eight-cylinder Oldsmobile Cutlass, maroon. A machine. I’ve disconnected the odometer. Killer is small. In a black leather jacket. His street rep is fearsome. Killer Cabral is in my car. He’s cooking junk in a spoon. He’s got his works out. Rolls up a sleeve. Ties off, finds a vein. Pushes the needle in. Tilts his head back for a second, eyes closing… Come to daddy.…that’s it. Then, Killer is out. Into the night. Hey, Killer Cabral was in my car last night. No way. Way.

For a while, my best friend was Fat Larsch. Toothpick thin. Stringy blond hair. We were tight for three years. Concerts, camping, ski trips, open-faced turkey sandwiches and mashed potatoes at the counter at Rockland Diner. Quarts of Bud. All the shit that kids do. Add weed, downers, and the occasional speed. I never once set foot inside his house. Some kind of weird trouble was going down in that darkened third-floor apartment. Finally, Fat Larsch went for the needle. He died of an overdose. By then, he’d become a respiratory technician at the local hospital. St. Anne’s. I never went to the funeral. I never went for the needle. That was a line I wouldn’t cross.

I woke up in the Emergency Room. Tied it off. All the people who were part of the old world, over. I passed them on the street. I did not meet their eyes. I did not speak. No hellos, no how you doing. I don’t see you.

{ photograph by richard pelletier }

This low-heeled boy had a dream — a wanting. It was so bonkers, so outlandish, and freakish, and buried so deep, it would take over four decades to dig it out. Wanted that mother so hard, had to wrap that fragile thing in blankets and shame and lies and foolish loves and silence.

Touch and go.

The business of storytelling

December 16, 2017 by Richard

The nine-year old storyteller and the VP of Marketing

When Lori met Chloe

A good story weaves a spell. It takes us on a journey where we see — and feel — humans in action. In this (fictional) case study, a VP of Marketing learned the power of storytelling from a surprising source. A nine-year old girl.

Once upon a time, a small, prestigious hospital on New York City’s Upper West Side — let’s call it New York MED — fell on difficult times. For years, New York MED had been known and admired for talent, boldness, and breakthroughs. But now New York MED was known for mistakes; in surgery and the billing department. Finances were shaky. Several high-profile physicians and a CEO left for competitors. For nearly a decade, a once great hospital was lost. The worst moment came when a prominent New York MED surgeon was embroiled in a lawsuit and lost.

What’s our message?

At the very least, new messaging was clearly going to be needed and marketing proposed an approach along the lines of — “New York MED has the city’s best heart surgeons.” “New York MED is the leading teaching hospital in the Northeast.” “New York MED. Think of us as family.” All of which inspired no one.

Internally, PR fought with the VP of Marketing. The PR team wanted to emphasize New York MED’s storied history. The marketing group felt that expertise and caring were most important. Confusion reigned. More people left.

The problem of claims and assertions

We’ll get back to our case study in a second. But let’s quickly note the bald assertions above. It’s an enduring problem in marketing. “New York MED is the leading teaching hospital in the Northeast.” It sits there like a dead fish — like a billion other claims that every business everywhere makes. “NY MED. Think of us as family.” I don’t feel persuaded, do you? There’s no hint of emotion, no sense of life, of movement, of genuine connection. There’s no story.

Stories tell us who we are

Here’s why storytelling in business is on fire. It’s because the old ways, the claims, the assertions — nearly all of advertising — are on life support. No one’s buying. There’s wide agreement on the need to do something different, though not on what direction to take.

There’s a mountain of evidence that show stories can transform nearly every aspect of business writing. That’s because our brains are wired for stories. Stories are how humans transmit and reveal who we are, how we operate, and, what matters to us. Stories are how we connect.

The inciting incident

A well crafted story has a protagonist, an antagonist (sometimes referred to as the ‘forces of antagonism’) and an inciting incident, that thing, that event, that launches the protagonist into a new, disorienting world and onto a journey. And the story begins.

So here’s the rub. In a business setting, there is a world of difference between asserting that a physician (or a hospital) is dedicated and brilliant and expressing that in story form. In story form, you show the physician (or hospital) in action, living out their dedication and caring. Which is what a nine-year old storytelling patient named Chloe, taught New York MED’s VP of Marketing. Let’s pick up the story.

When Lori met Chloe

In spite of redoubled marketing efforts, New York MED still struggled to re-establish its position after a devastating lawsuit. Nothing changed, until one fateful winter’s day, when Lori Smith, the besieged VP of Marketing, met Chloe, a smart, freckled-faced nine-year-old cancer patient.

Although Chloe had a terminal illness, she was spirited and creative. She was an Instagram superstar with 750,000 followers and supporters. Her charm and bravery — her story — had captivated hundreds of thousands. And Lori, for all her professional training and experience, was nowhere near the storyteller that Chloe was.

‘We are gonna fight the bad guys’

On her good days, Chole took selfies with her caretakers. She posted her work on Instagram. She was especially fond of Kathy, a London born radiologist. Under a photograph of a bald and smiling Chloe with Kathy, was Chole’s caption:

“This is Kathy. She’s from London. I LOVE how she talks. She takes pictures of my brain. She says my cancer cells are the bad guys, and that we are gonna fight the bad guys. She hid her new puppy Buddy, under her coat and snuck him past the nurse’s station into my room so I could meet him! Hi Buddy!”

When Chloe met Lori, she took a selfie of the two of them. She asked Lori, ‘what’s your job?’ Lori, angry about her workload, her responsibilities and lack of success, stumbled around for awhile and finally said, “I identify potential markets and deliver the appropriate messages. I’m not very good at it.”

Chloe looked out the window for a moment, returned to her iPad and tapped out her caption. “This is my new friend Lori! I think she tells stories.”

Two weeks later Lori got the news after another contentious meeting where it was made clear she needed to deliver results. Chloe had died in the middle of the night surrounded by her family.

Lori finds the golden key

It was only in subsequent days that Lori Smith, grieving for young Chloe, and dejected about her job, sat at her cluttered desk, and found her way to the treasure that was Chloe’s Instagram feed. She scrolled through dozens of touching and poignant mini stories that told the world about Chloe and her caretakers at New York MED. There was a post with Chloe and Joshua. “Joshua cleans my room. He was supposed to be working tonight, but he held my hand for two straight hours because I was so sad.” There was Bing, an oncologist from Shanghai, who, Chloe wrote, “taught me to say ‘my favorite food is ice cream’ in Mandarin.” And there was Margaret, a night nurse. “This is Margaret. When I can’t sleep, she sings to me.”

Lori Smith stopped at the image of herself with Chloe. As she read the words, ‘I think she tells stories’ it finally began to dawn. She thought, “I think I know what we need to do. Finally.”

Did Lori Smith realize she was on a quest? Not likely. Did she realize that the lawsuit was an inciting incident that launched New York MED into a world of confusion about its identity and mission? Did she know that she was a character in a larger drama filled with inciting conflicts, crises, and resolutions? Unlikely. But somewhere inside, she did know that she’d found a person wiser than herself who instinctively understood that humans connect through the stories they tell. Chloe held the golden key and Lori knew it, saw it and was changed.

For business writers, thinking and working in story form, changes everything. It gives us a much deeper — even profound — understanding of the forces at work in human affairs and, gives us the means to shape our narratives to engage and connect with our audience in a noisy world.

As the great E.M. Forster said, “Only connect.”