It was difficult to sit on a panel to talk about the benefits of Brand Storytelling, because I can’t stand the phrase. It’s the kind of thing that sets off the Marketing Bollocks alarm in any CEO’s head and switches their attention from what you’re saying, to their smartphone. It’s a meeting killer, which is a shame, because beneath the wanky name are some principles worth sticking with.
I’m a big believer that deeply ingrained, ancestral behaviours still apply today and explain a lot about human behaviour.
Go back 4000 years to Mesopotamia and leaders had to ensure their populace adopted the behaviours of a stable, safe, constructive society, otherwise the whole thing goes to pot. But instead of telling people the rules and hoping they’d listen, leaders used stories to inspire the ‘correct’ values in their people. The Epic of Gilgamesh wasn’t just entertainment; it was a moral guide and a reminder of what it meant to live as a proper member of Mesopotamian society. Crucially, not only was narrative more arresting in the first place, but its emotional impact also had more staying power.
As Maya Angelou said: people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel. If we estimate that only around 3% of our audience are in-market to buy now, today, then after indifference, recall is a marketer’s biggest challenge. Six or twelve months down the line when they’re ready to buy, ready to switch, will your audience remember your brand more favourably? Will they remember that very clear explanation of your products and services you provided them with? Arguably not, if you didn’t make them feel something.
No one comes out of the cinema and says, “That was a great film, it was so clear! I knew exactly what was going on.” (Although anyone who sat through Christopher Nolan’s film Tenet might have settled for that.)
We lost the performance marketing lot by the second paragraph, but even in their world of clicks and conversions, narrative isn’t a luxury — it’s a multiplier. Paid online video is a prime example. A dull, purely functional ad in that space is a skip-button delivery system. But a spot with a clear story makes the media budget sweat harder. The creative earns attention, and that attention lifts the performance of every channel that follows. Pretending otherwise is just bad maths.
And yet, senior people in business still squirm at the idea that (as Les Binet would say) they should ‘entertain for commercial gain’. They see it as a soft distraction from the serious business of logic and reason. But if you ever needed proof of just how impotent a purely rational argument is to your audience, look at the medical research. A group of neuroscientists in the States found patients who suffered damage to their prefrontal cortex — the bit of the brain that processes feeling — were unable to make decisions. They could rationalise what to eat but were unable to decide on their next meal. They could list pros and cons of different activities but found it impossible to choose one. They were in a System 2 spiral.
It would be crass of me to suggest you can emulate a serious brain injury, but… think how many dishwashers are on the market. Think how similar they are. Think how little you care — you just want clean dishes. Beyond a shortlist of models around the same price point with about the same feature list, you don’t think which one to buy, you feel it.
And so, the role of narrative in our work isn’t a fluffy top-of-funnel indulgence. It’s the mechanism of decision-making itself. And that, begrudgingly, is why so-called brand storytelling isn’t total wank after all. Maybe if we all stop calling it that, someone might let us do it from time to time.