Information versus Story

My partner Jim and I disagree about very little, but over the years, we have debated the weight he is willing to grant to information in the conflict between information and story. At Character Camp, I have often heard him say—after defining the difference between information and story—“Information is great, if…” and then list the three conditions that must be true for information to be impactful and persuasive:

  • The person listening must be in need of the information you are providing
  • They must be looking for the information at the time they encounter it
  • The information must be presented in a way that is actually useful

As the extremely intelligent, highly rational son of an engineer, Jim comes by his respect for information honestly. But when he lists his conditions, I usually resist by pointing out how seldom those conditions are met. To which Jim responds, if someone asks you for the price of your product and you answer with, “Let me tell you a story,” they will suspect that you are about to dish out some pungent BS. I then concede that point, but object that the case is so trivial as to constitute an exception that proves the rule.

Given this history, I was quite tickled to stumble across the following metaphor, in a book review in this week’s New Yorker:

History is not a science. Essentially, as A.J.P. Taylor said, it is “simply a form of story-telling.” It’s storytelling with facts. And the facts do not speak for themselves, and they are not just there for the taking. They are, as the English historian E. H. Carr put it, “like fish swimming about in a vast and sometimes inaccessible ocean; and what the historian catches will depend, partly on chance, but mainly on what part of the ocean he chooses to fish in and what tackle he chooses to use—these two factors being, of course, determined by the kind of fish he wants to catch. By and large, the historian will get the kind of facts he wants.”

I find this true as I read history, which is an extreme case because good historians begin with curiosity and an honest intention to learn something about the human condition. It seems even more true in the context of journalism, entertainment and social conversation of all sorts, to say nothing of marketing.

I find myself more and more persuaded that, with respect to the human mind—because of the way the brain has evolved—nothing of any significance goes in unless it is mediated by story. Which is why a lot of marketing communication simply bounces off.

I’m sure Jim would appreciate it if you can share any examples of the value of pure information in marketing. And I would be grateful for any examples to the contrary—instances in which pure information is not useful until a story of some kind provides context, meaning and relevance.

Stories of Fear and Stories of Hope

Four days after the murder of George Floyd, my community was still in a lot of pain. Personally, I was experiencing a kind of emotional exhaustion which, I get, is not a big deal under the circumstances. I wanted to get to work—a friend had just taken the head marketing position at a big retail brand, and I was excited about helping him gather his team and hit the ground running—but I could not get myself to sit down at my computer and start. I had my coffee; I ate my high-protein breakfast; I tried my meditation routine…nothing. By the time I arrived at work (by which I mean the daily Zoom conference with Jim, Sara and Wayne) I was feeling even more worn down and unable to move forward.

We started talking about what was going on and how we might best affect some positive change, including how we might advise our clients to express the stories of their brands in an environment of protest and pandemic. I would love to report that we came up with a single, simple approach that every well-intentioned brand could use to connect with their customers right now. Sadly, it didn’t go that way. In fact, the discussion was foundering on the rocks of our despair, anger and frustration, when Jim suggested that we do what we always advise our clients to do: start by looking to our own story first. How should we show up based on our own identity and purpose? What do we uniquely have to say about how to live in a world torn by such strife?

The essence of our practice is a shared understanding that a story is powerful to the extent that you believe it. That’s the meaning at the heart of our story. But what I saw, to my dismay, is that the story running in my head that morning—that I could no longer expect that the future would be better than the past—was a story powered by fear. That’s not a story I wanted to make more powerful through my belief, but looking around at my world, trying to derive meaning from what I was experiencing, all I could seem to come up with was essentially, abandon hope, all ye who enter here. It comes from Dante’s Divine Comedy where it is the slogan inscribed on the Gates of Hell.

That caught me up short and forced me to question how I got here. I realized then that stories of fear are precisely what Mr. Trump has been trading in for the last four years. And more important, I realized that if I could get no further than either lashing out blindly or withdrawing in despair, then I would simply be embracing the divisive, corrupting forces in our current social and political environment as a new truth.

It was Jim who reminded me that ultimately, in story, it is intention that creates meaning. If I wanted to show up as part of the solution rather than simply add weight to the negative side of the scales, I would have to find the positive intention within myself and bring it to the surface. That idea in itself provided a tiny glimmer of hope, but it was only a glimmer, and I struggled to keep that flame alive against the flood of poison with which the world seemed to be trying to extinguish it.

I got a small boost the next day, as I listened to a conversation between Ezra Klein and Ta-Nehisi Coates. I was familiar with Mr. Coates from previous interviews but I had avoided his writing because I thought his stance was too radical for me. Still, I was struck by the title promoting the podcast: Why Ta-Nehisi Coates is hopeful. After all, hope is what I was looking for. He described a recent conversation with his father, a Vietnam vet who was a member of the Black Panther party at the time of the riots following the assassination of Martin Luther King. His father told him that, although there were white people protesting racism in 1968, the faces in the crowds protesting the murder of George Floyd are way more representative of a broad swath of the American people. That is the reason why Ta-Nehisi Coates is hopeful, and it was enough to nurture my glimmer of hope for another day.

Mr. Coates said something else, as well, which struck me not so much as a source of hope, but more like a light illuminating a dark place I had never been able to see into. He said that the way many white people feel about living in a world in which Mr. Trump is considered a fit moral character to lead this nation is the way many black people feel about living in a world in which their children must be taught that they cannot trust the police. I’m paraphrasing, but that is the way I heard it, and in that moment, seven decades of puzzlement and good intention fell away. For the first time in my life, I felt that I could see the problem clearly, with a kind of empathy and compassion that had eluded me.

Later that day, I read what Jim Mattis wrote in The Atlantic  I don’t know General Mattis’s politics, but based on his willingness to serve in Mr. Trump’s administration as Secretary of Defense, I can guess that he and I have very different opinions about a variety of policy issues. But I agree with him that “‘Equal Justice Under Law’…is a wholesome and unifying demand — one that all of us should be able to get behind.” I agree with him that focusing on a small number of lawbreakers at the expense of “tens of thousands of people of conscience who are insisting that we live up to our values” is a distraction. And I was particularly struck when this man, who has served at the highest levels of the military and the government, noted that “Donald Trump is the first president in my lifetime who does not try to unite the American people — does not even pretend to try.”

These emails I send are normally about the intersection of story with marketing and business strategy. I don’t use them to debate political issues. But these are not normal times, and I am trying to show up here, in this way, because I believe what we are confronted with are not issues of policy but issues of character. I have good friends who have supported Mr. Trump. I understand that, on issues of policy, he has delivered results that are important to them. I am happy to discuss my ideas about trade, taxation, immigration, separation of powers, health care, environmental regulation, et.al. I see valid ideas on different sides of all these issues, and my own opinions about many of them are not settled. But if, after everything we have seen and heard, any of my friends still believes that Mr. Trump is a man of good character, fit lead a great nation through a difficult time, then we do not share enough common ground to have a meaningful conversation about it.

With regard to marketing, what I have seen in recent weeks is that the character of a brand is more than just the happy, entertaining personality it displays when things are going well. In any story, the true character of the protagonist is revealed when things fall apart. It looks like a lot of brand leaders are on the same kind of journey I’ve been on—trying to figure out who they are personally, who they are as a team, and how they and their brands need to show up in order to be true to themselves. For me that has meant sitting quietly, examining my intentions (both positive and negative), watching carefully for the glimmers of hope, and considering how I can authentically nurture those embers with the stories I choose to live by.

And as I sat, thinking about stories of hope, I was reminded of the granddaddy of them all, as told by author and teacher Rachel Naomi Remen, who received it, appropriately, from her own grandfather as a gift on her fourth birthday:

In the beginning there was only the holy darkness. And then, in the course of history, at a moment in time, this world, the world of a thousand thousand things, emerged from the heart of the holy darkness as a great ray of light. And then, perhaps because this is a Jewish story, there was an accident, and the vessels containing the light of the world, the wholeness of the world, broke. And the wholeness of the world, the light of the world was scattered into a thousand thousand fragments of light, and they fell into all events and all people, where they remain deeply hidden until this very day. Now, according to my grandfather, the whole human race is a response to this accident. We are here because we are born with the capacity to find the hidden light in all events and all people, to lift it up and make it visible once again and thereby to restore the innate wholeness of the world. It’s a very important story for our times. And this task is called tikkun olam in Hebrew. It’s the restoration of the world.*

(* Rachel Naomi Remen, interviewed by Krista Tippett on Speaking of Faith, Nov 2008)

 

I Get by with a Little Help from My Friends

Over the roughly twenty years that Jim and I have been doing this work, we have often found ourselves talking story strategy with friends who, like us, are running small businesses—a podcast producer, a local contractor, an architect, a microbrewer, a personal trainer, and lots of others. These conversations have not been organized in a systematic way like the experience of Character Camp, but we find ourselves using the same tools and drawing on the same insights. After all, the category conflict of retail (wants versus needs) is just as relevant when you are running an artisan boutique as it is for Walmart or Target. The category conflicts of coffee (special versus everyday and stimulating versus relaxing) apply to a neighborhood micro roaster as much as they apply to Starbucks.

One of the things I’ve noticed about the pandemic is that it is an amplifier and accelerator of almost everything it touches, including story. Brands, large and small, that had a firm grasp of who they were before the crisis have, in many cases, been able to double down on their story and gain a great deal of traction by showing up in character. Brands whose sense of meaning and purpose was not clear or not deeply held have sometimes appeared opportunistic and shallow. As Warren Buffett said, in a slightly different context, “It’s only when the tide goes out that you see who’s been swimming naked.”

From a purely financial point of view, many small businesses seem uniquely vulnerable in the current economic catastrophe. But from a story point of view many of these same small businesses have strengths that big brands only dream of (or remember from their youth). It’s all about knowing who you are and finding ways to express who you are in the way your business shows up during this crisis.

In that spirit, my colleagues and I were thinking about ways we could show up, and it occurred to us that we could explicitly offer to do what we’ve been doing casually all along. So, if you have a friend running a small business who could use some perspective, advice and support, send them to us. It could be a colleague who struck out on their own, an adult child, niece or nephew running a restaurant, a gym, or a landscaping service. Or it could be a non-profit whose board you serve on. There is no charge. In fact, in our business, there is never a charge for casual conversations about story and brand; we just love talking about this stuff.

We’d love to help, so just contact me or give your friend our contact information.

Trust Me

In 2010, I did a TED Talk, titled “Is it Better to be Loyal or Honest?” My talk was based on the idea that humans subscribe to two different systems of ethics, one which supports the smooth functioning of the marketplace, and one which enables the effective authority of a king—or, today, a government. 

The important thing to consider from a brand-building point of view is that many large brands must try to adhere to both systems, even though the ethical principles of the two systems are frequently in conflict. This is particularly important when it comes to building trust, because it turns out that the meaning of “trustworthy” changes as a brand becomes more successful, more ubiquitous, and more powerful. 

When a new brand enters the marketplace, trust is mostly about honesty: Can the brand actually deliver what it promises? Is the product worth what it costs? If the brand grows big and powerful, different questions arise: Does the company have my best interests at heart, or is it just focused on enriching itself? Is the brand going to use its power to push products (on me, my kids, my neighbors) that it knows are bad for us? At the end of the day, who is the brand actually loyal to?

Trust is a fat word. I trust you to deliver a product or service that is worth what you charge for it means something different from, I trust you to be a force for good. The do-what-you-say kind of trust is easier for consumers to wrap their minds around and easier for brands to measure. The do-what-you-say kind of trust is essential to building a brand of any value in the first place, but it is not enough to sustain that value in the long term. I may be pleased with a brand that delivers what it promises, but my relationship with that brand is conditional. If the brand fails to deliver, even once, or if someone else is able to deliver marginally better value or better service, then my loyalty to the brand is likely to fray.

If a company grows big enough and powerful enough, the threat to the brand goes beyond frayed loyalty. The more I come to depend on a brand, the more uncomfortable I get with a relationship that is defined in mostly commercial, transactional terms. To the extent that I depend on a brand, I would like to think that the power that I’ve given it is being used in my interest. That’s where the force-for-good kind of trust becomes particularly relevant. If I begin to suspect that my interaction with a brand represents the pursuit of my own short-term comfort and convenience at the expense of a lot that I cherish in the long term, then I may start to feel a little uncomfortable about patronizing that brand. 

Consider Walmart. When it started out, selling “national brands for less” to working families in small, underserved markets, it could earn trust simply by delivering what it promised. By the mid 2000’s, however, Walmart was the 1000-pound gorilla of retail, and many people had serious doubts that the brand had their best interest at heart. Walmart’s smiley-faced icon, originally a kind of Robin Hood character enthusiastically rolling back prices, was widely coopted by the company’s critics as an emblem of corporate greed, representing the sacrifice of real value on the alter of low price, and signaling the exploitation of working families and the disruption of small-town culture. 

It is difficult for any massive company to convince its customers that it is ultimately acting as a force for good. A brand can build this kind of trust only if its customers are convinced that it believes in something beyond making money. In a story, we don’t begin to trust a character until we understand that character’s objective and see what it costs them to pursue it. 

The first kind of trust is an expression of honesty: I trust you to do what you say. Honesty serves efficiency; it does not inherently require warmth or compassion. But unless I believe that you are driven by some objective beyond just making money, I will fear—quite reasonably—that your increasing efficiency and effectiveness might end up transforming my world for the worse. The second kind of trust is an expression of loyalty: I trust you to have my best interests at heart—not just what I might want in the moment, but what I will need in the long term to insure my own well being and that of my family, my community, and my world.

Just like the tension between honesty and loyalty in any personal relationship, you can’t build a brand by committing to one side of the conflict at the expense of the other. Simply doubling down on convenience, price leadership and reliability can lead a big brand to justify anything that is efficient and profitable, which can end up alienating big groups of stakeholders. That is what happened to Walmart, and it took a massive effort on their part to rebuild trust by signaling—through their actions—that there is something bigger than profit that the brand believes in when it is at its best.

As with a personal relationship, the only healthy way forward is to relentlessly pursue both honesty and loyalty at the same time—without pretending that there is no conflict between the two. A brand needs to deliver what it promises. At the same time a brand needs to stand up for the long-term well being of its customers, its stakeholders, and the communities in which it lives. At important moments in the life of any brand, those two objectives will collide in some dramatic way.

Embracing this kind of conflict is not a skill most brands have cultivated. A competitive mindset treats conflict as a battle to be won. An analytical approach treats conflict as a problem to be solved. These classic brand-building tools are not wrong, but when it comes to building trust they are not particularly helpful. The whole strength of story as a strategic tool is that, in the world of story, conflict is a source of energy and authenticity. Embracing the conflict—between honesty and loyalty, between short-term wants and long-term needs—is the only way to build the kind of trust that makes a brand both profitable and sustainable.

I can think of lots of brands for which trust has eroded in inverse proportion to their success. If you have some examples of brands that have maintained or even increased trust as they have grown, I would love to hear them.

Tony Rogers and Kurt Kane on Courage and Storytelling

Two of my favorite marketers recently did an episode of the CMO Moves podcast together. Among other things, they do a great job of describing the strategic value of story. Kurt Kane recently moved from CMO to President at Wendy’s, and Tony Rogers went from CMO at Walmart to Chief Member Officer for Sam’s Club.

Early in the conversation, Tony describes Wendy’s approach as courageous because, he says, “It feels like you guys have decided on a personality for the brand and you really stick to it.” He asks if that is the key to all the earned media that Wendy’s has been enjoying.

Kurt responds that it all comes back to storytelling. He points out that being really direct and behaving as a challenger to the QSR category has been an authentic part of the Wendy’s story going back at least as far as the iconic “Where’s the beef?” commercial in 1984. He explains how understanding that story dynamic, and using it to embrace the conflict inherent in the brand, gives them the confidence to double down on the story, especially in social media.

Here’s the link to the podcast.

Both Tony and Kurt have been through Character Camp a number of times over the past 14 years. Each time I go through the story framework process with them, I get new perspective on ways that effective and experienced leaders can leverage the stories of their brands.

I hope you find their conversation as interesting as I did.

The Data Dilemma

Building a competitive advantage that is sustainable over time depends on the interplay between data and story. Data alone is just table stakes these days. In a marketplace awash in data, story serves three vital functions without which all the data you collect is of little value. The first function, which was the subject of a previous essay, is to provide a framework that makes it possible for your audience to hear what you have to say and remember it. The second function of story is to provide an organizing principle to help you figure out what to measure and how to think about the information that your measurement provides. That is the subject of this essay. Jim and I are also working on one more essay to address the third function of story—to anchor a relationship with your audience that allows you to use all this insight to secure a sustainable competitive advantage.

With regard to the second function, figuring out what to measure and how to think about the information you collect, here’s the underlying principle: In the social sciences, any question that can be answered by quantitative analysis alone is probably a trivial question. I understand that direct measurement of certain variables is essential to running a business of any size. But my experience is that anything you can determine by quantitative analysis alone is unlikely to give you a sustainable competitive advantage, primarily because your competitors either have, or soon will have, access to that same information.

With regard to the “hard problems,” the ones that ultimately determine success or failure in the marketplace, the role of data is not to solve the problem directly. In fact, data can actually complicate the problem if it is not understood in the context of story. A good and enduring example of this phenomenon is the legendary New Coke debacle. The marketers at Coke had persuasive data suggesting that a sweeter formula would help them turn around decades-long share losses and boost relevance with younger audiences. But in the words of then Coca-Cola President and Chief Operating Officer Donald Keough, “The simple fact is that all the time and money and skill poured into consumer research on the new Coca-Cola could not measure or reveal the deep and abiding emotional attachment to original Coca-Cola felt by so many people.” The data was there, but without an understanding of the story playing in people’s heads, the data was not just unhelpful, it was misleading and dangerous.

Data does have a role to play in relation to the hard problems, but its role is not to solve the problems. The key function of all this data, properly analyzed, is to surface patterns that are not visible to the naked eye. Once you can see these patterns, you can develop a hypothesis about what they might mean. The hypothesis is the story that you tell yourself about the possible meaning of the patterns in the numbers. Then, if you’re a good scientist, you say to yourself, “If my hypothesis is true, then such and such ought to also be true,” and you design a further study and collect new data in an effort to get closer to the truth.

This interplay between data and story is the virtuous cycle that builds value in a brand. You have a hunch about some aspect of your business—product formulation, price sensitivity, package design, brand extensions, social-media strategy, whatever. You frame that hunch as a testable hypothesis and collect the data to prove or disprove it. Based on what you learn, you refine your hypothesis and collect more data. Rinse and repeat. But if you have no clear articulation of the story framework of your brand, then, for the most part, you are simply racing against your competition to refine hunches about the category as a whole or, worse, following data in a way that dilutes the emotional attachment people feel toward your brand.

I have a friend who runs marketing at a large consumer-products company. He is focused on providing the right experience to the right people at the right time and place. The trick, of course, is to understand how story and data interact with regard to each element:

• Right experience: Data plays a role in validating a proposed activity or communication, but the question of which experience is “right” for the brand is ultimately a story question that your audience can’t answer for you.

• Right people: Research is an essential tool for understanding your target, but if you want to sustain your competitive advantage, you need an authentic relationship with your audience. (More about this in the next essay.)

• Right time and place: Data is the main driver here, especially in a digital, programmatic world with a vast array of media to choose from.

In the end, of course, if there is no story expressed in the way the activity or communication is presented to your audience, then your marketing initiative won’t qualify as an experience, and no one will remember what you are trying to communicate.

Think about something as tangible as price. You can research elasticity of demand against price in your category, but this research won’t tell you anything about what meaning your consumers attribute to the pricing decisions you make. Pricing communicates something quite different about a value brand than it does about a premium one. Or consider packaging. Suppose you are selling hot sauce in glass bottles, and you want to know whether you would lose customers by switching to plastic. Before you can gather useful data, you have to understand the meaning of your brand story and the role of those glass bottles in communicating that meaning. If you start with the story framework, you can frame your questions in a way that gets at the relationship your customers have with your brand, and you can parse their answers in a way that provides unique and actionable insight. Otherwise, there is a danger that you are primarily probing your customers on the rational side of their brains, which probably has little to do with how they actually decide what to buy.

Over time, it is hard to win based on math alone, even if you are better at the math than everybody else in your category. On the other hand, if you can combine your math skills with your experience and your creative intuition in order to find meaningful patterns in the numbers, then you can build a relationship with your customers that is authentic, motivating, resilient and long-lasting.

Escape from Beacon Rock

While you’re waiting for the next essay on data and story, I have a more personal piece to offer. It might particularly appeal to you if you have raised, or are raising, a teenager. The conflicts that drive this story are safety versus freedom and autonomy versus connection, two of the big ones. And it’s all true.

Here is the synopsis that appears on The Dirtbag Diaries website:

“For me, it was a way to stay connected—literally: tied to my free-range daughter by a length of 10-millimeter climbing rope, and connected to my own dream of being an adventurer,” says David Altschul. “And that was how I found myself, a few days later, on a ledge, high above the Columbia River, in the dark.”

For the past decade, David has told the story of the infamous “Escape From Beacon Rock”—a failed attempt to climb a basalt monolith with his daughter, our producer, Jen. At age 72, it dawned on him that, rather than continue to tell the story of the failed climb, he could connect with his daughter by actually climbing Beacon Rock, and doing it this time as a ‘real’ climber.

If you are a regular podcast listener, just search for The Dirtbag Diaries and click on the latest episode, “Escape from Beacon Rock.”, or find it here on iTunes.

Alternatively, here is The Dirtbag Diaries website. And here’s a link to the episode on Soundcloud.

This story has almost nothing to do with marketing, except perhaps for a glimpse at how Patagonia spends some of its social media dollars, but I thought you might like it.

End of Story

A friend of mine is head of marketing at a large retailer. He understands my fascination with story, and he knows how much leverage he gets when one of his storytelling efforts goes viral. But honestly, in his heart of hearts, I know he would be happier if his organization could master the data so perfectly that he would never have to worry about storytelling again. In his fantasy marketplace, he would know what you want before you want it. He would present you with what you want, at the price you are willing to pay, at the moment you are ready and willing to buy it. He would never waste your time—or his marketing dollars—presenting you information when you weren’t in the market for it. In my friend’s marketing paradise, the relationship you have with his brand is purely transactional, but every transaction is so pure (so seamless, so effortless) that you love his brand and always shop there first. Well, maybe love is a bit of a stretch, but at least you think well of his brand, on the occasions when you happen to think of it at all.

I understand the attraction of this fantasy. Story is messy. Storytelling is hard. Using story effectively requires both good creative judgment and the ability to manage creative people (which I know, having spent two decades of my life running an animation studio, can be a real pain in the ass). To do storytelling well requires that you embrace and sustain conflict. And, story is difficult to measure. Story seems like a lot of trouble. I see why my friend imagines that running his business would be less stressful if he could dispense with story and turn marketing into a real science.

The fantasy underpinning my friend’s marketing paradise is perfect information, perfectly delivered. Data would be so comprehensive and so thoroughly analyzed that it would be possible to know exactly what information to serve, who to serve it to, and when to serve it. Information communicated in this way would not need to suggest any meaning deeper than this: Here is what we are offering. These are the functional attributes. This is what it costs. The purpose of such a business is to make money for its shareholders by providing stuff its customers want. End of story.

Which is ironic, because all the current science of how the brain works suggests that a business model based on this fantasy would collapse of its own weight. The brain takes in information in a completely different way than it absorbs story. In fact, the brain is a story sponge and an information filter. Most of the energy our brains expend while we are awake is spent sifting through the almost infinite stream of incoming data looking for the few bits of information that, if strung together in a particular sequence, might be meaningful. In fact, that’s what story is: A sequence of events that communicates meaning.

Our brains have evolved in a way that makes particular use of story. We observe patterns of events, search for connections, and try to find the meaning in them. Our ability to make connections and derive meaning from them has provided a fundamental evolutionary advantage. As a result, our brains reward us for finding these patterns in the data. By the same token, if the stream of information doesn’t seem to mean anything, then there is no reason to pay attention, and we remember almost none of that information, unless it concerns something we happen to need at the precise moment when we encounter it.

It’s this inconvenient truth about how the brain works that undermines my friend’s fantasy of a perfect, scientifically managed marketplace. You can see the problem clearly if you look at his business from the point of view of the relationship between his customers and his brand. If he succeeds in mastering the data so as to provide a perfect flow of information, leading to a series of purely rational transactions, then his brand becomes invisible. At best, you might relate to it the way you relate to a well-functioning utility.

In fact, the comparison with a well-functioning utility is apt. The more my friend succeeds in building his business through scientific marketing alone, the more the relationship between his brand and his customers will be shallow and fragile. A relationship based on a series of transactions has very little resilience. If a company promises to deliver electricity every time I flip a switch or plug in a lamp, then that company becomes largely invisible until the power fails—or until I have to pay the bill. If a big retailer promises the lowest prices, always, then my relationship with that retailer will come to be defined by that promise. The first time I become aware that I could have bought the same thing for a lower price someplace else, I will feel foolish and betrayed.

Ultimately, because of the way the brain processes information, your customers will make story out of their interaction with your business whether you explicitly present a story or not. If they experience your business as a well-oiled machine with no higher purpose than facilitating seamless transactions, your customers will assume you are just in business to make money. They will instinctively adopt a defensive posture toward you because they know how that story goes: the character who is motivated by an interest in money for its own sake is always the villain. That is the narrative that threatened to overwhelm Walmart in the early to mid 2000s, when it lost control of its story to its critics.

In the end, the fantasy is that any business can dispense with story. If you are running a business that has a relationship with its customers that goes beyond the transaction, then there is, by definition, a story playing in their heads. That story is an expression of what you do and why you do it. What you do is your purpose, and why you do it is the meaning of your story. If your customers believe that there is meaning in what you do, then they will have a framework with which to organize all the information you want to present to them. That is the only reason they might remember that information, and think well of your brand, the next time they have a need for what you offer.

What is Story For?

“The storytelling monkeys”—that’s an expression my partner Jim has used for years to describe what distinguishes humans from other animals. I always thought it was a clever turn of phrase, but I didn’t understand the profound importance of that idea until I read Sapiens by Yuval Harari. The book showed up on the favorites list of a lot of smart and famous people, including Bill Gates, Barack Obama and Mark Zuckerberg. The subtitle—A Brief History of Humankind—gives you a sense of its subject and scope, but what really sells it for me is the premise, which I would articulate in three words: story is everything.

Here’s the logic: Seventy thousand years ago, homo sapiens was one of half a dozen species of hominids living quietly on the Earth, organized into tribes or extended families that usually numbered no more than 70 or 80 individuals. What distinguished us from the Neanderthals and other, now extinct, proto-humans was not the size of our brain or the strength of our muscles or any unique capacity for making tools. What distinguished us was our imagination. It was our imagination that opened the door to shared fictions—stories—which made it possible for vastly larger groups of people to cooperate. Whether you are talking about the supernatural powers of jealous gods, the divine right of hereditary kings, the inalienability of human rights or the value of paper money, without such stories the largest group of individuals that can cooperate in a flexible way is around 70 or 80. Story—the shared belief in fictions that have no physical reality—makes it possible to coordinate the activity of almost unlimited numbers. Consider for example the virtually universal belief in the value of American dollars that underpins the global financial system.

The hypothesis is that the human mind evolved to facilitate imagination and shared belief because that skill gives humans an extraordinary evolutionary advantage. As Harari pointed out in his TED talk, an average human would not fair very well against an average Neanderthal, or even against an average chimpanzee. Even 80 humans would probably be defeated by an equal number of Neanderthals or chimps. But once thousands of humans could cooperate in a flexible and intentional way, there was nothing on Earth that could stop them.

I think this hypothesis is fascinating all by itself, but it is also deeply relevant to marketing in particular, and to human enterprise in general. Think about it this way: The mind is optimized to support shared beliefs that facilitate massive and flexible cooperation. In fact, in the general run of human affairs the amount of decision making that is based solely on a rational calculation of costs and benefits is vanishingly small. The brain processes virtually all incoming information in the context of stories. If you want to connect with other people, whether as a marketer, a politician, an adversary or a friend, you have to do and say things that provide clues that support a story they already have playing in their heads. And ideally, the way you act in the world will demonstrate that you share a belief in that story with them.

Most of the time, in most areas of our lives, we do all this storytelling intuitively. If you are involved in a group storytelling process, however, like a TV series, a political campaign or a brand-building initiative, it is very difficult to harness the full power of story unless you can articulate the elements of your story and use that framework as an organizing principle for everything you do and say.

In my own life, I have come to believe that there are just a few irreducible feelings—happy, sad, angry, fearful—and that everything else, including the ideas my mind generates to explain the feelings, is story. I wonder if you agree.

The Illusion of Simplicity

Can you capture the essence of a brand in a single word? A couple of days ago, a friend in Dallas raised this question, citing Southwest Airlines as a case in point. His perspective is that, early on, the leadership at Southwest seems to have landed on the idea that flying wasn’t very much fun, and they set out to change that. So, according to my friend, they chose fun as the essence of the brand, and the story just took off from there. (Pun, I suppose, intended.)

Of course fun, by itself, is not a story. Without conflict there is no story, and our experience is that without story there is no way to build an emotional relationship between the brand and its audience. Given that Southwest Airlines had, at least for the first couple of decades, a very unique and resonant relationship with its customers, I started thinking about where the conflict energy came from to power its story. The word that most frequently sits opposite fun in brand stories is responsible. And responsible versus fun certainly makes sense as the driving energy for the story of an airline because, no matter how much fun you have doing it, running an airline carries with it an immense weight of responsibility.

It is important to understand that Southwest could tell a compelling story, while seeming to put all its emphasis on fun, only because it powerfully cued its responsible energy at the same time, but in less overt ways. First, Southwest—even in its name but certainly through its actions—suggested an affinity for salt-of-the-earth values, plain dealing and equality that seemed highly responsible. In addition, a deep obligation to act responsibly is baked into the airline category. If Southwest had seemed blasé about safety or if its early safety record had been anything but sterling, its story would have collapsed. Instead, Southwest focused with pride on its flawless safety record and its young fleet of aircraft. So I think my friend was partly right. Southwest did get a lot of traction from using fun as a simple anchor for a lot of its actions and communications. But without the implicit conflict between fun and responsible, the brand story would have been shallow and would have gotten old quickly.

What Southwest did in air travel is similar to what Geico accomplished in insurance. While Geico may, on the surface, seem to be entirely playful, the brand story is actually powered by a conflict between serious and playful. Geico can get a lot of story energy from that conflict while projecting ridiculously playful behavior because the very idea of insurance carries so much of the serious energy. And just as the Southwest story would not have survived a casual attitude toward safety, Geico would lose traction quickly if it did not seem serious in the way it handles claims.

Both Geico and Southwest built their stories as challenger brands, and, in part, this is an illustration of the kind of story energy a challenger brand can get by playing against the conventions of its category. When a brand ignores or denies the conflict, however, and tries instead to focus on a single word, a lot of energy can drain out of the story. Consider Volvo during the decades when it worked hard to own safety. A car brand can certainly use the conflict of safety versus freedom to power a very compelling story. And starting in the 1960s, Volvo did have a compelling story built on the legendary slogan Drive it like you hate it. That story got a lot of additional traction because, during the decades following the Second World War, freedom was deeply baked into the idea of owning a car (See the USA in your Chevrolet). But by the 1980s, Volvo was using safety more as a single-pointed theme than as one side of a conflict. As a result, Volvo owned the position, but the brand felt kind of shallow, and its relationship with the car-buying audience didn’t have much emotional depth.

I understand how attractive it can be to try to organize a complex marketing effort around a single word. It can work, at least for the short term, because any clear organizing principle is better than none. But, at best, this kind of simplicity leaves a lot of value on the table, and, at worst, it can make the brand vulnerable when circumstances change. In fact, I think Southwest is currently suffering somewhat from its very success. It feels as if the brand is less certain about how to use fun now that Southwest is among the largest domestic carriers. To me, that suggests that the brand never really understood how to use its conflict in a strategic way.

If you can think of examples of other successful brands that generated powerful story energy by taking a strong, simple theme and smashing it against the prevailing energy of their category, I would love hear them.