Here’s a counter-intuitive idea: Great business to business brands know something essential about story that many B2C brands could benefit from learning.

I know. I know. Conventional wisdom is that B2B and story are like oil and vinegar. They don’t mix. B2B buyers aren’t swayed by emotion—they’re not like a consumer audience. They’re not motivated by branding. They’re more rational. So, B2B brands don’t do story.

The fact is that while many B2Bs may not focus on high-profile storytelling, the best understand something essential that can be easy to miss if you are distracted by the idea that brand story is only about advertising. I wish I could claim that insight, but it’s not mine.

“Story isn’t just about what you’re going to say—what commercial you’re going to make—it’s about influencing your strategy, your business, and your culture,” says Melissa Minihan, Head of Digital Commerce and Marketing at Veritiv Corporation. “Story is about defining how you make decisions differently than your competitors in a way that results in benefits for your clients. It’s not just a marketing template. It’s not just about what you are going to say to people to get them to buy from you.”

Melissa shared that idea with me in a recent conversation about her experiences using story in B2B versus B2C. She has a deep understanding of the topic, having led marketing and management at both very large B2C and B2B brands, including The Home Depot, Rubbermaid, STAINMASTER, Antron, Dacron, Lycra, and now Veritiv. If you are unfamiliar with the Veritiv Corporation, you are not alone. It’s one of the biggest B2B companies most people have never heard of, selling packaging, facility solutions, and print to everyone from Lululemon to Boeing.

“To me, a story framework actually works more to your advantage in a B2B business because you’re not creating commercials, you’re creating strategies—business and sales strategies—that frame what you are great at,” Melissa tells me. “And you are giving that to your inside sales team, your digital commerce team, or your actual ‘feet on the street’ sellers and they’re going out and telling that story so you’re getting more margin, or more share, or more of the things that they care about for their compensation, and we care about for our business metrics.”

From Melissa’s perspective, story in B2B provides a coherent way to answer the essential questions that define a B2B brand and how it matters to everyone, outside and inside the organization:

• What do we offer and why?
• What kind of people are we?
• What do we value?
• Why are we better than a competitor—especially one that offers the same, or similar goods or services?

“That’s what we’re trying to arm our salespeople with. Not just price, not just talking about supply chain,” Melissa tells me. In B2B, story isn’t about telling. It’s about articulating and showing the beliefs that define the organization in order to ensure that the story comes through in everything the business is and does.

You can watch the full conversation and get more insights and tips from Melissa in Character’s Fourth Campfire Story: B2B, Brand Story, and the Bottom Line. I’d also love to hear your experience or thoughts on the role of story in B2B.

The best story in the world won’t help your brand for long if you don’t offer something great that your audience needs. So, am I saying that quality is all you need then? If you offer a great product, service, or experience, isn’t that enough? I’ve certainly encountered plenty of businesspeople who question the value of story on those grounds and paraphrase Ralph Waldo Emmerson to remind me, “If you build a better mousetrap the world will beat a path to your door.”

Greg Hughes, the President and CEO of Suntory Global Spirits, recently discussed with me the role of quality versus story when it comes to branding. “If all you really do is make the best products, but you don’t connect that to consumers in some way that is relevant to their life through story, well then nobody engages, and you don’t deliver an experience that allows the craftsmanship to get out into the world,” Greg told me.

“There are some core philosophies and values of Suntory,” he explained, “one of which is a Japanese word called monozukuri which basically translates into a relentless commitment to quality from seed to sip. But that’s paired with a Japanese word that we also talk a lot about called monogatari, which literally means story. And what we’re trying to do in all of our brands is join what we view to be our competitive difference with the story that makes that craftsmanship relevant.” In this age of choice paralysis and the over-abundance of high-quality goods and services, he warned, it’s more important than ever to connect with audiences in ways that motivate and engage them.

Greg offered three great tips for ensuring you embrace both monozukuri/quality and monogatari/story in your branding.

• Don’t be too literal. Functional benefits are important but, as Greg points out, “If you don’t stay relevant in terms of meaning, there are very easy ways for people to find the same functional benefit from your category with a different brand.”
• Make sure you really understand the truth underlying your brand. Brands are complex, especially spirits brands, but complexity is confusing. That’s why it’s essential to articulate the heart of what your brand is about and push through to a simple statement of its meaning. “If you get the core right and put the effort into the simplicity,” Greg elaborated, “it becomes much easier to know how to tell your story in multiple different contexts. If you don’t know that, then you just come off as complicated and confusing, and people don’t engage.”
• Don’t build brands by committee. “You can’t tell a good story or develop a good story by committee, and if you’re too safe or vanilla in your marketing, people are just going to ignore it.”

You can watch the full conversation and hear more great tips and watchouts from Greg in Character’s third Campfire Story: Monozukuri and Monogatari. And if you’ve ever had an experience with a product or service that was clearly superior to its competition but didn’t seem able to break through, or had a great story to tell but for a product or service that didn’t fully live up to it, I’d love to get your perspective.

One of the difficulties in telling an ongoing story, whether for a brand, a long-running TV series, or movie franchise, is keeping things interesting, relevant, and engaging without betraying the fundamental story the audience was drawn to. If the places you take the story stay too familiar, the show can start to feel formulaic. Sorry, Jack Bauer and ‘24’. If you explore territory too far afield it can seem like you’re just making things up as you go. Sorry Jack Shephard and ‘Lost’. If you do both, it just gets confusing and annoying. Sorry Jack Sparrow and the ‘Pirates of the Caribbean’ films.

Lee Susen, Chief Sales and Marketing Officer at Mcllhenny Company, maker of TABASCO® Brand Sauce, was kind enough to sit down with me to talk about the challenges of marketing a brand that’s been a leader in its category for more than 150 years.

“The necessity of breaking through in a meaningful way is more important now than it’s ever been,” Lee told me.

Lee says that, as part of an exercise to write a 100-year plan for the brand, he and other TABASCO® Brand leaders asked themselves, “How do you leverage, honor, and be inspired by where you’ve come from as you endeavor to continue to grow into the future?” According to Lee, it’s easy to get trapped in unprovable speculation about what consumers will be thinking, or hung up on current product forms and their uses, when what’s really central to answering long terms questions about relevance is meaning.

“That’s what allowed us to have a conversation about the next 100 years,” Lee explained. “The problems we were trying to solve became secondary to the fundamental truth of well, who are we? And why do we do what we do as an organization? Where are we going?” With those questions answered, “Everything else falls into place,” he notes.

You can watch the full conversation and see more insights and advice from Lee in Character’s second Campfire Story: Writing for the 156^th season of the TABASCO® Show.

We’re launching a new thing today that we’re calling Character Campfire stories. For almost 25 years now, we’ve been running Character Camps to help brand leaders and their teams better understand and work with the key principles that underlie great storytelling. In the course of that work, we’ve had the pleasure of connecting with some fantastic people who’ve done an excellent job of using story to build their brands and drive their brand strategy. I don’t know why it took so long, but it finally occurred to us that it might be valuable to talk with some of these folks on camera so that we could share a bit of their experience and insight with a wider audience. Today we’re happy to present the first of those conversations.

Our inaugural guest is a Character Camp alumnus 8 times over, Douwe Bergsma. We first met and worked with Douwe when he was the brand manager of Pringles at Procter and Gamble. After that, he became the first CMO ever at Georgia Pacific, holding that position for 9 years. These days he is the CMO of Piedmont Healthcare, overseeing the marketing, communications, and physician outreach for their 23 hospitals and 44 thousand care givers. In addition to that work, Douwe is the Dean for the Cannes Lions’ Brand Marketers Academy, a founding member of the CMO Collaborative, and serves on the board of directors of the Association of National Advertisers, among other accomplishments.

Douwe took on his position at Piedmont Healthcare a mere four weeks before the beginning of the COVID pandemic. We’ve titled this first Campfire Story after something Douwe said when I asked him how he felt about that momentous coincidence: “When the world is on fire, why not work for the fire department?” A typical sentiment from an extraordinary person.

Later in the conversation, Douwe lists the top four challenges he believes stand in the way of activating story for brands. I’m interested to know if there are other challenges you would add to the list. And, of course, I’d love to know what you think of our first ever Campfire Story!

We were helping a brand team work through how to use their story framework on the final day of Character Camp.

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Have you met Sara? She’s the account director at Character—responsible for making sure everything is in order and under control. It was literally eleven years ago last month that she came in to work with a black eye and bruises around her neck. Before Wayne and I even managed to jump up from our chairs in alarm, she cut us off.

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Over the next few years, infusing more passion into her life resulted in plenty of busted lips, ugly bruises, and black eyes. And then there was the night she had to go to the hospital and was out for days because of a concussion and the need for stitches.

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She lost.

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“I got my butt kicked,” she told us when she got back.

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Sara fought in her most recent Championship Tournament at the beginning of last month. This one was in Vegas. The Christmas Cowboy Convention was in town at the same time.

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Although none of our clients noticed it at camp, all of that was what Sara meant when she shot me her look.

Here’s a link to Sara’s LinkedIn post about her black belt ceremony.

Clearly, the holidays have got me thinking about gifts! I’ve always felt that, like people, brands are born with inherent gifts—strengths, talents, and notes of personality—that help define them when they’re at their best. Here’s an Adidas ad from the London Olympics, and here’s a Nike ad from the London Olympics. I’d love to hear your perspective on the difference between Nike and Adidas, if you’ve got one, or your thoughts on other brands that appear to make products that are similar to each other but clearly live in different story spaces. Happy Holidays to you!

So much has already been said about the Bud Light issue I’d decided I wasn’t going to write about it. But then I was watching a show with my oldest daughter, the one who’s been obsessed with horses since she was four, and this ad came on.

I’m so proud of that kid.

One of the enduring advantages I’ve seen when a brand has an internal consensus on its story framework—the foundational elements that make its story go—is that it makes it easier to own when you get thrown. Having an agreement on the heart of your story is like having a new set of eyes through which to view the brand—a different perspective than what you might get through a competitive or science lens. Knowing your story helps you define and agree on your brand’s values in a way that helps the audience understand who you really are.

I’ve seen lots of brand values statements over the last twenty years that list the same generically positive descriptors anyone would like, and nobody would object to. That’s not the kind of values I’m talking about. When you think about a brand from a story perspective—like it’s a character in the story of its category—then you realize that its values are supposed to define it by embodying what it believes in. Your brand values should make it clear what the brand stands for, will sacrifice for, is willing to fight for. And not just for the edification of your consumers, but as an instruction set for those who bring your brand to life. Values aren’t supposed to be generic and easy. They’re supposed to be defining and meaningful, which can make them difficult to live by and live up to.

Having a foundation built on hard values not only helps you decide what to do and not do, it helps you own your decisions and understand the difference between “making a mistake” and “taking a stand”. Coming at branding from a competitive or science perspective, it can be hard to justify any move that would result in conflict. That tends to push brands toward bland and generically positive values. In story though, conflict is an asset—it’s the engine that makes your story go. It engages audiences and defines who a character really is. Anybody can pretend to be awesome when things are going well. We learn who characters, people, and brands really are when we see how they react in the moments when things go wrong—when they get thrown. Consequently, a solid consensus on your brand’s authentic story can give it the ability to own the energy of its struggles, harness it, and ride its conflicts. That allows you to keep steering the identity of the brand for your audience instead of handing the reins off to your critics.

Unfortunately, without a consensus on their story and a handle on their authentic values, many brands wind up afraid of their conflicts and living in denial of their flaws and vulnerabilities. They can’t own their conflicts and internal struggles, so they ignore them, pretend they don’t exist, or act like there’s no problem.

I thought this earlier Bud Light ad hit that nail right on the head. Pouring down rain on our big outdoor festival? No problem! It’s actually awesome! Unfortunately, instead of making a brand’s problems go away, denying or ignoring a conflict the audience is aware of tends to come across like hand-waving to distract them. Denying or ignoring the problem almost always makes things worse and deepens negative perceptions of the brand.

Bud Light is in a bad place. It has stirred up a giant controversy and doesn’t seem to have a north star to follow to find its way out of the resulting firestorm. Instead of owning the conflict and taking a stand one way or the other, it’s trying hard to pretend nothing is wrong and hoping it will all just go away. That’s making some otherwise pretty solid commercials—communications that might have felt moving and authentic under a different set of circumstances—look clumsily manipulative and disingenuous.

It’s interesting to contrast how Bud Light reacted with what Nike did in a very similar situation. At approximately the same time as Bud Light (April of 2023), Nike also associated itself with the same influencer and, likewise, stirred up considerable controversy. However, when critics challenged that relationship, instead of backing down, Nike doubled down. It challenged its audience to, “be kind, be inclusive, and encourage each other.” This response seems to flow directly out of Nike’s values regarding equity and teamwork. Nike made a stand consistent with the brand identity, and by and large, that took a lot of the wind out of the opposition. Bud Light, on the other hand, has backpedaled furiously—not to take a stand, but to avoid taking one. And, to date, its $15K influencer promotion has cost the brand its long-standing position as the world’s best-selling beer, close to $400 million in sales, and by some estimates, nearly $27 Billion in shareholder value. It’s tough to say if Bud Light will ever be able to admit it got thrown, quit pretending everything is fine, and do something really hard—dust off, stand up for something it believes in, and get back in the saddle. In the meantime, it will continue to look like the only things the brand really values are popularity, money, and easy choices.

Conflict is an engagement engine.

I’m not saying people like conflict. Most don’t. But it does capture and compel our attention.

That’s why conflict is the fuel that drives stories. Stories start when something goes wrong—the world falls out of balance—and they keep going until the conflict is resolved—the end. As long as the conflict is going, so is the story.

Conflict should be one of every brand’s primary tools. If you want to fuel engagement for your brand, show conflict.

Knowing that, it can be tempting to just pick a good conflict and run with it. Unfortunately, if you pick a conflict that’s not authentically part of the experience of your brand, you’re likely to create an engaging story that audiences don’t connect to your brand. Have you ever seen a really funny commercial but had a hard time remembering which brand it was for? Or worse, an emotionally moving commercial that shoots itself in the foot at the end by revealing a brand connection that leaves you scoffing? That’s the kind of thing I’m talking about. The conflict has pulled you in, but the connection to the brand just isn’t there or doesn’t feel authentic.

Identifying authentic conflict in your brand can feel like a struggle because most of the current tools of brand building were designed to ignore or minimize conflict. Your brand is supposed to offer a perfect solution to a problem for the audience. You’ve fixed it. Now the audience lives happily ever after, The End. That’s not using conflict, that’s denying it.

So, how can you find conflicts that will build your brand? One way to kick-start the process is to begin by looking at your category.

Every brand exists within a category—like transportation, insurance, cosmetics, laundry detergent, or food—and every category has an inherent category conflict. Whether you are aware of it or not, your brand is already connected to that conflict, and you can consciously use it to power your brand story and increase engagement and connection with your audience.

Every category of goods or services is built on a struggle between conflicting needs that people are trying to address through their use of those goods or services. For example, food.

When someone puts out a tray of snacks at a meeting that offers both raw veggies and M&M’s, you can watch people struggle as they consider what to choose. Should they pick the wholesome, good-for-them choice, or the indulgent, delicious choice? If they pick the M&M’s, should they only take a few? If they have some carrot wedges and broccoli florets first, can they take a whole handful of M&M’s?

What they’re wrestling with is the food-category conflict—virtue versus pleasure. This conflict captures the struggle people face when choosing between foods as safe, nourishing fuels to keep them healthy and alive versus foods as sensual, pleasurable experiences that satisfy them physically and emotionally.

Often, if not always, these impulses pull in opposite directions, causing people to struggle with their food choices. Healthy, whole foods lean toward the virtue side of the struggle. Delicious, treat-foods lean toward the pleasure side. Most foods fall somewhere along the spectrum between the two poles. All brands within the category, whether they are conscious of it or not, participate in the struggle and have the potential to suggest their distinct perspective or point of view about how to choose. And in the end, that’s mostly what a brand is—the crystallization of a distinct point of view about how to thrive when torn between the positive opposite urges that shape a particular category.

Anyone who has been to Character Camp knows that one of my favorite examples of harnessing the virtue-versus-pleasure conflict of the food category to drive engagement is M&Ms. There was about a forty-year period in which the M&M characters denied the conflict of their category and suffered for it. From the 1950s to the mid ‘90s, Red, Yellow and their friends were just pleased as punch to be eaten by fans of the brand and didn’t seem to care about anything other than letting the audience know they were delicious chocolate candies with a thin sugar shell. That got them to a point where virtually everyone knew who they were and no one really cared.

All of that changed in 1995, when the brand introduced conflict in the characters. The new incarnations of Red, Yellow, and the gang were torn between the pleasure of being loved and appreciated versus their desire to stay safe and alive. And overnight, they went from ranking near the bottom of brand-character popularity to literally outperforming Santa Claus and Mickey Mouse—raising the profile and significantly improving the financial performance of the M&Ms brand in the process.

Like M&M’s, your category conflict is waiting to be tapped as a source of connection and engagement for your brand. If you want to make more effective use of story, your category conflict can make an excellent starting point.