Chicken Nuggets of Truth

On Saturday, my seventeen-year-old daughter surprised me by suggesting that she’d like Wendy’s chicken nuggets for lunch. You may need a little more information to understand why that’s surprising. We live in Portland, Oregon, which means that she’s grown up hearing from teachers and friends that big food companies are evil and that if you are going to eat a chicken you should be able to confirm that it was raised free and happy. Ideally you should know what it ate, where it was born and even what its name was. That’s not just a Portlandia joke. That kind of attitude is in the air here. She’s also a teenager, which means she’s routinely seething with righteous indignation and anger at the many injustices of the world. Last time I’d checked, she was dead set against all fast-food chains as exploiters of animals, despoilers of the environment and oppressors of working-class people. Believe me, it’s made eating on family vacations very difficult.

So, as I said, I was surprised. I’m sure I should have just taken it as a gift and picked up the nuggets without comment, but I was curious.

“I thought you didn’t like fast-food chains?” I said, trying to sound casual.

“Wendy’s is different,” she told me. “The food is better.”

“How do you know?” I asked. “You’ve only ever eaten there once and that was under protest.”

“Geeze, Dad! That was a million years ago. I eat there with my friends all the time.”

“Since when?”

I don’t know how to write that sound teenagers make when they roll their eyes and cough air up into the roof of their mouth to indicate that someone has just said something unbelievably, monumentally uninformed, but that was her response. Which is odd because there is no Wendy’s remotely close to her school, she doesn’t drive yet, and neither do her friends. I’m pretty sure she’s has not eaten there any time recently.

“Since always. They’re hilarious.”

“They are,” my younger daughter chimed in.

Again, I was flabbergasted. Usually, any chiming in between my girls is just a thinly veiled opening volley in their ongoing war over who wore whose article of clothing without asking first. But this time, it was support.

“Want to see some hilarious videos of their tweet burns?” the little one asked. She wrestled away my phone and showed me two YouTube compilations of Wendy’s tweets with a total of more than nine million views between them. That’s not an exaggeration. They literally have more than nine million views. And both my daughters laughed together over them, agreeing that Wendy’s is the best and that other fast-food brands look ridiculous when they try to “clap back.” Who could argue in the face of evidence like that?

I drove the three of us out to Wendy’s. We all got nuggets, and they tasted as delicious as only fast food can, but I was impressed again by how much the girls enjoyed the food and how vocal they were about it being waaaaaay better than competitive offerings.

Of course, this made me think of Coca-Cola and wine and detergent. Not physically mixed together. That would be gross (and possibly fatal). No, I mean neuroscience experiments around how the taste of Coke and wine and the efficacy of detergent are powerfully influenced by the story playing in your head.

Have you heard of the Pepsi Paradox? The term comes from a neuroscience experiment that was conducted in 2004. Subjects were asked to blind taste test Pepsi and Coke while having their brains scanned in an MRI machine. During these tests, most people reported preferring the flavor of Pepsi, and their brains lit up (showed increased activity) in an area called the ventral putamen, which is associated with pleasure and reward. However, when the exact same people were tested a second time and were able to see the labels of the products they were drinking, almost all of them switched their preference to Coke, and a different region of their brains lit up as well—the medial prefrontal cortex, which is associated with self-image and identity. In other words, when people felt connected to the brand, the product tasted better to them.

While various folks have tried to poke holes in the Pepsi Paradox over the intervening fourteen years, further neuroscience experiments have continued to validate the power of the prefrontal cortex to change our perceptions of “rational” attributes like flavor and efficacy. For example, a study about the taste of wine and how it is impacted by price was widely reported in 2015. In the study, participants were asked to taste wine samples and rate their flavor while undergoing an MRI scan. The samples were identified only by price. Respondents reported that the more expensive wines tasted better than the cheaper ones, although all the samples were of the exact same wine. In fact, the respondents were not lying! According to the MRI results, the reward and pleasure centers of their brains (as well as their tricky prefrontal cortexes) lit up more strongly when they tasted the wines they believed were more expensive, indicating that they took more pleasure in the taste of these wines. In other words, when people believe something is likely to be better, it actually is.

Another great example is the laundry-detergent experiment in which participants were asked to take home three different boxes of laundry detergent, use them all for a few weeks and then report back on which was best and why. One box was mostly yellow, one was mostly blue, and one was a mix of yellow and blue. At the end of the trial period, the respondents overwhelmingly favored the detergent in the yellow and blue box. They backed up their preference with detailed notes about the superior efficacy and performance of that detergent. None of the respondents mentioned the box as a factor in their choice, but, of course, the box was the only difference between the detergents.

“These nuggs sweep Micky Dee’s nuggs under rugs,” my twelve-year-old announced from the back seat of the car, reminding me it was probably better to concentrate on my driving than on neuroscience experiments (despite their relevance). Knowing the science, I didn’t argue with her. There’s probably no way to objectively and definitively establish the relative rug-sweeping abilities of one brand of chicken nuggets over another, but that doesn’t really matter. Wendy’s social-media voice has both my daughters identifying with the brand and recognizing it as more valuable from a social-currency perspective than other brands. And those factors are literally making the food taste better to them. As far as I’m concerned, that’s a tremendously good use of social media and a great reason for any brand to think deeply about its personality and voice when relating to its audience.

“Nuggs under rugs! That’s a good burn,” my seventeen-year-old congratulated her. “You should tweet that to them.”

“Can I get a twitter?” the twelve-year-old demanded of me.

“You have to be thirteen,” I told her. I’m not sure if that’s literally true, but I’m sure the science will support that I think it should be.

From my point of view, the research Jim cites is a dramatic example of the use of data to validate the power of story. I am eager to know if you have other examples from your own experience.

And, to be clear, we are not taking credit for the brilliant use of social media by Wendy’s. We did do a Character Camp for Wendy’s a few years ago, but the story framework of a brand is only the foundation for great storytelling. The Wendy’s brand team and its agency partners have done all the heavy lifting to bring that story to life so effectively.

Google Mugs Father Christmas

I was just starting my annual letter to Santa when I saw a commercial that threatened my entire system of belief. Santa will have to guess what I want this year because this letter felt more important:

Dear Google,

Please tell me that you really aren’t just another brand! I want to believe in the spirit of Google. I want to believe not only that you are smarter and better than those other technology companies but also that you aren’t evil.

First, let me say that, from a story perspective, I love the ads you’ve made so far. I actually use them as examples of how to do storytelling right. With ads like “Jess Time”, “Dear Sophie” and “Make it Happen”, you have played to all the key principles of effective storytelling. You’ve routinely crafted your communications around conflict, you’ve suggested meaning deeper than the surface message, and you’ve never hit me over the head with what you were trying to say. You’ve been thoughtful and engaging, and you’ve seemed to care about what everything means.

That’s why I was so shocked by the Google Chromebook Christmas commercial you aired last night. On the surface, it’s very similar to the other things you have done. It’s an upbeat and even touching montage of people opening gifts and reacting. What’s beautiful about it is that the reactions are so genuine. The unbridled excitement and glee, the occasional eyes that brim with tears&#8212all really capture something about the true joy of giving. Part of that magic is the energetic rock and roll beat of the Christmas tune you set the commercial to, “Father Christmas”, by the Kinks.

With that, however, you shake my faith. I know that song, and it’s not about the true joy of giving. It’s a song about a department-store Santa Claus mugged by a gang of children, who tell him to give them money and save his toys for the little rich boys. The power of the song is the devastating contrast it draws between the happy excesses of Christmas and the harsh reality of poverty. It sounds great in the spot. But it doesn’t fit.

This is a classic error that brands make. They like some lyric of a song or its snappy tune, but they don’t really pay attention to what the song is saying. Or they assume I, their audience, don’t know what it means. They miss or ignore the fact that the song has the exact opposite message from the one they’re promoting. I’ve seen this done over and over—as when Target used Devo’s “It’s a Beautiful World” an ironic song about how ugly consumerism is, in an iconic design campaign. Great choice for Target!

Of course, most people never noticed the unintended irony in the Target ad. So, what’s the big deal then? “Father Christmas” wasn’t that big a hit for the Kinks when it came out in 1977. Maybe people won’t know what it’s really about. Well, maybe they wouldn’t have in the old days before you, Google, changed the way we access information. But these days (thanks to you) it’s only too easy to ask the Internet what that catchy song was on the Google ad, to google the lyrics and instantly find out what it’s really about. Again, only a few people may do it, but that’s not the point. The point is that up until now, I thought you were smarter and deeper than this kind of error, Google. I thought you cared about the deeper meaning. Up until now, I had faith that you weren’t just organizing all the scads of information floating around on the net, but that you were actually trying to make sense of it and help me understand what it all meant. Because what good is information if I don’t know what it means?

But now I’m worried. What if you don’t care? What if you’re just like any other big company? What if you are just another cold-hearted brand trying to push my emotional buttons so I’ll buy what you are selling? If that’s the case, it’s very, very scary, because I’ve been unwittingly giving you information about my emotional buttons for years now. So please, Google, say it ain’t so. Show me that you knew what you were doing and that I can still believe in the spirit of Google.

Yours hopefully,
Jimmy

And just in case you just are not as deeply devoted to the Kinks as I am, I have pasted the lyrics to “Father Christmas” below. I certainly hope Google has not shaken your faith in Christmas.

Happy Holidays,
Jim

When I was small I believed in Santa Claus

Though I knew it was my dad

And I would hang up my stocking at Christmas

Open my presents and I’d be glad

But the last time I played father Christmas

I stood outside a department store

A gang of kids came over and mugged me

And knocked my reindeer to the floor

They said:

Father Christmas, give us some money

Don’t mess around with those silly toys.

Well beat you up if you don’t hand it over

We want your bread so don’t make us annoyed

Give all the toys to the little rich boys

Don’t give my brother a Steve Austin outfit

Don’t give my sister a cuddly toy

We don’t want a jigsaw or monopoly money

We only want the real McCoy

Father Christmas, give us some money

Well beat you up if you make us annoyed

Father Christmas, give us some money

Don’t mess around with those silly toys

But give my daddy a job cause he needs one

He’s got lots of mouths to feed

But if you’ve got one, I’ll have a machine gun

So I can scare all the kids down the street

Father Christmas, give us some money

We got no time for your silly toys

Well beat you up if you don’t hand it over

Give all the toys to the little rich boys

Have yourself a merry merry Christmas

Have yourself a good time

But remember the kids who got nothin’

While you’re drinkin’ down your wine

Father Christmas, give us some money

We got no time for your silly toys

Well beat you up if you don’t hand it over

We want your bread, so don’t make us annoyed

Give all the toys to the little rich boys

Nike Wins Gold

I was at a five-year-old’s birthday party on this last Sunday of the Olympics. A bunch of the parents were sitting around in the shade of the rented bouncy house while our children literally bounced off the walls from too much cake, when somebody brought up that Find Your Greatness commercial with the jogging kid and said they thought it was the best commercial of the Olympics. This sparked a brief debate, not about whether it was the best spot of the Olympics or not–everyone seemed to agree on that–but whether Nike was the official Sportswear Partner of the games. The crowd was about evenly split between believing it was Nike or… some other sportswear company. Some people said Reebok. Some people said Adidas. One guy even thought it might be K-Swiss, although everyone laughed at him. They all remembered being barraged with lots of sportswear commercials; they just couldn’t remember much beyond the fact that they were sportswear commercials.

Since I follow branding (probably more closely than I do the Olympics), I knew that Adidas was the official partner, which was actually announced in 2007. But, apparently, five years, hundreds of millions of dollars and the exclusive rights to use the Olympic name, logo and references to medals hadn’t been enough to win the gold for Adidas. After all that effort, Adidas hadn’t been able to get its message across to even a third of the people attending the party–at least, not in the face of the story Nike has been telling with its Find Your Greatness campaign. That, everyone remembered. They talked, in particular, about the jogging kid and the little boy on the high-dive board, about how moving those commercials were. And as they debated it, more of them conceded that Nike probably was the official partner.

From a story perspective, it’s not that hard to see how Nike sprinted past Adidas. Adidas has been running a great-looking campaign called Take the Stage that featured lots of great-looking people (like David Beckham and Katy Perry) doing great-looking athletic things and partying, all set to cool music. The spots have been majestic, cinematic and big. Better still, from a story perspective, they seemed to touch on an authentic conflict between sportswear’s function as equipment for competition and its form as stylish fashion. But Nike’s story has been much more compelling. Instead of focusing on a conflict of sportswear, Nike has remained focused on an essential conflict of sport–triumph of the human spirit versus victory at all cost.

Sport is a funny thing. On the one hand, it’s play. Sport is powerful because it brings us together, teaches us teamwork and good sportsmanship. When we come together to play, we are enriched and uplifted. It doesn’t matter whether you win or lose, it’s how you play the game and that you choose to play it. Sport is about triumph of the human spirit. On the other hand, sport is competition. It’s a fierce battle in which opponents struggle to best each other. Only one side can take the top spot, and everyone else must lose. Sport is about victory at all cost.

Part of the magic of sport is that weird collision between everybody wins and only the best can win. Nike is built on that collision and has spent decades telling that story. As a brand, Nike has roots in the popular running movement where the slogan “Just do it” seems to suggest that we’d all be better people if we just made an effort, just got up on our feet, just did something with no finish line in mind and no victory larger than a personal sense of accomplishment. That’s a note that resonates loud and clear in Nike’s current Find Your Greatness campaign. But Nike also came out of high-level competition, with its founders pouring shoe treads on waffle irons to give athletes the fraction-of-a-second advantage that could make the difference between first place and everything else. In this context, the slogan “Just do it” takes on a completely different meaning. Just do it. Just win. Don’t make any excuses. Don’t give less than everything. And don’t come in second or you’re the loser. You only have to wind the Olympic clock back a few turns to arrive at the 1996 Atlanta Summer Games, where Nike drew so much fire for its campaign tag “You don’t win silver, you lose gold”.

Nike has never been afraid to embrace the conflict of sport, to own the fact that it’s just a game and it’s not just a game. When they’re at their best, they don’t gloss the conflict over or pretend it doesn’t exist–they throw their arms around it and use it to power their story. Winning is a powerful human motivator, but we can be very conflicted about what it means. Nike has always been about winning, in all its depth, complexity and emotional messiness. That’s what has made so many Nike commercials so memorable. While other brands frequently make commercials about sportswear, Nike consistently makes commercials about sport. That’s where they find their greatness and that’s what powered them to their gold-medal victory in these Olympic games.

Amping Up the Electric Car Story

There was a funny article in AdAge this past week about Nissan and Renault airing essentially the same commercial for two competing electric cars. (In case you missed it, here’s the link.) Worse, it seems very likely that both spots were essentially remakes of a spec spot created for Mitsubishi by a German production company.

From my point of view, the apparent plagiarism, while amusing, is less interesting than what this episode says about how various car companies are using story as they try to define their place in the world of electric cars. The fact that the same spot can be used for all three brands suggests that no one has carved out any unique story territory yet.

It reminds me of MP3 players before the iPod. A large group of competitors were piling into the category, battling with each other over a catalogue of features that conveyed very little meaning to most consumers. By contrast, Apple entered the category with a strong story that went beyond the literal new technology. The iPod seemed like such a brilliant collision of technology and intuition that many consumers perceived it as an altogether new kind of device.

Toyota captured that kind of story energy for hybrid vehicles with the Prius. It is significant that, in both cases–iPod and Prius–the story energy was unique enough and authentic enough to reflect back on the parent brands themselves.

I don’t know that there is anything wrong with Nissan and Renault spending money to tell the category story of electric cars (questions of creative integrity aside). But it does feel like the territory is wide open for someone to stake a much more engaging and compelling claim to a unique story.

I’d love to know if you see this same dynamic playing out in any other categories.

The Overdog’s Dilemma: What Happens When Challengers Win?

Does the recent commotion about the shortcomings of the new iPhone seem out of proportion to both the problem and the newsworthiness of the whole affair? When’s the last time you saw so much energy devoted to a cell phone that drops calls? And yet, there it is, front and center in the public consciousness.

And yet, from a story perspective it makes perfect sense. This isn’t really about a phone that drops calls, it is about a status shift in an iconic brand. Apple spent decades as the counter-culture underdog of the tech world. Steve Jobs was the freewheeling, self-proclaimed pirate (“It’s more fun to be the pirates than to be the navy”) who thumbed his nose at the stuffy conventions of the IBM and Microsoft establishment, building fun, cool computers that broke the rules for the benefit of the audience.

But a series of truly disruptive innovations, beginning with the iPod, has changed the role that Apple plays in the drama of the category. Apple successfully challenged the old definition of what a computer could be and thereby cemented its position as the thought leader in the tech category. In the long running battle between Apple and IBM/Microsoft, Apple won–so much so that it felt like an amusing bit of trivia when Apple’s market cap actually surpassed Microsoft’s recently.

While winning thought leadership has clearly been a good thing for Apple, it also comes with some fairly significant challenges. The chief one is how it affects the brand story. How can Apple be the underdog-pirate-challenger on which it has built its identity when it is now the king of the category? Everything Apple does and says is interpreted differently when it is the winner. Aggressive actions that would have seemed perfectly *in character* for a scrappy underdog fighting the oppressive big guys, take on a whole new aspect when those big guys are on the run and the world is lying at your feet. We’ve seen this happen many times–whenever a challenger wins. As far as the brand is concerned, it is just doing what it has always done, but from the audience’s perspective, it is playing a different role now and it needs to act accordingly.

That new perspective was painfully apparent at the press conference where Steve Jobs, previously seen as a charming and entertaining rouge for his in-your-face arrogance, tried to defend the new iPhone.

It will be very interesting to see what happens next in the unfolding story of Apple, but it is our suspicion that, unless they can come to terms with their change in status and circumstance, they’re going to be in for some rough sailing.

Long-term Greedy Is a Story; Quarterly Earnings Is Not

I’ve been trying to make sense–story sense–of the Goldman Sachs fiasco. After all, for years we’ve been saying that you don’t really have a brand unless there is a story that lives alongside the money story and suggests a purpose for the enterprise over and above making money for its owners. But what if the business of the firm *is* money? Does the same principle still apply?

From my point of view, Goldman Sachs used to have a very compelling story that was the foundation of its successful business. The essence of that story is contained in the idea that, in the words of its former senior partner Gus Levy, the firm should be “long-term greedy”. That phrase nicely captured the conflict between self-interest and the interests of the larger community. It suggested that if Goldman put the interests of its clients ahead of its own short-term profit then both would benefit in the long run.

Long-term greedy suggests a compelling story because it gets its energy from the collision of competing human needs and values. It is essentially the story of the marketplace at its best, and suggests a role for the firm as a facilitator of Adam Smith’s invisible hand–bringing needs and opportunities together in a way that magically turns the energy of individual greed into wealth for companies, jobs for workers, and profits for the Goldman partners.

The story of long-term greedy was an important part of the formula for the firm’s success for many decades. The fact that the firm was a partnership, which meant that as a partner you could only really cash in on the firm’s success when you retired, was congruent with the idea of long-term thinking. And the fact that a large number of senior partners went into government service after they retired seemed to support the idea that this story had some redeeming social value at its core.

Unfortunately, today’s headlines suggest that Goldman Sachs is another example of a brand whose very success has led it to outrun its own story. Whether or not the firm has done anything illegal, the crisis has exposed the fact that the firm is no longer living by the values of long-term greedy, and probably hasn’t been living by those values for some time now.

In the old days, Goldman’s reputation suggested that it had a talent for embracing the conflict between self-interest and community interest in smart, creative and authentic ways. Of course, that is not easy to do, but that’s the whole point–embracing an eternal human conflict is never easy, which is why a company that pulls it off with a certain amount of grace and integrity benefits from deep customer loyalty. Goldman’s story made it look like a company you would truly like to do business with, and it suggested reasons why the firm might be better at its business than competitors who were only in it for the short-term gain.

I used to believe that, as a client, I would benefit from Goldman’s superior insight, knowledge and experience if I maintained a relationship with the firm over the long term. Today I believe that Goldman Sachs will value its own quarterly earnings ahead of my interests, just like every other Wall Street bank. The Goldman Sachs brand has lost its golden aura, and with it the prospect of a lot of fee income going forward. That evaporation of trust has already taken with it tens of billions of dollars in stock value.

Interestingly, Goldman Sachs’ fall from grace, from a story point of view, is a function of the shift from *embracing* the conflict to *managing* it. Managing a conflict is usually a polite way to say that a company is ignoring a conflict or pretending that one doesn’t exist. And that is exactly what Goldman was doing in the past few years that seems so sleazy to all of us regular main street types. Goldman was acting as if there were no conflict between maximizing their own short-term profits and optimizing the long-term creation of wealth for their clients, themselves, and the economy as a whole–and they got caught with their hand in the cookie jar.

It’s important to keep in mind that it was not the financial crisis that changed the Goldman Sachs story. The firm made a number of choices about how it pursued opportunities for growth and profit–particularly in the decade since it went public–which gradually eroded the authenticity of its story. But as long as everybody was making money it was easy to maintain the aura of authenticity. What the crisis did was rip away that mask. That’s what a crisis is good for: to reveal the true character of all the players in a story.

The Scrooge Effect

I read The Economist, and I generally agree with their point of view, especially on matters of business and finance. A couple of months ago they did a special report on corporate social responsibility, and they began by asserting the classical position that a public corporation has no business pursuing any goal beyond increasing shareholder value. I understand the principle–that the shareholders, not managers, should decide how to spend the profits of the corporation–but in my daily practice of looking at companies and brands through the lens of story, I find almost the opposite to be true. My experience suggests this:

A company that seems to have no purpose other than making money for its shareholders will have an increasingly difficult time making money for its shareholders.

This observation raises a very interesting question for me: Are concerns about purpose or mission simply a part of the marketing and public relations function–a way to wrap a mask of public interest around a core of disinterested financial calculation–or is there a deeper and more strategic connection between brand purpose and the pursuit of shareholder value?

The way I see it, marketers are eager to develop a connection between their brands and their customers that feels authentic and emotionally compelling. Such a relationship is the only way to command loyalty, and loyalty leads directly to lower selling costs and premium pricing. For their part, most customers have no trouble understanding that a company has to have a money story–a way of acting in the world that generates profit and allows the company to survive and grow. But the money story is not the place where customers are likely to connect with a company or brand emotionally. The money story is all about the rational transaction–the cost/benefit analysis. A company that seems to have no purpose in the world other than to make money for its shareholders will consequently fail to develop a deeper relationship between its brand and its customers–and in today’s highly fractured markets filled with an abundance of high-quality choices, that kind of failure is likely to have a serious impact on the bottom line.

In the world of story, a character who pursues money for its own sake is generally the villain. Ebenezer Scrooge is archetypal. The essence of the Scrooge character is that he has no emotionally satisfying relationships with anyone because everyone understands that he loves only money. We call it “the Scrooge effect” when a brand’s audience begins to suspect the same about a company.

Wal-Mart is a really interesting case in point. Sam Walton was a driven, competitive individual who channeled his ambition into bringing the material attributes of the good life to small communities that were underserved and overcharged. He built the company around a very compelling story powered by the conflict between service and leadership. At its beginnings, and for many years after, Wal-Mart seemed a kind of scrappy underdog character. But after Sam died and the company became the largest retailer in the world, the service energy in the story slipped away, and for a while the company seemed to be driven by the idea of success for its own sake. From a story point of view, it is not surprising that Wal-Mart seemed to transform from an underdog into a bully, emerging as Scrooge in the larger category story.

In the past year and a half, Wal-Mart has made huge efforts to recapture its role in the retail category as a “servant leader.” Starting with a clear articulation of its story framework, Wal-Mart has embraced the conflict in its story, used that story to find a sense of purpose, and made strides on many fronts to bring that story to life in everything the company does. As a result, in a very difficult economy Wal-Mart’s stock price hit a 52-week high on May 1, up nearly 22 percent since the beginning of the year. And more important for the long term, Wal-Mart has positioned itself to pick up market share during the economic downturn and hold on to it as conditions improve.

I suspect that an intuitive awareness of the connection between the character of a company and its profitability is behind the surge of interest in brand purpose and the attention being paid to the nature of the relationship between a brand and its audience. Of course purpose and relationship are the province of story. Trying to find a larger purpose and establish a meaningful relationship using the current metaphors of marketing–war and science–is tackling the problem with the wrong tools. Such an effort seems likely to end up as an exercise in “taking the bird apart to see what makes it fly” unless the process is firmly grounded in a deep, strategic understanding of the metaphor of story.

If you are responsible for building a brand, one way we’ve discovered to approach purpose and relationship is to think of your category in terms of story and ask yourself, what role does my brand play in that story? What kind of character is my brand? What is its objective? And how does it act in the world in order to achieve its objective? That’s where you begin to get at an authentic purpose–the thing (over and above making money) that the brand exists in the world to do.

Most people remember Scrooge the miser–just as many people still think of Wal-Mart as the bully. But by the end of A Christmas Carol, Scrooge found enlightenment and re-engaged with the world in an authentic and compelling way. Wal-Mart, for its part, has done a lot recently to embrace its conflict and find ways to live a more authentic and compelling story. And its shareholders have a lot to be thankful for as a result.

So, are having a higher purpose and increasing shareholder value the same thing? Not exactly. But it’s clear that they are becoming more powerfully connected. It’s also clear that the conflict between them is the kind of conflict that might connect a brand to its audience and power an emotionally compelling story.