On September 24, 1968, CBS Television introduced a new idea to Americans: a “television newsmagazine” named 60 Minutes.
No black background and ticking stopwatch introduced the first show. Because documentaries on American television had missed more often than they’d hit, Alpo Dog Food was the only sponsor CBS could secure. The show opened with Harry Reasoner and Mike Wallace, and with stories about presidential candidates Hubert Humphrey and Richard Nixon, followed by several “articles” related to politics.
Patterned on a Canadian program, 60 Minutes looked like a gamble, and the overnight ratings showed it. The first show and those that followed rated only a little higher than the average documentary, but they weren’t documentaries. They were articles in a television newsmagazine. That was unfamiliar.
The network tried to hold on, and the show slowly gained traction—very slowly. It took eight years to finally crack the Nielsen Top 20, but as more people watched, more people watched. Just three seasons later and eleven years after that opening program, 60 Minutes reached number one for the first time.
Today, we know that CBS’s gamble worked. 60 Minutes is the longest continuously running prime-time television show in history. Its status as America’s number-one program for five years is an achievement equaled only by All in the Family and The Cosby Show; and for every year from 1977 to 2000, it finished in the top ten in the Nielsen ratings, also a record.
60 Minutes obviously tapped something deep within us. What was it? Producer and mastermind Don Hewitt has said that the reason for the program’s success is as old as the Bible.
The title of Hewitt’s autobiography hints at this: It’s called Tell Me a Story. Interviewed about the program for the PBS program American Masters, Hewitt explained: “Even the people who wrote the Bible were smart enough to know: Tell them a story. The issue was evil; the story was Noah. I latched on to that.”
Hewitt had learned that storytelling is universal. Our ancestors covered their caves with the PowerPoint presentations of their time: the images they painted to tell stories about the hunt. Then and now, we need stories; a story is a single coherent whole that makes sense out of a lot of parts. Aesop, Jesus, Muhammad, Moses, Confucius, and followers of the Buddha all knew it; every religion has stories at its center.
For years before his death, journalists and journalism students would ask Hewitt the secret of his success, and his message was for everyone in any business. How do you get into our hearts and souls? Hewitt answered with a message today’s best marketers heed: “At 60 Minutes, we do what everyone should be doing: Tell me a story. Learn to do that, and you’ll be a success.”
Just before noon, eastern time, on January 28, 1986, on a subfreezing day on Merritt Island, Florida, the space shuttle Challenger exploded in a cloudless sky seventy-three seconds after takeoff. None of the seven crew members survived. That night, a visibly shaken President Ronald Reagan addressed the nation with a speech now considered among the greatest in American history. This is how he concluded:
There’s a coincidence today. On this day three hundred and ninety years ago, the great explorer Sir Francis Drake died aboard ship off the coast of Panama. In his lifetime the great frontiers were the oceans, and a historian later said, “He lived by the sea, died on it, and was buried in it.” Well, today, we can say of the Challenger crew: Their dedication was, like Drake’s, complete…. We will never forget them, nor the last time we saw them, this morning, as they… waved goodbye and “slipped the surly bonds of earth” to “touch the face of God.”
Known as the Great Communicator, Reagan did what great communicators do: He told stories. On August 28, 1963, at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C., Martin Luther King, Jr., did, too. King told stories of a dream, one that included sons of former slaves and slave owners “in the red hills of Georgia” sitting down together at tables, and those stories moved people and made them remember King’s words decades later, when American Rhetoric named it the greatest speech in our history.
On his night, Reagan told two stories—one of Drake and the other of the Challenger crew repeating Drake’s heroics—because he knew the power stories have over people. Undoubtedly, he learned that from his fifty-year film career in Hollywood. Actors act out stories, and we flock to see them.
How much do we crave stories? Consider Netflix, which CEO Reed Hastings started in 1997 after getting hit with a $40 late fee for Apollo 13. Every day, Hastings’ company sends stories in the form of movies to subscribers nationwide. In just the fifty-five seconds that passed while you read this passage to this point, Netflix shipped eleven thousand of those stories.
Because of our passion for stories as well as play, is it any wonder the marketers at Pixar chose for the title of their blockbuster series of movies Toy Story?
We love stories. Perhaps best of all from every marketer’s perspective, we remember them, as the next childhood story illustrates.
One of many Americans’ first lessons in the psychology of memory and the power of stories came in fourth grade. That’s when we confronted the daunting task of learning to spell the word “geography.”
Fortunately, many of our teachers gave us the mnemonic device that made spelling that long word easy. They gave us a story: George Eliot’s old grandfather rode a pig home yesterday.
Why do we remember that sentence, with its nine words and forty-seven letters, more easily than we remember the nine letters in the word “geography”?
There are two reasons. George Eliot’s old grandfather rode a pig home yesterday is a story, and we remember a single story better than we remember a sequence of letters, especially sequences longer than five letters. A famous piece of research, the Rule of Seven, Plus or Minus Two, holds that we can remember seven items, plus or minus two. (Perhaps the best example: You can remember phone numbers without area codes [seven digits] but not those with them [ten digits].) “Geography,” having nine letters, is right on the limit of our capacity to remember, according to this theory.
Second, while stories are more memorable than simple narrative sentences—which explains why we are able to remember entire jokes, because they are a single story—certain stories are more easily remembered. As we learn from jokes, we are more apt to remember a surprising story.
The pig-riding story surprises us. The image of an old man steering a pig, especially all the way home, amuses us. And it puzzles us, too. How can an old man ride a pig? Pigs hug the ground so closely; where does he put his feet to get them out of ground’s way? And pigs move very slowly. So why would he ever choose one to ride sixty feet, much less “all the way home”?
We remember George Eliot’s story because it doesn’t give us nine things to remember, like the word “geography.” It gives us just five:
The boy’s name: George Eliot
His relative: old grandfather
His mode of transport: a pig
Where he went: home
When: yesterday
This gives us what memory experts call chunks, and we remember in chunks. The George Eliot story has just five chunks, as opposed to the nine chunks in the word “geography.” But then comes the final step, the one that explains why storytelling is used in all cultures in all times. As with all stories, after we repeat a story several times, it turns into a single chunk—and nothing is easier to remember than a single chunk.
Time was we bought shirts, ties, blouses, jeans. It was simple.
Then the stuff piled up, and we had trouble telling it all apart. Jeans were jeans were jeans. And then they weren’t.
Among the people who changed this was a Kentuckian with a catalog. He dreamed of owning a Duesenberg, it seems. Or so one of his tiny odes in his famous catalog suggests.
He was, and is, J. Peterman. His distinctive catalog of things—a Marie Antoinette nightshirt and a Gatsby shirt—might have earned him a few million dollars. But his style of storytelling transformed him from a success in business into a frequent character on Seinfeld.
Peterman’s notoriety rested on sentences that rarely exceeded twelve words. Sometimes he used five words. Other times, three. His simplicity drew people in. Simplicity always does.
But the real seduction in Peterman’s words came from how he assembled them: He made them into stories. So a Peterman shirt was never just a shirt; it was Jay Gatsby’s shirt, just as a black dress was Audrey Hepburn’s, with the only extra being a string of pearls. (Aware of the appeal of detail, from Peterman’s keyboard this would have come out “a string of pearls, from a favorite shop just off the Rue du Montaigne.”)
Peterman knew that like child, like adult: We are captivated by stories, eager from their suspense to know what comes next. So thousands of us, including Oprah Winfrey and Frank Sinatra, bought Peterman’s stories, and then his items.
A typical Peterman entry:
Versailles Hoof-Pick Belt (No. 2580). Made in the heart of Kentucky horse country by Claire Painter.
Who’s she?
A gifted artisan, right in my backyard.
Claire worked as a master saddle maker in Perthshire, Scotland. Then, thankfully, she moved here.
The leather is from Wicket and Craig, which has been producing the finest leather goods in North America for the past century and a half.
The buckle, solid brass, is an actual working hoof pick, not a replica.
One of the finest pieces I’ve ever seen.
There’s just one problem: People will never stop asking you about it.
Can you live with that?
Peterman doesn’t sell just a belt; he sells the story behind it, which gives the belt meaning. It’s no longer a belt with a solid brass buckle, but the creation of a former master saddle maker from Scotland who somehow ended up in Lexington, Kentucky. Plus that brass buckle isn’t a buckle at all; it’s a working hoof pick, which sounds like a one-of-a-kind touch, not to mention something we might use one day to pick a horse hoof.
Peterman’s fame reminds us how much we love stories.
But wait, you say. Didn’t Peterman’s company end up struggling? It has. It once declared bankruptcy. Does this mean we are less susceptible to stories than it appears?
No. Peterman’s problem stemmed from what followed.
We ordered one of his remarkable items—a black dress that Audrey Hepburn might have worn, say. Days later, our coveted box arrived from Kentucky. We breathlessly opened the parcel.
But what?
Our Hepburn dress arrived encased in cheap clear plastic wrap and had taken a pounding in transit, producing wrinkles that Audrey never would have tolerated. Nothing in the package reminds us of Audrey or her story. Seeing her dress sprawling on the bed, we see just a wrinkled cotton dress—not Egyptian cotton, or cotton from Sea Island, but perhaps a decent strain grown in Kentucky—with no obvious detail that helps us understand why an iconic actress ever would have chosen that dress.
The story was over, the romance was gone.
The problem with J. Peterman stories was that they were fictional, and we buy the real stories behind products—or at least, what we believe are the real stories. When we learn that Häagen-Dazs isn’t from Scandinavia but from the Bronx, for example, and that the founder made up the name because it sounded Scandinavian to him, that story devolves into mere fantasy and we lose interest—and perhaps some faith.
J. Peterman created interesting stories, but we don’t buy interesting stories; we buy the interesting true stories that today’s best marketers tell.
In its March 9, 2010, issue, Time magazine announced that Starbucks might have met its David. A rival coffee from nearby Portland, Oregon, had emerged. America’s foremost coffee expert, Oliver Strand of the New York Times, went a step further in the article: “Stumptown is the new leader.”
To Stumptown’s charismatic founder, Duane Sorenson, coffee is like wine, with an elevation, a quality of land (the terroir), a varietal, and tasting notes printed on every bag. (We learn that Sumatra Lake Tawar’s notes, for example, are blackberry cobbler, star anise, and cannabis.)
Here is Stumptown’s website description of one of its nineteen varietals:
Geisha is an extremely rare coffee varietal that has made waves in the past 5+ years for having what many coffee connoisseurs consider to be the most brilliantly complex and intense flavor profile of all. Originally brought to Costa Rica from the small town of Gesha in southwestern Ethiopia, the Geisha made its way south to Panama, thanks to Don Pachi (Francisco Serracin), before becoming internationally acclaimed. These trees grow to be very tall and have beautiful, elongated leaves….
Sorenson is drawing us into the deeper meaning of each Stumptown cup. In Geisha’s case, she’s a little bean from a small town that found her way to a bigger city thanks to a man named Francisco, and then to international acclaim: She’s the little bean that could.
Eventually, this draws us into Sorenson’s story. The bearded son of a sausage maker from Puyallup, Washington, he dropped out of Seattle University, wears hoodies and black Adidas high-tops, adores AC/DC, and lives in an apartment crammed with a dozen French presses. He’s a little guy, too, on a mission: He Jeeps his way into outbacks all over the world to find world’s great varietals.
The nearby Abercrombie & Fitch stores are built around stories, too. We hear it from CEO Michael Jeffries, who compares his stores to movies: “I want people walking in and wondering, “What’s at the box office today?” His clothing reveals this, too, portraying itself as the well-worn sweatshirts from a New York State championship winning team and from a summer camp at “Camp Beaver Tail,” membership in “The Growlers,” and nights spent with buddies at “Warrior’s Tap.”
Without some story to give it meaning, products are just stuff. Sorenson and Jeffries and the astute modern merchandisers realize this and turn to something universal that we love: a story.
One overcast Monday morning in February 1973, two third-year students at the University of Oregon School of Law approached a second-year student with a memorable request. Two fellow Oregonians had started a company and were raising additional capital. The two students insisted the company would succeed. How would you like to invest $2,000? They were sure that student—me—could triple my money.
Oh sure, I thought, running shoes will be big.
Their optimistic prediction turned out to be off by millions. Their friend was Phil Knight, the company was Nike, and Nike’s success is often viewed as a testament to brilliant marketing and lucky timing.
There was much more to it. We can dispose of luck, which always matters, and of which Nike had plenty. The first came from a disaster: the 1972 Munich Olympics. Everything about that Olympics foretold doom for Americans: suspicious disqualifications of American gold-medal hopefuls in swimming and the pole vault and unexpected failures by Americans in other events.
All of this became trivial when at 4:30 a.m. on Sunday, September 5, Palestinian terrorists broke into the Olympic Village and forced their way into the rooms of members of the Israeli Olympics team. During that entry, they killed two of the members, then took nine more hostage, eventually to a Boeing 727 waiting at a nearby airport.
Less than twenty-four hours after those terrorists entered the athletes’ rooms came an unforgettable announcement from sleepless and teary NBC sportscaster Jim McKay, for years the voice of the Games: “They’re all gone.”
Against this hideous background, and after days during which the Games were suspended, the marathon was run. For the Americans watching, the prevailing feeling was “What possibly could happen next?”
And what happened next changed the face of America for decades.
A gaunt and relatively unknown Yale Law School student named Frank Shorter took the early lead, and for miles ran alone toward the finish. Fearing the worst in this worst of all Olympics, America watched, but the worst never came. What came instead was Shorter’s win. That night, Americans watched the highlights of the race set to McKay’s riveting prose, including his unforgettable words about the marathon itself, repeated like the hook of a song: “You must run the race by yourself.”
What happened the next day in America was reminiscent of February 10, 1964, the Monday after American teenage boys first saw the Beatles and showed up at school with their short hair combed forward, Beatle-like. After Shorter’s win, Americans copied him. They started jogging, then running. But they quickly learned that their old white Converse low-cut basketball shoes or Keds didn’t work. They needed running shoes instead. And Phil Knight noticed.
Knight was a former above-average miler at the University of Oregon, a school in a town, Eugene, that is hallowed among distance runners. It suggests that small town’s stature in the world of running that it once held not just one marathon but two—one marathon for every 42,000 residents. The first was called the Nike OTC (Oregon Track Club) Marathon, and it attracted most of America’s best marathoners. The second was called the Track Capital Marathon, a title the town had held for years.
Beginning in the mid-1950s and continuing for decades after, many of America’s best young distance runners chose the University of Oregon for the opportunity to train under the school’s famous coach, Bill Bowerman.
In the fall of 1970, Bowerman attracted one more person who would figure prominently in Nike’s story. He was a 5-foot-9-inch, 145-pound package of sheer will from the small Oregon coastal town of Coos Bay. He was Steve Prefontaine, and he became iconic, too, breaking eight NCAA records and winning seven NCAA titles in his career. Today, you see people in “Pre Lives” T-shirts from Tampa to Kuala Lumpur, and every serious runner knows what those words mean.
Through his decades of work with runners including Pre, Bowerman had become dissatisfied with the Adidas and Tiger shoes made for distance runners. Those shoes tended to be barely modified versions of the shoes worn by sprinters, who run almost exclusively on their forefeet and do not need arch support or heel cushioning. But distance runners train and race on paved roads and concrete. They don’t need speed or spikes; they need cushioning from the pounding.
Famously puzzling over this problem in his kitchen one morning, Bowerman took a waffle iron, injected it with a rubberized compound, and made a sole for a running shoe. The sole naturally looked like an inverted waffle; square studs protruded from where the waffle holes normally would be. The waffle sole was a welcome and needed innovation, and runners quickly embraced it.
So Nike’s story now included Eugene, the nation’s track capital; the University of Oregon, distance running’s Mecca; Bowerman, running’s distinguished elder statesman; Pre, America’s premier distance runner and most charismatic figure; and the most innovative shoe in the sport.
This was the Nike story, and its truth resonated in a way no other athletic shoe company’s story could.
By contrast, what was the Adidas story?
Adidas’s story was created by a German unknown to Americans. He was and still is so unknown that few Americans know that the name “Adidas” comes from the name of the company’s founder, Adi Dasler.
And what was the Puma story?
A family feud: Adi and his Adidas partner and brother started fighting one day. In a huff, the brother left Adidas and started Puma as an act of revenge against Adi.
Adidas and Puma are German companies, which gives them weak running backstories. When Nike emerged, world and European distance running had been dominated by the Kenyans, the Finnish, and some Eastern Europeans—but not the Germans. The only German runner of brief note was Waldemar Cierpinski, but he hailed from East Germany and was tainted by stories of the East German athletic machine and its use of steroids. So the German running story, such as it was, had few chapters.
Tiger was based in Japan, a country without a significant distance-running tradition other than its well-known marathon in Fukuoka, which owed what little fame it had in America to the fact that Shorter won it the year before his Olympic win and in each of the three years after.
Nike won its race, in part, because no competitors could match its story. Nike was more than a manufacturer; it was a collection of running purists who wanted to help people run and train for long distances in something more than a thin, flat sole glued to a synthetic upper and tied together with string.
Nike’s founders realized the power of its story and the influence it would have. Its first ads didn’t even feature its shoes but told the stories of the renegades behind them. An early single-page ad focused on Bowerman himself, under the headline “The Spirit That Moves Us.” Nike’s very noncorporate-looking “top executives” were featured in another early ad. They were shown sitting in an airport gate waiting area, clad in clothes several degrees short of business casual, with the headline: “Our first employees are still with us. We think.” Nike told us they were traveling the world, trying to help runners run better.
Nike told its story well, in a voice more like a conversation than a corporate ad, trumpeting the standard “We listen, we’re with you all the way.” Runners knew Nike cared about them, for an obvious and compelling reason: Nike was them, and runners wanted to be a part of them.
When Nike expanded into other sports, it routinely brought on the best athletes in those sports—Michael Jordan and Tiger Woods most vividly—not just for the endorsement value but the meaning behind it: We are the shoes for the truly serious athletes, the shoes that help you Just Do It—whatever your “It” is.
We don’t buy things; we buy what they mean, and a company’s stories provide that meaning. We need narratives from birth to comprehend our world and everything in it.
Nike knew that, because Nike knew—intensely—precisely what runners love. But of course they did; they were the very runners they were trying to appeal to. Nike wasn’t tapping a market; it was the market.
Compare Nike’s success selling to runners to Toyota’s efforts to capture the attention of America’s youth and sell its entry-level Scion by identifying itself with hip-hop. Hip-hop’s signal characteristics are graffiti, break dancing, MCing and DJing, rebellion, and slang; Toyota’s are making and selling well-made, low-defect, affordable cars. Nike’s connection to runners was and is real and undeniable; Toyota’s hip-hop connection, like its cars, has been totally manufactured.
This may help explain the Scion’s twin fates: Scions prospered at first, but largely because the wrong people kept buying them: older drivers looking for affordable vehicles that were easy to get into and out of, and parents who finally found an inexpensive car with lots of space for maneuvering children into and out of car seats. Perhaps because too many hip-hoppers noticed all these retirees and parents behind “their” wheels, Scion sales started dropping drastically in 2009.
Nike didn’t try to target the running culture; it was the running culture. It didn’t have to concoct stories about its role in running; they were everywhere you looked. Scion, by contrast, took the conventional aim strategy: Let’s target a segment and ingratiate ourselves with the people in it, even to the point of making it appear that Scion is not really a Toyota. On its website, the only references to Toyota are those required by law, and they appear in the smallest typeface allowed by law.
The Scion lacks a story; no story links it to hip-hop. And today, it’s stories—authentic stories, told well—that win, just as stories have captured us from those nights with Mom and Dad reading at our bedsides.