6
THE PURPOSE-TOLD STORY
The two previous chapters laid out the underlying event design of every tale ever told, from prehistoric myths to twenty-first-century TV series. This chapter applies that ancient form to marketing’s innovative twenty-first-century counterpart, the purpose-told story. Let’s begin by comparing fiction-told with purpose-told, focusing on the latter’s unique components.
STORYTELLING: FICTION-TOLD VERSUS PURPOSE-TOLD
Long Form Versus Short Form
The first storytellers set the standard performance length when they gathered their tribe around the fire. They geared their tales to the single seating—the length of time people are comfortable sitting in one place, focusing their thoughts with uninterrupted concentration. This practice became the traditional two-hour playing time (more or less) for a play, opera, ballet, or film.
Rarities, such as Neil Oram’s twenty-four-hour-long play The Warp (see Guinness World Records), aside, the single-seating principle also explains why the writers of prose and long-form television break their massive works, such as War and Peace and The Sopranos, into units of absorption known as chapters and episodes.
Unlike full-length fictions, purpose-told stories abbreviate events. The typical business story is a mini-tale told in a thirty-second commercial or a three-minute YouTube video. GE’s “Owen” ads and the Dove Real Beauty Sketches are two perfect examples of each.
When measured by turning points, the multiple story lines of full-length fiction pivot hundreds of moment-by-moment reversals. The marketing story, no. Purpose-told works crack open the gap between expectation and result usually only once, perhaps twice, maybe three times at the most.
General Versus Detailed Memory
Story sticks. As noted previously, the mind is a story-making, story-storing machine. As a result, stories lodge and live in memory far longer and more vividly than facts and numbers. However, the magnitude of most fiction-told stories is so great that audiences remember only the outlines of their plots and the impressions made by certain characters. Thousands and thousands of pinpointed details are foggy at best or lost altogether.
The compressed brevity of the purpose-told story makes it memorable—the most important detail being the name at the heart of a branding story or demand-generation tale. Like a favorite tune that reprises in a listener’s head through the day, the purpose-told story replays itself whenever the consumer’s thoughts drift toward the need for that kind of product or service.
Satisfaction Versus Action
A fiction-told story wraps a tight circle of involvement around its audience; the purpose-told story breaks that circle. Both modes begin by hooking curiosity and empathy (inciting incident), then deepening that connection through the middle (progressive complication); but when it’s time to pay off (crisis/climax), the fiction-told story completes the audience’s experience, while the purpose-told story extends it one critical step beyond. The purpose-told’s audience members take their storified experience into the real world and relive it each and every time they purchase the subject product or service. In other words, the purpose of the purpose-told story is to transform the aesthetic pleasure of a story’s climax into a viable action in the marketplace—to turn audiences into consumers.
The best purpose-told and fiction-told stories satisfy with a meaningful, emotional experience. We laugh at something we never thought funny before; we cry over something we never thought tragic before; and most important, in both cases, we gain an insight into life we never knew before, all enveloped in emotions we never felt quite that way before. This fusion of idea and emotion adds a measure of enrichment, great or small, to our inner life. We exit a beautifully told story a fuller human being than when we entered.
Single Versus Repeated Experience
But the key difference is this: The fiction-told story fulfills itself in one telling, whereas the purpose-told story retells its tale in the mind of the consumer each and every time she buys its product or hires its service. The purpose-told story moves the consumer not only to make a first choice, but to buy again and again—and what’s more, to pay full price, thus building margin.
Concentrated experiences entertain because they carry us through time unaware of the passage of time. Our sense of time is so subjective that playing a musical instrument, watching a favorite sports team, competing in a video game, or immersing ourselves in a superbly told fiction makes time vanish. The story power of a fine play, novel, film, or TV series sweeps us through time until the entertainment spell suddenly breaks and we glance at our watch in amazed wonder: “Wow, was that three hours?” Some story-goers plunge back into a much-loved classic for a second, third, or more reliving. Nonetheless, the climax of each re-experience sends the fan back into daily reality.
The market-purposed story also captures the mind and erases time; it too can repeat itself into the future without limit. The public repetition of a purpose-told story becomes the chain-reactive fission known as word of mouth. The same sort of thing happens with fiction-told stories, but the difference is that (with exceptions like Star Wars) most titles have a shorter life span than most brands.
Author Loyalty Versus Brand Loyalty
The only loyalty the reader of a fiction-told story owes is to the author who wrote it, in the hope that the novelist’s next book will deliver that pleasure again. The audience of the purpose-told story, on the other hand, ignores the artist and feels brand loyalty instead. Brand loyalty, and the lifetime of purchases that comes with it, is created by the mirror experience at the heart of the purpose-told story.
THE MIRROR EXPERIENCE
Well-told stories create two simultaneous experiences that mirror each other: one mental, the other emotional.
The mental mirror experience begins and ends with curiosity. A story’s inciting incident teases the audience’s mind with unanswered questions such as “What’s going to happen next? What’ll happen after that? How will this story turn out? Will the protagonist win his object of desire?” The rational mirror experience in story mirrors the same set of concerns and questions we ask of our everyday life. As Shakespeare said, a story holds a mirror up to nature.
The emotional mirror experience begins and ends with empathy. When a story’s protagonist radiates a positive human glow from within, this center of good attracts the customer’s natural instinct to connect with a fellow human being. She quickly falls into a subconscious identification, aka empathy, with the protagonist. As discussed in the previous chapter, empathy is imperative in the purpose-told story because without this essential human link, no story moves anyone to take action of any kind, let alone make a purchase.1
The emotional mirror experience of a fiction-told story takes two steps. The purpose-told story adds a third.
First, the identification. The moment the target consumer recognizes a shared humanity between herself and the protagonist, her instincts follow the logic of kinship: “That character is a human being like me. Therefore, I want that character to get what he wants, because if I were that character in that situation, I would want the same thing for myself.” In other words, she bonds.2
Second, the subconscious switch. Once the target audience identifies with the protagonist, she senses that this is her story, and so she substitutes his storified desire for her real-life desire. By rooting for the protagonist to obtain his object of desire in the story, the audience member vicariously roots for her own desire in life.
She instinctively experiences the events as if they were happening to her. As the story arcs, she feels a change from negative to positive, from problem to solution, until the upending climax delivers a vicarious fulfillment of her need.
This subconscious switch from fictional to personal explains in a nutshell how and why the well-told, purpose-told story delivers results with staying power.
Third, the reenactment. The consumer’s mirror experience motivates her to act. Wishing to relive the positive charge of the purpose-told story, she purchases the product or hires the service embedded in the telling. Her post-story reenactment satisfies her need and the marketer’s purpose simultaneously. In short, she becomes a customer.
THE SCIENCE
To understand exactly how the mirror experience happens and why it works, let’s step back and take another look at the neuroscience of story.
As noted in chapter 3, the brain’s largest mass, Brodmann area 10, performs the executive functions of memory recall, reasoning, problem solving, choice making, and action planning. Other brain areas carry out these decisions, but the consciousness buck stops here; in BA10 the past flows into the future.3
The mind memorizes the patterns of cause and effect that underlie real-life past events so it can strategize its future actions. As events impact us over the years, we gather knowledge of how things work, how the various forces in our world interconnect. When new situations arise, the mind draws on these past patterns to imagine the possible tactics it might take and predict the probable reactions these actions might cause.
This process of linking previous encounters to future outcomes underlies not only factual but also fictional experience. When a story engages the mind, its virtual events play out in the theater of BA10. Memory then stows these ostensible events in an “as if” state alongside real-life events. In time, however, their as-if-ness dissipates. When preparing for the future, the mind doesn’t bother to distinguish between fictive and factual events; rather, it focuses on their mutual substructures. The mind abstracts the patterns of causality that underpin both the “is” and the “as if” and merges them. This accumulated knowledge of cause and effect sets the stage for future choices.
Each person acts on her unique sense of probability, what her sum total of personal experience, actual and fictional, tells her will probably happen when she chooses to act. Through this uniquely human process, stories provide a vital source of insight and a guide from one action to the next, constructing part of the reference framework she will use to make future decisions. Wise marketers leverage this propensity with the purpose-told stories they tell.
CREATING THE PURPOSE-TOLD STORY
The creation of a purpose-told story moves through the same eight stages as the fiction-told story but with an eye to creating a mirror experience that moves the consumer to a profitable reenactment. The arc of the purpose-told story guides the consumer from an absence in her life to its fulfillment, from need to satisfaction.
STAGE ONE: THE THREE TARGETS
As outlined in chapter 4, the first stage of story design identifies its targets. Authors of fiction-told tales tend to make broad assumptions about their audience, but not the creator of a purpose-told story. You, the marketer, must know exactly where you’re aiming, and that means defining the target market/audience, the target need, and, above all, the end result: the target action.
Step 1: Research Target Audience
In this big data era, the demographics of a target market (the age, gender, education, income, et cetera of the consumer, client, investor) are usually well known—and if not, then easily researched.
Step 2: Define Need/Want/Problem
What awaits discovery is the deep need harbored in the customer’s secret self. Big data tells us who people seem to be, but not who they really are; surveys tell us what they keep on their shelves, but not what they keep in their hearts.
To set up the most effective, most powerful marketing story, take a major step beyond demographics and ask that classic advertiser’s question: “Where does it hurt?”
This was the true genius of Steve Jobs. He saw what no one else saw: Computers were ugly. He called Dell’s products “un-innovative beige boxes.”4 And he was right. It hurt just to look at Dell’s wire-sprouting, cumbersome plastic cartons, let alone pick one up and carry it around. Jobs sensed what consumers subconsciously wanted but didn’t consciously realize: a unique identity. To see themselves as rebellious, creative, and elite. So he made machines that symbolized those qualities with beauty, touch, and grace as they move from room to room, desk to pocket. Jobs’s dream of mobile phones spoke to the unspoken needs of the consumer. Apple storified his vision in a series of brilliant commercials, and the rest is branding history.
To find your story’s target need, ask, “What is my customer’s pain? What does she need but not know? What hidden problem cries out for solution?”
Step 3: Design Target Action
No matter how popular a marketing story might become, it matters little if the public enjoys it like a piece of fiction and then drops it from mind. The storytelling in Dove Real Beauty Sketches moved people deeply, and with that, they ran to the store to buy bars of Dove soap in unprecedented numbers.
Consider what specific action you want your audience to take. If you’re telling story B2B, you may want your client to sign a contract. If your telling is B2C, you might want your customers to pick up an over-the-counter item. If you broker big-ticket items, you might want customers to visit the showroom so your sales team can do their thing. If you offer a professional service, you may want consumers to visit your website and make an appointment. If you run a branding campaign, the target action takes place in the mind of the audience member, as she goes from brand-ignorant to brand aware, or, if necessary, changes her perception from negative to positive.
Although these targets seem obvious, many promotions miss them by a mile. They don’t bother to define a purpose; instead they brag, they promise, they beg “Buy now!”
STAGE TWO: SUBJECT MATTER
Preparing subject matter for the story to come takes three major steps.
Step 1: Discovery of the Core Value
Identifying the consumer’s unfulfilled need in Stage One leads to the first step of Stage Two: identifying the core value that best dramatizes the solution to this problem, the cure to this pain. Consider, for example, the storified marketing campaign that saved a brand from virtual extinction, “Real Beauty” by Dove.
As we demonstrated in the emotion-creation section of the previous chapter, this insight into the target audience’s inciting incident and resulting object of desire inspired Ogilvy & Mather to weave a purpose-told story around the core value of self-criticism versus self-appreciation. Their three-minute marketing video titled Dove Real Beauty Sketches premiered on April 14, 2013. The dynamic of this core value and the story that expressed it connected so well with Dove’s audience that the YouTube feedback was 97.6 percent positive. The video went viral with more than fifteen million views inside a week; thirty million in less than ten days. In two months it triggered 163 million global views and won the Titanium Grand Prix at the Cannes Festival of Creativity. Overall, it scored 4.6 billion media impressions and nearly doubled its sales.5
Step 2: Choice of Protagonist
All enterprises can be grouped into one of three grand categories depending on their essential function: resource exploitation, product creation, or service performance. Although some practice all three, each company takes its true identity from the one task it would never outsource. Marketing campaigns, by tradition, have always strived to express the unique nature of their company’s brand. Therefore, marketers have traditionally cast their protagonists in sync with that one-of-a-kind identity. As a result, marketing stories tend to star one of three very different kinds of protagonists, depending on the company’s core function.
1. The Resource-Centric Company
A resource-centric company beats its competition by exploiting a natural resource or raw material with greater efficiency and creativity than its competitors. Mining companies, for example, unearth the planet’s minerals, while pharmaceuticals transform its biology and chemistry. Once the mineral is out of the ground or a biological secret discovered, resource-centric companies have a monopoly on their asset and therefore tend to dominate their market. What’s more, the end user seems virtually invisible, sitting somewhere at the end of many distant future steps in manufacturing, packaging, and sales. In such cases, B2B marketing makes the company itself the protagonist of any story told about it.
No easy task. Reducing a corporate giant to a personality is like squeezing all fifty of the United States into Uncle Sam. It can be done, but it demands a brilliant creative leap.
2. The Product-Centric Company
A product-centric company triumphs over its competition by creating a better-functioning, better-looking, more convenient, more durable product. In this category, marketing stories often cast the product as the core character, personified as a voice, personality, or archetype. Apple’s “Get a Mac” campaign, for example, starred Justin Long as an honest, commonsensical Mac computer versus John Hodgman’s deceitful, bumbling PC. Or in another example, an animated Mr. Clean stars as a neo-Hercules or unbottled genie who quick-fixes Procter & Gamble’s housekeeping problem/solution stories.
3. The Service-Centric Company
A service-centric company outperforms its competition by providing superior service. When it does, the end user of its medical, financial, or legal services comes out healthier, wealthier, safer. Service pros devote their talents and skills to making life better for the consumer. Marketing tradition therefore portrays the professional as the facilitator, not the hero, and instead casts the consumer as the core character. The same applies to nonprofits such as nongovernmental organizations, charities, and all branches of government.
These three casting strategies served as guidelines for marketing stories throughout the last century. But then came the rise of the Internet. When shoppers went online to rate retailers—sometimes thanking them, often denouncing them—everything changed. Word of mouth became instantaneous and viral, making consumer-centricity the mantra of modern marketing. Today campaign after campaign characterizes corporate clients as service enterprises (whether they are or not) and casts their customers as protagonists.
All good. Consumer-centric storytelling marks a positive evolution in world commerce—so long as the tellings are creatively compelling, pander-free, and, most important, honest. Millennial and Generation Z consumers detest BS.
The Empathy Imperative
If your target audience member does not sense a mutual humanity between herself and your story’s core character, she will not care, not listen, not identify, not be moved to act. Empathy is absolute. This principle should be self-evident, yet rather than rewrite an uninspired story, marketers often call upon this classic rationalization: “No matter how trite the story may be, if its core character looks and sounds like the typical buyer, then emotional involvement clicks in automatically. Therefore, the cure to banality is casting.” This logic, as painful experience teaches, is fallacious. An everywoman protagonist is no guarantee of customer-centricity. What the consumer wants is a human affinity, not a clichéd facsimile.6
In fact, for many business stories, the only logical choice for protagonist is a product or a corporation. If so, the tale must be told from that point of view. To do so, however, the storyteller faces this challenging problem: How can I fuse an empathetic connection between consumer and protagonist when the latter is either an inanimate object or an impersonal institution?
Product Identification
A protagonist, by definition, must be able to choose with a free will. A product, however, is a thing, and things have no self-awareness, no willpower, and therefore cannot make choices or take actions. The common solution calls on fantasy. Either an actor or an animated character personifies the product, or an Oz-like world brings things to life. Recent campaigns for Pier 1, Nest Labs, and Geico Insurance feature talkative teapots, chatty suburban homes, and an irrepressible Australian reptile.
Fantasy worlds and characters demand imagination, innovation, and creative execution. Rather than face that task, many campaigns abandon storytelling in favor of a spokesperson bragging and making promises the product’s performance may or may not be able to keep.
Corporate Identification
As set out in the previous chapter, a demonstrably human quality deep within a core character embodies the story’s center of good, its magnet for empathy. To turn a corporation into an empathetic protagonist, the marketer first must identify the company’s primal value, a value so essential to its nature that if it were lost, the company would disappear with it. Next, the marketer must infuse the corporation-as-core-character with this value and put it into play as the protagonist’s choices and actions build the story.
In practice, however, when corporations take on a core character role, the center often seems void. Some companies get the naming rights to a stadium in the hope of buying lovability. PR firms perform heart transplants by bedding their clients with charities. Philanthropy provides material for press releases, but its benefits seldom overcome the buying public’s antipathy to multinationals. Always bear in mind that the center of good expresses itself in action, not association.
A corporate mission, however, tells another story. Starbucks, P&G, Royal DSM, and many other firms have taken up social causes such as educating the unfortunate, rebuilding after disasters, and curing third-world diseases. Not only do the stories these missions generate cast their corporations in a humanitarian role, thus drawing empathy, but—unlike self-congratulatory PR pieces—they also span a negative-to-positive arc that makes the purpose-told story a natural.
Brand Identification
Each person draws her personal identity from the culture that surrounds her. When asked who they are, people name their nationality, tribe, religion, profession, and marital status, along with the music, films, books, art, cuisine, and sports teams they love. They might add some experiences and achievements unique to themselves, but these, too, have been influenced by the culture that clothed them since birth. This was always the way of things until modern life added one more dimension: brands. In the first half of the twentieth century, people hid labels or cut them off. No longer.
Identification with brands, and the phenomenon of badging that came with it, arrived post–World War II and took up residence on Madison Avenue. Today people flaunt logos across their chests. These badges not only advertise the brand itself, but suggest their owner’s taste, class, politics, sexuality, personality, and much, much more.
Brands, whether resource-, product-, or service-centric, are often more massive and complex than many third-world countries. They represent both a corporation in the background and a lifestyle in the foreground. Each brand radiates a presence in the world, surrounded by its own unique aura: IBM = genius, Budweiser = good times; Louis Vuitton = luxury. This essential quality has been earned through decades of hard work, so when a marketing story stars a corporation or its product, the brand’s aura should become the protagonist’s persona and the storytelling should reinforce this personality.7
Avoid Overdogs
When casting your protagonist, bear in mind the self-contradictory dynamics of your fellow human beings. A person can find her identity in anything from torn jeans to a diamond ring, from Big Macs to haute cuisine. So while people use products to shape their sense of self, that doesn’t mean they empathize with the corporations that make them. People do not identify with power. They respect it, shelter in it, rebel against it, worship it, but they rarely empathize with it. The wealthiest of people, for example, often need high-end luxury goods to confirm their identity. Despite their obvious social prestige, they lie awake at night, feeling, in their heart of hearts, like an underdog. This perception is virtually universal.
When human beings survey their place in the world, they instinctively feel that they’re up against overwhelming forces that stretch from the unpredictability of love to the inevitability of death. Weighed against the sum total of negative forces in life, we all feel, to some degree, on certain days, like an underdog.
When your story’s inciting incident upsets the balance of your protagonist’s life, the audience should sense that she is up against powerful antagonistic forces. The perception of underdogness draws empathy faster than any other cause. So above all else, avoid “overdog” protagonists. If you cast a corporation as protagonist, do not brag about its size, its reach, its wealth, its influence. If you cast a product as a protagonist, do not brag about its newness, its hipness, its celebrity. The world spares no empathy for an overdog; market with a graceful humility.
Step 3: Creation of Setting
Social and Physical Location
The social and physical settings for purpose-told stories range from the conceptual to the concrete, from animated to real-world grit, from a sole individual to a massive society. Compare the storytelling in two Apple commercials: “Get a Mac” and “Misunderstood.”
The enormously successful “Get a Mac” campaign ran from 2006 through 2009 and told sixty-six different thirty-second stories. Each featured two characters symbolizing competing computer brands standing against an abstract, ultra-minimalist milk-white background. One dressed in casual clothes (actor Justin Long) and introduced himself as a Mac computer; the other dressed in a suit and tie (comedian John Hodgman) and declared that he was a PC. In each mini-story, a conflict quickly develops between the two “computers,” then pivots around a single turning point, with the Mac always winning. The “Get a Mac” campaign received the Grand Effie Award in 2007.8
In “Misunderstood,” realism rules as a true-to-life family celebrates Christmas in a true-to-life suburban home. The ad’s ultra-naturalistic images tell the story of a teenage loner, surrounded by a lively family gathering, but spending his day face-deep in an iPhone. With a bolt of surprise, the turning point reveals that in fact the kid has used his iPhone to make a mini-film celebrating his family’s joy-filled holiday. This ad played through the 2013 Christmas season and won a Creative Arts Emmy for Outstanding Commercial.
Wherever you physically and socially set the story defines and limits what’s possible in the story. Only certain things are possible in a given world.
Location and Duration in Time
Now and then, advertisers set stories in the past, the future, or even the timeless worlds of the Brothers Grimm and Hans Christian Andersen to showcase everything from hair products (“Rapunzel”) to bedroom furniture (“The Princess and the Pea”). But in most purpose-told stories, familiarity and accessibility guide the choice of temporal setting, placing the vast majority of these stories in a realistic, contemporary world.
Length of time is a different matter. Storytelling has the magical, piston-like power to compress time, turning an hour into an instant. A TV commercial, for example, might dramatize an entire wedding in thirty seconds, while an investment prospectus squeezes decades of corporate history into half a dozen pages. This works to a marketer’s great advantage. You have the flexibility to use as much of the protagonist’s life as you need to craft your story.
STAGE THREE: THE INCITING INCIDENT
An inciting incident launches a story by suddenly throwing its protagonist’s life out of kilter, changing the core value’s charge sharply to the positive or negative. This surprising event grabs the customer’s curiosity and pulls him through the telling by raising a question only the climax can answer: “How will this turn out?”
In the purpose-told story, the precise quality of the inciting incident and the imbalance it causes depends on the nature of the protagonist. If, for example, your core character represents a corporation, possible inciting incidents range from mergers and acquisitions to takeovers and lawsuits. If your story stars a product, starting events run from innovation to obsolescence. If the consumer fills this role, anything can happen to a human being from giving birth to losing a loved one.
But no matter how you characterize your protagonist, his reaction to the inciting incident should draw the audience’s empathy and emotional concern, placing him at the story’s center of good. By doubling involvement via both curiosity and empathy, you transform the customer’s passing interest into suspense, laying the groundwork for the surprise that springs loose in Stage Five.
What’s more, from the audience’s viewpoint, the sudden reversal of fortune in the protagonist’s life mirrors the customer’s life and reflects his target need, the unsatisfied desire that the marketer discovered while researching the story’s setups. This hook begins the mirror story that will carry the audience to climax and declare the call to action.
Consider, for example, the “December 21st” campaign created by Leo Burnett Madrid for Sociedad Estatal Loterías y Apuestas del Estado (SELAE), the Spanish national lottery.
As background, the Spanish Christmas lottery is the second oldest lottery in the world, operating continuously since 1812. Over two centuries, it has become a national phenomenon, with 75 percent of Spaniards participating in the annual drawing.9 In 2016, the lottery sold more than €2.6 billion in tickets for its once-a-year Christmas drawing.10
The Christmas lottery operates differently from many other lotteries. There are just 100,000 potential winning numbers, from 00000 to 99999. The top prize (called El Gordo or “the Fat One” for this and other lotteries) pays €4M to each ticket holder who has selected the precise number drawn. In 2016, 165 winning El Gordo tickets won a combined €660 million.11
Individual lottery tickets cost €200, much more than most individuals are prepared to pay. Each ticket, however, is divided into ten perforated subtickets called décimos, enabling groups of people to purchase tickets together. Each décimo receives 10 percent of the winnings of each ticket. With this approach, the lottery unites friends and colleagues each year with a shared dream just before the holidays.
In recent years, social fragmentation in Spain has expanded beyond typical political debate, due in part to the growing Catalan independence movement. These divisions presented a threat to this shared ticketing model. Would groups form less often to buy tickets together? If so, would participating in the lottery be viewed as a selfish act? SELAE turned to storytelling not just to combat this risk, but also to position the lottery as something that helps unite people.
“December 21st” opens in a coastal Spanish town as a doting grandmother prepares a light breakfast of fruit, toast, and milk for her grandson. She thoughtfully arranges his meal on a tray and carries it to him in the living room.
The grandson, focused on his phone, absently dismisses her saying he is not hungry. As he does, the television in the room draws her attention, as an announcer calls the live drawing for El Gordo.
The grandmother rushes to find her ticket and watches in amazement as, ball after ball, her number is drawn. Stunned, she rushes out of the house to find one of the neighbors with whom she shared the winning ticket.
As soon as she departs, however, the television announcer returns, explaining, “And that’s how the drawing went last year. Tomorrow is the big day.”
Her son then enters, asking the distracted grandson, “Where’s Grandma?” The grandson replies, “Outside to find [her friend], she thinks she’s won the lottery.” Suddenly concerned, her son starts after her, his life having been thrown out of balance.
The grandmother’s misunderstanding triggers the inciting incident of the story. It hooks audience attention by causing viewers to wonder, “What will happen next?” That scene also establishes empathy for our protagonist. As the story progresses, the townspeople, SELAE’s customers, emerge as a group protagonist. The worry on the face of one of the members of that group, her son, as he learns of her mistake draws the audience into empathy. As audience members, we realize that if our own grandmother were confused, thinking she’d found life-changing good luck, we would want to protect her from harm and find some way to cushion her from the fall, just as the son seeks to do by following her into the street.
STAGE FOUR: THE OBJECT OF DESIRE
Stage Four focuses the audience’s curiosity and empathy toward the story’s climax. In order to restore life’s equilibrium, the protagonist conceives of the specific goal or objective, a story component we referred to previously as the object of desire. Like the inciting incident, the object of desire in a purpose-told story varies with the identity of the protagonist, be it an enterprise, product, or customer. This focus of intent could be a physical thing, like a new iPhone, or a condition that improves life, such as financial security, a career promotion, or even something more abstract like a dream of romance. To invent a one-of-a-kind telling, merge your knowledge with your imagination, and then ask: What exactly does my brand, corporation, product, or consumer want?
With that answer in hand, ask two questions more: How does this object of desire relate to the core value (for example, just/unjust or rich/poor) of the story? And by extension, how does the story’s core value relate to my company’s core value? Your answers need not match perfectly, but they cannot be divorced. Values and desires must reflect each other and thus unify the story with the company that produces it.
No matter how the object of desire is defined, as a thing or a situation, the central character feels he needs it to achieve a positive rebalance of his life. This desire drives him forward and powers your story.
In “December 21st,” the town’s object of desire is to help the grandmother avoid embarrassment and disappointment. To achieve that, a growing number of people will have to work together to execute an increasingly complex plan. As the story unfolds, the core value pair is revealed to be isolation/togetherness, taking us from the opening scene where the grandmother and grandson barely communicate to a very different conclusion.
STAGE FIVE: THE FIRST ACTION
Stage Five launches your protagonist’s quest. To reach his object of desire, the core character takes an action based on his best sense of expectation. Spontaneously or consciously, he uses words and deeds as tactics to evoke the positive reactions he hopes to get from his world. The unique identity of the protagonist determines the unique actions he will take.
Therefore, the creator of the purpose-told story must research the psychology of his core character in depth and detail. In the same way that the question “What would my character want?” demands knowledge and imagination, so do the answers to “What would my character expect to happen? And therefore what would he do to make it happen?”
Again if we turn to the “December 21st” example, the son takes the first action on behalf of the group protagonist when he carries the grandmother’s jacket outside, expecting he will tell her and wrap it around her for comfort. Until…
STAGE SIX: THE FIRST REACTION
Stage Six violates the protagonist’s expectations. A gap of surprise cracks open between what he imagined would happen when he took action and his world’s sudden, unforeseeable reaction—a reaction that’s either different or more powerful or both at once.
In the case of the Spanish lottery story, the son arrives to find his grandmother celebrating on the street with their neighbor, one of the other ticket holders who shares her number. The son and neighbor make eye contact, and the neighbor gives him a knowing look and shrugs, as if to say, Let her have her moment.
A full-length work of fiction may pull this reaction from any combination of the various levels of conflict (inner, personal, social, or physical). Most marketing stories, however, are compact and sharply focused on results. They therefore rarely involve their characters at more than one level of conflict.
Developing a compelling story means developing a conflict that relates to your audience, mirroring the positive/negative duality of their lives. Think about it. Life fills our hours with problems to be solved, needs to be met, desires to be satisfied—not enough time to get the job done, too far to go to get what you need, a romance on the rocks, an illness that resists cure.
When negative forces block a character’s desires, conflict compels her to reach deep within, make a tough choice, and then act. From the audience members’ point of view, the protagonist’s storied struggle mirrors their real-life struggle, thus focusing their attention, deepening involvement, and inspiring a purchase.
The creative force that rouses powerful storytelling is, as Jean-Paul Sartre taught, scarcity. There simply isn’t enough of anything in this world to go around: not enough food, nor enough love, and never enough time. To satisfy human needs from their most basic to their most dream-filled, we must battle paucities that deny our yearnings. In short, the essence of reality is humanity’s ongoing strivings against negation.
Imagine a TV commercial with three cheerful, homespun scenes strung back-to-back: a very happy family, followed by an even happier family, topped by the happiest family the world has ever seen.
What reaction would this triply sugared design evoke? The first spoonful might draw a smile, but the second will sour that grin, and the third will evoke a silent vow never to buy what’s on offer. When mawkish ads drumbeat sentimentality, no one reaches for a credit card.
Marketing stories move from problem to solution, not solution to solution to solution. A positive climax demands a negative setup. For no matter how happy a happy ending may be, if nothing but uplifting scenes precede it, redundancy erases those images from the audience’s memory.
The Law of Diminishing Returns
The more often a cause repeats, the less and less its effect.
Repetition kills impact. This principle, put into action, falls into a pattern of thirds, to wit: The first time we experience something it causes its full effect; the second experience causes half or less than half of its original effect; the third experience reverses itself and causes the opposite effect. The first piece of cheesecake tastes great; the second seems hard to swallow; the third makes you sick. The same pattern applies to story design.
Story enemy number one is repetition and leads to story enemy number two: vacuity. Why do so many branding campaigns devolve into boring recitations of… and then and then and then…? Why do so many product and service ads deliver little, if any, impact? Answer: because their tellings deliberately avoid any hint of conflict. And why is that? Answer: negaphobia.
Negaphobia: The Fear of All Things Negative
Negaphobia is a by-product of marketing education. Ever since the invention of the business school, and marketing as a unique discipline within its curriculum, marketers have been trained, as the old song goes, to accentuate the positive and eliminate the negative. What seemed like common sense and good manners has metastasized into an emotional contagion that now infects every dimension of corporate life from outbound branding to inbound team building. Today, for example, the worst thing one employee might say about another is: “He’s so negative.”
In all probability, the guy in question is simply a realist who sees things as they are, downsides and all, but from cubicle to cubicle, those who cannot face the sharp edges of reality tend to shun those who can. This negaphobic disdain for the truth is, of course, shortsighted, in that the career span of those who cannot face facts quickly abbreviates. So why would someone risk her or his future by ignoring what’s real, no matter how negative? There are three primary causes:
First: as mentioned, the business school dictum to protect your brand from any and all criticism.
Second: the super-sensitive people of today’s hyper-protective culture who find unpleasant truths intimidating.
Third: people who want to cover their asses.
Consider, for example, an ad with an intriguing negative inciting incident that sets up a splendid positive flourish at climax, but, for some unknown reason, does not increase sales. The real cause for the ad’s failure may be found in any link along the chain from creation to distribution, but the finger of blame will immediately point to whoever dared okay the ad’s negative floor.
To preempt blame, marketing executives cover their butts by outlawing the least hint of anything negative in their ads. As an unfortunate result, negaphobia not only distorts their business judgment, but also sucks the impact out of their messaging.
The Principle of Negation
A compelling marketing story encompasses the negative of life. And the story must establish its negative floor either in Stage Two, when the inciting incident imbalances the protagonist’s life, or here in Stage Six as the story’s forces of antagonism suddenly react against the protagonist.
This surprise instantly pops the question “Why?” into the mind of character and audience alike. Curiosity drives them to look more deeply into the story’s society and setting. As they suddenly discover the answer, they experience a rush of insight into the true forces that oppose the protagonist’s desire and how his world actually works. Consumers love to realize the truth in this spontaneous, storified way. They want to be shown, not told. They don’t want to sit in a classroom; they want a surprising living discovery.
This insight puts the consumer’s mirror story on a path to solution and the satisfaction of her need. She doesn’t know how it will be done, but it’s out there, so she can’t look away. This curiosity holds your prospect’s attention, even in a world of constant distraction.
Marketing stories are generally brief. The protagonist pursues her object of desire through usually only one turning point.
However, in longer stories, such as our “December 21st” example, stages 5 and 6 build progressively.
The antagonistic force that violated the protagonist’s expectations in Stage Six now blocks the path to her object of desire. At the same time, however, this unforeseen reaction gives her a new understanding of her world. In Stage Seven, she puts this insight to work as she makes her final choice of action.
STAGE SEVEN: CRISIS CHOICE
Stage Seven brings the story to its crisis, the highest level of tension and suspense. The protagonist, based on her new knowledge, chooses a new tactic, one she hopes will create a reaction from her world that will deliver her object of desire.
At this point in most fiction-told stories, the protagonist stands in dilemma, forced to choose between either two irreconcilable positive possibilities or two equally repugnant negative choices.
Never in a marketing story. Rather, the insight the protagonist gained in Stage Six now gives her a clear choice of what to do to get what she wants. She conceives her new tactic and takes it.
As the protagonist acts, tension peaks and the audience senses that the world’s next reaction will answer the major dramatic question: “How will this turn out?”
Events progress in “December 21st,” until the protagonists realize the day is coming to a close. As a wonderful lobster feast winds down, they know the grandmother will soon learn there is no €4 million prize coming her way. Her son makes the decision that they must tell her, and approaches to break the news.
STAGE EIGHT: CLIMACTIC REACTION
Stage Eight delivers the goods. The protagonist’s second action evokes a positive reaction from his world, giving him his object of desire and reestablishing the balance of his life. This climactic event not only satisfies your audience’s emotional curiosity about the outcome of the story, but also dramatizes how they can solve the mirror problem in their own lives—how they, too, can get what they need and desire.
Early in “December 21st,” after the son’s first attempt to protect his mother fails, he and the neighbor, Puri, agree to celebrate her “win” at the pub. Immediately forces of antagonism arise. The pub owner and other guests know the lottery drawing has not yet happened. A single word from one passerby will shatter her extraordinary day. As the grandmother walks across town, her family and friends call ahead to alert the pub owner and ensure everyone there is ready to play along. Champagne is being poured as they arrive.
After celebrating in the pub, the grandmother sets off to greet friends at her salon. The town involves more people to keep up the ruse, and a crowd begins to grow behind her.
At one point, she wonders, “Shouldn’t the television crews have arrived?” Her son nearly throws in the towel and reveals the truth, but he’s stopped by the previously disinterested grandson. Caught up in the spirit of the day, he sprints off to find friends with a video camera who can interview Grandma. While the townspeople thought that might satisfy her, at the end of the interview she turns to the crowd and marshals them to the town lighthouse for a town-wide celebration.
“December 21st” ends with a final twist. Before the son can break the truth to the grandmother, she stops him, saying, “I know what you are going to say.” He sighs, thinking she has already figured it out and been let down. Instead she reaches into her pocket and hands him her “winning” lottery ticket, saying, “But you should always listen to your mother. And I will be much happier if you have this.”
He hugs her, makes eye contact with Puri, and they decide to let the ruse go on. In that moment, the audience is rewarded with a rush of insight. It was not the windfall of money that made the grandmother so excited. It was the happiness that she knew it would bring the town, in the many ways they might celebrate and live better together. We realize as the screen fades to black that, through their adventure that day, they had achieved that happiness through togetherness, whether El Gordo winners or not. “December 21st” executes its progressive complications brilliantly, holding the audience’s attention to climax.
The Open-Mind Moment
A story’s climax impacts the audience’s mind with a sudden rush of meaningful emotional insight, a flash of “I get it!” In this instant, a flood of charged understanding opens the mind. Neuroscientists have measured this open-mind phenomenon and found that it lasts for six to eight seconds. In this moment of wonder and pleasure, anything presented to the mind lodges in its memory. Therefore, this is the spot where the wise marketer plants his logo. That’s exactly what the Spanish lottery does at the end of their five-minute story, and beneath it they feature their tagline “There’s no bigger prize than sharing.”
The Call to Action
The final effect of the open-mind moment turns the entire story into a massive call to action that sends the audience member out into the real world to duplicate the protagonist’s triumph. Wanting to relive the mirror story, she purchases the product or hires the service that’s at the heart of the story.
EXPLICIT VERSUS IMPLICIT STORYTELLING
Now that we have reviewed the eight stages of story, it’s important to note that not every marketing story needs to take its audience through all eight stages explicitly. The mind, as we noted, is a story-taking and -making machine. One key phrase or image may imply an entire story, as the audience’s mind instantly imagines the unexpressed stages.
Consider, for example, Nike’s famous imperative: “Just Do It.” What story do those three words imply? It goes like this:
“I’m climbing the stairs one day and barely make it to the top [protagonist in his setting]. I suddenly realize that I’ve got to get in shape [inciting incident] before the stairs kill me [object of desire: fitness]. I buy a pair of Nikes and start to run [first action]. The pain hits hard [first reaction]. But I stick with it [second action]. Each day I push against the pain until I lose weight, feel great, enter the local 10K [second reaction/climax].
“Call to action: Buy Nike.”
A story doesn’t even need words. Take for example, the famous Michelin advertisement, featuring this image:
What story runs through the mind at the sight of that ad? It might go like this:
“I’m driving [consumer as protagonist] along a curvy road on a stormy night, my family in the backseat [setting in balance]. Suddenly a truck jackknifes in front of me [inciting incident], putting them at risk [object of desire: a safe, secure family]. I swerve to the side [first action], my tires splash into the mud [first reaction]. But as I swing around the spinning truck [second action], my Michelins grip the shoulder and I veer safely past the truck, and back onto the asphalt [second reaction/climax]. Thanks to my Michelins, I save my family’s life.
“Call to action: Buy Michelins.”
When told beautifully, a little goes a long way.