The marketing director of one of the biggest fast-food chains in the world had a problem on his hands. His biggest competitive advantage was probably that his food was a whole lot healthier than his rivals’—but his research was pretty clear that promoting that advantage wasn’t going to do a whole lot for the chain’s sales.
He knew he could go out there with all sorts of statistics and health information and make the case—but, those numbers and facts would just bore consumers, who only considered stopping in at one of his eateries for a quick meal when they were short on either money or time, or possibly both.
That meant the marketing director wasn’t particularly excited when a Chicago franchisee found out about some guy who dropped a lot of pounds by only eating their food and took the story to the chain’s ad agency. Again, they weren’t promoting themselves as the fast-food equivalent of Jenny Craig or anything like that, so what good would that do? Not only that, but this kind of campaign could get the company in legal hot water. Their lawyers were warning that they could be in for a ton of liability lawsuits should they make any kind of health claims or promises.
The ad agency was insistent that this was a great idea, however. They put together a legal disclaimer that the lawyers could live with. So the marketing director finally sighed and agreed to try a regional test campaign.
Jared Fogle, a guy who lost 245 pounds eating the exact same Subway sandwich every day for months, appeared in his first commercial on January 1st, 2000—and the next thing he knew Oprah was booking him on her show. The marketing director was astounded by the instant success of the campaign, and it was soon rolled out nationally.
During the next ten years, Subway’s sales doubled, the chain moved up from being the number-four fast-food franchise (after McDonald’s, Burger King, and Wendy’s) to become number three (displacing Wendy’s), and Jared became a minor celebrity.
Not only that, but every time Subway tried to dump Jared from advertising, their sales suffered. The first time, in 2005, sales immediately fell by 10%. Jared’s story was now Subway’s—and it made them billions of dollars in the process.
The success of the Jared campaign is surely based on the premise of our first book, Celebrity Branding You: “People Buy People.” When you effectively promote a real, living, breathing human being that people can connect with, as opposed to dry facts, the audience is going to be a lot more responsive just because of that “human touch.”
And when you combine that personality with a compelling story, you’ve hit a marketing home run.
That’s just what Subway did with Jared, who’s a perfect example of the potential StorySelling™ holds for a business. He crystallized for consumers what ordinary nutritional information could never have accomplished: He provided an authentic story that visually demonstrated the benefit of eating at Subway (as long as, of course, you took it easy on the mayo, bacon, and cheese!).
But why was Jared necessary to make that kind of impact? Why couldn’t simple and verifiable health facts deliver the same message—and, in turn, motivate the same rise of sales?
For that answer, we have to examine the power of stories—and how that power could dramatically increase your branding and sales success.
Storytelling: It Never Goes Out of Style
Cave drawings were the first way we came up with to tell a story. Those later evolved into hieroglyphics in ancient Egypt. Of course, you can only tell so much with pictures—and it can be a real drag having to sketch everything out. That’s why, around 3,000 E1F. the Sumerian tribes in southern Mesopotamia developed the first primitive writing, which they called “cuneiform.” Suddenly stories could be written in more detail—and that eliminated the guesswork involved in trying to figure out what those scrawls on those walls were trying to say.
Of course, most people back then couldn’t read or write, which is why most stories were spread by simple word-of-mouth. This created a “survival of the fittest” process where the best stories ended up having an abnormally long shelf life, even though they only existed in oral form.
For example, around 500 E1F., a fellow named Aesop was walking around delivering a great many memorable “fables”—stories that always had a moral lesson (or, as we call it today, a “takeaway”). It wasn’t until 300 years later, after its author was long dead and buried, that Aesop’s Fables were actually written down and distributed.
The fact, however, remained that these and other powerful stories refused to die. There was something meaningful about them that motivated people to not only spread these stories far and wide, but also to hand them down to their children, and their children’s children.
That’s how the Bible came to be, of course; hundreds of years of oral storytelling finally resulted in holy men putting these tales together in the Old and New Testaments. The Bible also became the centerpiece of the next phase of storytelling, when Johannes Gutenberg created what we know as the modern printing press. Of course, it’s not so modern anymore due to computers.
Which brings us to the 20th century, where we saw the most rapid and transformational change in storytelling. What we now know as “Old Media” was brand-new then—movies, radio, and TV were suddenly able to tell us stories in new and exciting ways. And, of course, the 21st century has brought even more incredible storytelling tools, through the explosion of “New Media”—online video, social media, blogs, websites, and more.
Stories are more important to us than ever. An effective narrative, even if it’s found in a simple YouTube video, can quickly go viral throughout the world—indicating the public is feverishly searching for great stories more than at any other time in history. Aesop, if he were around today, would no doubt have his own Tumblr blogsite that would attract millions (especially if his fables featured the Kardashian family instead of turtles and birds).
DAN KENNEDY’S COMMENT: In my field, success education, there have been two enduring stories so powerful that they refuse to die, and are told and retold by so many so often that they have kept books first published in 1937 and 1960, respectively, thriving to this day. The stories are what are called Origin Stories, and they are attached to Napoleon Hill and the book Think And Grow Rich and Dr. Maxwell Maltz and Psycho-Cybernetics, which I updated in a co-authored edition, The New Psycho-Cybernetics. In the health field, the example Nick and Jack just presented of Jared probably trumps all others, although you would also have to include the Charles Atlas story of “the bully who kicked sand in the face of the 90-pound weakling.” Both are Transformation Stories. The best-known business Origin Story may be Disney’s. Every business or product category, interest category, or field has at least several of these stories that never die and hold their value and influence over years, decades, generations. These are the stories to study as you craft your own.
This Is Your Brain on Stories: Why We’re Addicted
The question remains—why do we like stories so much? Actually, change that, because we don’t just like stories—we love them.
Literally.
Researchers at the Center for Neuroeconomics Studies at Claremont Graduate University, in Claremont, California1, discovered that stories activate the oxytocin hormone in our brains—this is actually called “the love hormone” by the scientific community. That’s because it’s associated with romantic attachment, human bonding . . . and yes, sex.
In other words, stories are way sexy. Even when they themselves are very far from it. Dr. Paul Zak, one of the Claremont researchers, showed volunteers a video that told a story about a four-year-old boy with terminal brain cancer—and also showed the same group a video of the same length about a four-year-old boy going to the zoo without any real narrative to it. Those that watched the first video had a 47% higher level of the love hormone. “Of all the stimuli we’ve developed that release oxytocin, this one was the best,” said Zak of the story experiment.
Why do stories trigger that kind of reaction? Other research suggests that it happens because we identify with whoever the story is about—and put ourselves in their shoes. After all, we’re all people—and we all experience the same fears, desires, joys, and ambitions.
More fun with brain scanning confirms that this is true. Jeffrey Zacks of Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri, ran functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scans of people reading a story or watching a movie2—and discovered that, when the main character encountered a situation, it activated the same parts of the brain in the subjects that would have responded if they themselves had been in the same predicament in real life. And it didn’t matter if the story was read or experienced through a movie or a video—it was the content of the story itself that provoked the reaction.
We are addicted to stories in a very real sense—and here’s more research that proves it. Read Montague of Virginia Tech University in Blacksburg, Virginia, and William Casebeer of the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) in Arlington, Virginia,3 analyzed how listening to a story affects the brain’s reward centers—the parts that respond to such wonderful things as sex, good food, and drugs. Casebeer’s conclusion? “If I were a betting man or woman, I would say that certain types of stories might be addictive and, neurobiologically speaking, not that different from taking a tiny hit of cocaine,” says Casebeer.
Simply put, strong stories key into our emotions in a deep and profound way; we identify with them in a way we don’t identify with raw data. That’s why Jared’s miracle sandwich diet was so effective for Subway—and also why raw black-and-white information wouldn’t have been. Consumers could see that eating at Subway actually caused a person like them to lose weight—and, most importantly, could see it working for them. They identified with Jared—and it made for a very rewarding experience for their reward centers.
Beyond the emotional component, however, stories actually accomplish a critical function for our brains. Believe it or not, we need them to figure out our lives.
Let’s switch up researchers to find out just why this is—and examine the work of neuroscientist Michael Gazzaniga from the University of California, Santa Barbara. Gazzaniga has done incredible research in the whole right brain-left brain arena. He’s the person who discovered that the mind’s right side was more artistic, creative, and visual, while the left side was more verbal and intellectual (and he did this at the ripe old age of 25).4
Now, given that the right side of the brain was the artistic and creative half, that half would be the one that would naturally respond best to stories in whatever form they take, right?
Wrong—and this is where it gets interesting.
You see, Gazzaniga also discovered that you could actually separate the left side of the brain from the right, and the left side wouldn’t suffer any loss in IQ points. Don’t ask us how he found that out. We’re afraid it will sound like a horror movie we definitely do not want to watch. Ever.
But something about the brain’s ability to seemingly function the same, even when split in half, confused the good doctor. It didn’t add up—if the different sides of our brains acted that independently, what accounted for our unity of thought, action, and purpose?
To find out, Gazzaniga used his access to people who had had surgery to disconnect communication between the two halves of their brains (this is done sometimes for severe epileptics, for example). What he discovered was equally revolutionary.
Whatever information he gave to the right side of the brain, the left side of the brain would then work overtime to explain. The left side, through storytelling, concocted narratives to make sense of random information. More research confirmed his initial results: Gazzinga began to call the left side of our brains “The Interpreter”—because a big part of its job is to put together individual facts to make a complete mental “picture.”
In other words, the artistic half of our brains doesn’t come up with the stories—the intellectual half does. And not as a creative pursuit—but just as a way to make sense of what was happening all around it.
Think about your own daily life. Think about how many times you try to explain to yourself (or to someone who’s with you) something random that happens.
For example . . . you hear a random piece of gossip about someone acting strangely. You immediately try to connect the dots to solve the riddle of why that person acted out of character, and come up with excuses like, “They’re getting a divorce,” “They’re on drugs,” or maybe, “They lost their job.”
Or . . . your car makes a funny noise on the way home from the store. You immediately try to formulate an explanation in your head for why it’s making that sound. Needs an oil change. Maybe the muffler’s loose.
Or . . . you watch TV shows like CSI, NCIS, or Bones—hourlong shows that have a central mystery at their core in each episode. These shows are so popular (just as murder mysteries and detective novels have traditionally been) because the audience is constantly trying to figure out the solution to whatever bizarre crime is being dramatized.
This tendency gets even more intense with a show like Mad Men or Homeland, shows that have an ongoing storyline. Something shocking happens at the end of the episode—and you spend the week trying to concoct the storyline that led up to the cliffhanger (and not just you—there are 50 million people on the internet also blogging and commenting, also trying to explain what happened).
Now, the above examples have something very much in common. In all instances, you pretty much have no idea what the real story is. But, the sad truth is . . . you can’t stop your brain from trying to figure it out anyway.
That’s your left side talking. It wants to know. It NEEDS to know.
Early man, pre-science, would make up various “gods” to explain away all kinds of natural happenings. That’s because, at that time, humans weren’t capable of discovering that the earth was round and it rotated—and that’s why the sun came up in the morning and sank down in the evening.
But they still had to know why.
So they made up stuff. They filled in the blanks, just like we do every day.
It may be hard for you to think of Subway’s Jared as an ancient god, but, in a sense, he was. He personified Subway’s healthy eating possibilities and provided a living explanation of how they might work through his very dramatic weight-loss story. He filled in the blanks in a way that had impact. So people bought his StorySelling™—and, more importantly to the company, they subsequently bought a lot of Subway sandwiches.
As we’ve hopefully demonstrated, a myriad of scientists and researchers (along with all of human history as well!) have all come up with the same conclusion about stories: that certain ones really do answer primal needs that we all need to have met.
That’s what makes StorySelling™ so powerful. When done correctly, it hits the human brain with an incredible impact, most of which is felt on a subconscious level. It also activates the pleasure centers of the brain—which makes you want to hear more.
Jared’s diet breakthrough saga accomplished all that and more. It made a treat into a health food (“You mean you can lose weight by eating 6-inch subs?”) and it created the perception that Subway’s food wasn’t just good to eat, it was also good for you.
The campaign was as effective as it could have possibly been, simply because Jared’s story was true—and yet unbelievable at the same time.
The Four Key Factors of StorySelling™
When you apply StorySelling™ techniques to your brand, you have the potential to maximize your impact on your audience—and you give yourself the greatest opportunity to persuade them of your value vs. your competition’s.
There are four key factors that, when combined, create the perfect climate for StorySelling™ success:
1. Simplicity
How many stories do we hear in a day? How much information do we end up taking in? The answer to both of those questions is the same: a scary, crazy amount. That means if your story isn’t simple and easy to grasp, most of us, unless we’re already intensely interested in the story, aren’t going to hang on to it. Our lives are too busy and our minds too cluttered to take in something that’s not directly relevant to what we’re dealing with at the moment. With Jared, the facts were clear and easy to process—the guy ate nothing but Subway sandwiches for months and lost a whole bunch of weight.
2. Authenticity
We are also bombarded with marketing campaigns night and day—and most of us can smell a sales pitch a mile off. If your story only seems like an effort to get your audience to buy—or, even worse, if it doesn’t have the ring of truth—no one is going to take it seriously. Jared was obviously not a polished media pro when he started doing Subway commercials—and that worked in the campaign’s favor. He seemed real because he was real—and so was his story, as many in the media found out when they checked it out and verified in their reporting that it was true.
3. Visibility
Obviously, the public, or at the very least, your target audience, has to have access to the story you want to tell. There are a lot of channels you can utilize to deliver your narrative; the point is, you can’t expect your potential leads to come to you, you have to find a viable way to bring your story to them. Subway obviously put a lot of money behind exposing Jared’s story to the public and made sure everyone they could possibly reach heard about it.
4. Relevancy
It also has to be a story that people want to hear. As we noted with Jared’s Subway commercials, viewers loved the idea that you could lose weight at a fast-food restaurant. Again, we have so many people out there trying to sell us their stories that we block out as many as we can, just to keep our sanity. That means your narrative must be one that your audience is predisposed to hear for one reason or another—and that reason should be a powerful one.
Just like with any other powerful force, StorySelling™ is awesome to use—as long as you can maintain some control over it. Often, that’s not possible. Ten years into Jared’s run as a Subway spokesperson, for example, he ended up packing on a few pounds—which wasn’t good for the campaign, which kept trying to cover up the weight gain. There were even a few ads where Jared’s waistline was disguised by big bulky coats.
When something like that happens, however, there are ways to continue your narrative and make it turn back in your favor. In Subway’s case, they turned Jared’s weight gain into a positive—as they had him train for the New York Marathon in a new ad campaign, which gave them an entirely new narrative to StorySell™ with their sandwich star (and also guaranteed that he would again be svelte and commercial-ready!).
So think about what story you’re telling with your brand—and look closely at it to see if it’s really the most effective one you can tell. If you’re not putting the power of StorySelling™ behind your brand, you’re missing out on your single strongest opportunity to deliver your message in the most memorable way—and with the most profitable results!
RESOURCES
Nick and J.W. have a brand-new book, Hollywood Secrets Revealed—How to Sell witout Selling by Telling Your Brand Story providing much greater depth and detail on this important subject, available at all booksellers. If you’d like to hear a FREE AUDIO PROGRAM with Dan Kennedy; famed mystery novelist Les Roberts, with whom Dan collaborated on the novel Win, Place or Die; Nick Nanton; Donna Krech; and Lee Milteer, visit www.nobsbooks.com. Dan Kennedy also has a complete home study course on Influential Writing, and information about it can be found at www.DanKennedy.com/store.
NICK NANTON and J.W. DICKS lead The Celebrity Branding Agency®. Nick is an Emmy-winning documentary film director and producer, a gifted and skilled business storyteller, and an exceptionally knowledgeable media insider. J.W. Dicks is a strategic business development advisor and a securities and franchise attorney. They have perfected systems for personal and business credits. They are also the authors of Celebrity Branding You and StorySelling. For free copies of their bestselling books and a special Celebrity Expert Resource featuring Nick, J.W., Brian Tracy, Tom Hopkins, and Michael Gerber, visit www.CelebrityBrandingAgency.com.
1 Jorge A. Barraza and Paul J. Zak, “Empathy Toward Strangers Triggers Oxytocin Release and Subsequent Generosity,” Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, June 2009.
2 Gerry Everding, “Readers Build Vivid Mental Simulations of Narrative Situations, Brain Scans Suggest,” www.phys.org, January 26, 2009.
3 Jessica Marshall, “Gripping Yarns,” New Scientist, February 12, 2011.
4 Benedict Carey, “Decoding the Brain’s Cacophony,” The New York Times, October 31, 2011.