Every business has a story to tell
Everyone loves a good story and why not? The stories are entertaining
instructive, entertaining and above all human; connect people
people and companies to customers. Stories are about communication.
and communication is the essence of marketing.
We have at our disposal the greatest communication tool in the world
known, the Internet, and we are wasting it. The websites are used as if
They were corporate brochures. The techno-experts would even have us
remove its visual and kinetic elements, and turn it into an academic style
magazine to please the SEO gurus. We have been there and done that.
Search engine optimization is great, but who is going to go to your
website if it is boring to look at and tedious to operate. It’s time to move.
A place of communication for the rest of us
The Web is a place of multimedia communication, and with an increase
bandwidth and high speed connections we can use it effectively to
send our marketing messages. But communication is a funny thing,
just because we speak, write and present information, does not mean that
they are communicating.
Since I am defending storytelling as a means of delivering your
marketing messages, I’ll illustrate my point, you guessed it, with a
history. In his book ‘Information Anxiety’, Richard Saul Wurman recounts the
following story attributed to U.S. Representative Pat Swindall of
Georgia.
“A woman seeking a divorce went to see her lawyer. The first question
he asked was, ‘Do you have reason?’
She replied, ‘Yes, about two acres.’
‘Maybe I’m not expressing myself well,’ he said, ‘Do you have a grudge?’
‘No, but we have a garage,’ she replied.
‘Let me try again. Does your husband hit you? she said impatiently.
‘No, I usually get up before him,’ she said.
At this point, the attorney decided to try a different tack. ‘Ma’am, are you
Are you sure you really want a divorce?
‘I don’t want one at all, but my husband does. He claims that we have
difficulty communicating.
It’s a great story; offers everything a good story should communicate:
a reinforcement of sight, information, emotion and the truth about the human being
condition. The only thing that would make this story more effective is if
was delivered by a human voice that could add character, emphasis,
and personality
Marketing is nothing more than telling your story in an effective way that
embeds your identity in the minds of your audience, connecting and
communicate who you are, what you do and why your audience
I should be doing it with you. The brand and positioning are the results, not
the process.
So tell me a story: it’s all in the delivery
One of the great narrators of the last forty years is a radio announcer
and commentator, Paul Harvey. On hay day he had a whole
great storyteller needed to make a memorable impression: the voice, the
cadence, attitude, writing and the ‘schtick’.
He presented his comments as if he were reading the newspaper,
even reading the page numbers when he returned from
commercial, “Page Two”. He would elaborate his stories by introducing the
listener to a character in the most casual way, perhaps referring to
him or her by a diminutive given name. At the end of the story, he
tell you who this person really was and invariably it was someone
famous, and the story he told revealed something unusual or hidden in
the background of this person. Each story had a strong point of view, and
each comment ended with the tagline “…and now you know
the rest of the story.” Paul Harvey’s little radio comments are a
quintessential example of Sonic Personality©
“Content is not communication”
Web experts always talk about “content” and how “content is king”.
on the Web, but as Curt Cloninger wrote in his article ‘A Case for Web
Storytelling’ “content is not communication”.
The content stays there until it is proactively delivered, and
plain text content on your website is far from proactive.
Stories need to communicate effectively if you want to deliver your
intended message. Alone, your audience will scan, jump,
misunderstand and generally miss the point you are trying to get across.
The only effective way to make sure your audience doesn’t misunderstand
the message of your story is to deliver it in a human voice: one with
character, cadence, accent, language and an attitude that represents
Who are you. A well-told story creates expectations and relevance; that
creates image and identity, and focuses on the business promise that you
must comply.
Fakers don’t need to apply
As good as your storyteller is, he or she can’t beat a fake. You
You must be honest about who you are and what you really do. every business
it has a character and an operating ethos. trying to communicate a
message that conflicts with that corporate character is a recipe for
failure. Apple and Dell are good companies, but Apple Computer is
innovative; Dell is not. Walmart and The Gap are successful
companies, but The Gap is cool and Walmart is Walmart. Does not matter how
a company tries very hard, it cannot be something it is not, and try
it can only create false expectations, confusion and failure.
A plan to create your brand story
Whether you write the story yourself or hire someone to write it for
You must first gather the necessary material. The easiest way to
collecting material is creating a series of questions that when answered
reveal the brand story. Think of the process like an interview.
The Brand Story Interview
1. What was the original vision of the company?
2. Who were the founding fathers of the company?
3. How did the company start?
4. What was the guiding business philosophy?
5. Is there a creative genius or technical wizard behind your vision?
6. What is the big idea behind your product or service?
7. What does your product or service do for your target audience?
8. Is your vision based on the quality, cost, or uniqueness of your
has. products,
b. Services,
against knowledge, or
d. delivery system?
9. Has your approach changed since the company was founded?
10. What is your vision for the future?
Once the material is collected, it should be put into story form. you are
you are not writing a research paper, nor are you creating ad copy. you are
tell a story, and as such, it should be written as a story. Like
suggested that you are delivering the story using audio, you need to write it to
the spoken word and not for print. There is a variety of multimedia.
styles that can be used ranging from Paul’s radio commentary style
Harvey in the style of PBS documentary by Ken Burns with
accompanying graphics and photographs.
It’s not just the story, it’s how you tell it
If you have ever tried to tell a joke that you heard from a professional comedian
and messed it up, you know how important it is to tell a story. It is not
just the words; is the rhythm, the cadence, the accent, the intonation, the point of view,
and attitude that makes the story funny, memorable, interesting, or
instructive.
Our previous article titled ‘The Sound of Business’ goes into detail about
how the Sonic Personality© concept delivers branding and marketing messages
Stories in a compelling, inventive, entertaining and memorable way. That
explains the power of the human voice and the need to integrate it
on your website.
The medium is the message
It is hard to believe that there are companies of any size or
sophistication that do not have a website, but it is even more difficult to
understand how so many companies with websites, they have no idea what
the website is
The Web is usually described in technical terms, but in fact the Web is
simply a place designed for communication, a place where
conversations take place, where information is exchanged and where
transactions are made. If you can accept the idea that the Web
exists to further your communication efforts, then it stands to reason that
delivering your story is the ‘raison d’être’ of your website. and without him
sound of the human voice, the delivery of emotional connective content,
and the transmission of intelligent, interesting, useful, entertaining and
compelling stories, the web is a wasteland, an uncommunicative place
random confusion environment.
