In their upcoming book, What's Your Story?, authors Ryan Mathews and Watts Wacker look at the power of stories and storytelling to drive business in the 21st century. In this second installment in a multipart series, RetailWire speaks with Ryan Mathews to look at effective storytelling to build brand sales.
Ryan Mathews, founder and CEO of Black Monk Consulting and co-author of the upcoming book, What's Your Story? (2008, FT Press, Upper Saddle River, NJ), will tell you that successful brand and corporate storytelling comes down to connection and engagement.
First, the storyteller must find a means to connect with an audience to get their attention and then engage them in such a way as to keep and deepen that connection.
Progressing from connection to engagement requires a keen understanding of the audience. According to Mr. Mathews, however, many brands just don't seem to get this aspect of storytelling. At least, it is difficult to tell from their advertising creative.
A case in point, Mr. Mathews told RetailWire, are the cereal manufacturers who have done a great job of telling stories to kids while failing to engage adults.
"Normally cereal ads tell adults one or two things: you're sick or you're fat. If you can pinch an inch use Special K; if your cholesterol is high, try Cheerios. But, what about people that aren't fat or sick? They can't eat the product? Tell the story of the cereal that makes sense to an adult audience."
Another story that has failed to resonate, said Mr. Mathews, is in the commercial where an adult sits down to eat a bowl of cereal and promptly turns into a five-year old after the first bite.
"Adults don't want to be five-years old. Heck, six-year olds don't want to be five." he said.
Speak to an adult in terms they can easily understand, said Mr. Mathews.
"The commercial that I'd like to see, for example, would show the typical road warrior coming into his or her apartment. It's late, they're tired and dragging the suitcase up behind them. Their computer is screaming at them; they've got 5,000 emails. They've missed flights, been gone for days; they go to the kitchen and open up a box of cereal and they're happy. It's convenient and quick and nothing tastes better than a bowl of cereal when you've just come off the road like that," he said.
"There are dozen of brand attributes that flow from that one story. But, they (cereal brands) don't tell that. Tell the story of the cereal that makes sense to an adult audience. When you think about an industry that has such great stories to tell, it's interesting (re: puzzling) that the only stories they can think of to tell adults is you're fat, you're sick or you're a kid."
Part of the problem that brands face is trying to tell the same story to different audiences, said Mr. Mathews.
"If you go back to the days when storytellers wandered from town to town and supported themselves by telling stories, you'll see that if they told a story well, they got food or money. If they didn't, they got rocks thrown at them. That storyteller very rarely had one story. They knew their audiences. If they went to a town and were telling a story about stupid people, they would use the name of a rival town. When they went to the rival town, they'd reverse the names.
"The beauty of stories is that they are inherently so flexible and easy to modify. This is the difference between truth and true. What's truth is pretty fungible. What's true is pretty objective. Kellogg's, General Mills, or whoever it is, could run one flight of commercials to children and a much more compelling flight to adults and sell a lot more cereal. They just tell different stories. Now, they keep trying to tell the same story to two different audiences (and it doesn't work)."
Discussion Questions: Do you see companies/brands limiting growth by adhering to a single story? Does varying a brand's story by target audience somehow lessen the validity of the individual stories being told? Why do you think some companies that clearly excel at reaching one audience seem to struggle with finding compelling stories for a difference consumer target?