If individuals can build trust in themselves by telling their stories, why not organizations? In fact, storytelling has always been part of the arsenal of branding and marketing departments. “One way of building internal passion for brands,” says Landor Associates, “is through the creation of stories.”2 But which stories?
In the twentieth century, the main focus was on stories told by the corporation. In recent years, as the credibility of corporate storytelling steadily declined and the voice of the customer grew louder, the focus of branding and marketing has shifted to catalyzing customers' stories.
Consider the following examples:
In 2008, when United Airlines broke Dave Carroll's guitar, he made a singing YouTube video that told the story of the incident; more than 8 million people have now viewed the video.3
In 2008, when a mother took offense at a commercial for the pain reliever Motrin that implied, in her eyes, that mothers were wearing baby slings simply to be fashionable, she was able to launch a “Motrin Moms” protest movement that within two days became the most popular subject on Twitter.4
In 2008, when Howard Schultz returned as CEO of Starbucks, he woke up one morning to find around a hundred e-mails in his inbox. It turned out that this was the result of a sensational story in the Sun, a London newspaper, about a problem that Schultz had never heard of. When his phone rang and a reporter asked him to comment, Schultz replied that he had no idea what it was. The reporter advised him to find out fast. Although the real-world issue in the story turned out to be insignificant, it had become an instant public relations crisis. Schultz recalls: “The lesson was that the world had changed. Something that happened in London had created a world-wide story that positioned Starbucks with venom and disrespect.”5
These are just a couple of eye-opening illustrations of the revolution generated by sites like Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube. As a result, stories told by customers can instantly trump the marketing stories being told by organizations about their products and services. The scale and rapidity of the ensuing public relations crises are astonishing.6
At the same time, the positive opportunities for organizations to use the power of social media for telling the story of their products and services are equally dramatic:
Procter & Gamble has used social media to reach otherwise unreachable customers when they helped create a community for teenage girls (beinggirl.com) that provides a friendly and helpful environment for them to converse and share stories, where the girls also learn about P&G's feminine care products.7
Ford has used social marketing to launch a new car—the Fiesta—without traditional advertising by generating a massive “Fiesta Movement,” involving stories reflected in 6 million YouTube views, 740,000 views of Flickr photos, and 3.7 million Twitter impressions.8
Since 2005, when the first edition of this book was published, the dynamic of branding and marketing has been transformed. In 2005, the examples cited above could not have happened. Facebook and YouTube had just been created, and Twitter did not exist. Now in 2011, these three Web sites have hundreds of million of participants who can and do tell stories about the products and services that they use.
The ability to understand and use the power of story to defend against threats and take advantage of opportunities offered by social media has become a core organizational competence. Corporate storytelling in the twenty-first century is becoming less and less about the corporation telling stories and more and more about creating products and services that themselves catalyze customer stories of delight.
Marketing in the Twentieth Century
For much of the twentieth century, branding and marketing consisted mainly of crafting and communicating one-way messages to a mass audience. By mass-marketing the same product in roughly the same way to all consumers, companies could reach the largest potential market at the lowest cost. Moreover, they could interrupt whomever they wanted with any message they cared to transmit. And buyers were forced to watch it because there were only three television channels. And there was no easy way for customers to talk back.
Why the Model Changed
Four changes help explain why this model is less and less operative today.
One is the shift in the balance of power in the marketplace from sellers to buyers. By and large, the established twentieth-century firm was in control of the marketplace. But the situation changed as a few sellers turned into many sellers. Buyers acquired instant access to reliable information. As a result, unless customers are receiving a continuously added value from the firm, they can—and will—go elsewhere. This in itself is a game changer: the firm's goal shifts from merely satisfying customers to the more complex goal of delighting them.
A second change is the fragmentation of media. A few channels have exploded into multiple channels of television, the Web, and cell phones. Reaching a large audience becomes very expensive unless that audience wants to be reached. As a result, mass advertising has diminished cost-effectiveness. Targeting of advertising to those who are likely to be interested in the advertiser's products and services becomes a preoccupation.9
A third change is technological. Word of mouth has always been seen as important: the accepted maxim was that every unhappy customer told ten friends. Now the importance has been dramatically magnified. Social media make it wonderfully—and frighteningly—easy for anyone to communicate instantly with anyone else in the world about anything. Now a dissatisfied customer can talk back to millions of interested fellow customers. Employee stories about a firm are publicly available on sites like www.glassdoor.com. Customers can band together and use stories to rapidly form alliances that can work powerfully for or against an organization. Ignoring this groundswell of customer conversations and stories can be risky. For most firms, working with it will be more productive.
A fourth change is social. Customers are no longer docile pawns that can be manipulated at will with one-way messages sent by entrenched oligopolies. Customers are skeptical about the stories they are being told. “Advertising has no credibility with consumers, who are increasingly skeptical of its claims and whenever possible are inclined to reject its messages.”10 Now customers are able to exploit the power of the new technology to obtain information, address problems, and tell stories so as to get what they want. The twenty-first-century customer is different and more elusive than the customer of fifty years ago.
These changes require a revolution in marketing thinking. They raise issues not just about particular management practices, but with the very notion of how an organization should be run.
Three Kinds of Stories
Corporations tell three kinds of stories: the story of the firm itself, stories of the firm's products or services, and customers' own stories and their relationship to the firm.
Stories of the Firm Itself
The founder's story is the story of where the firm came from, how it grew, and what values it pursued along the way.
Some of the mystique of Apple Computer and Microsoft comes from the “geeks in a garage” stories of the early creation of those companies by Steve Jobs and Bill Gates, respectively. But care in the use of the founder's story is needed. The Steve Jobs story may have some resonance, as both Jobs himself and the firm of Apple still convey some of the boyish enthusiasm of a start-up. By contrast, “the geeks in a garage” story has little resonance with the current business colossus that is Microsoft.
Southwest Airlines is a story of people living life to the fullest, with humor and a sense of fun, being free to “roam about the country” because the airline makes it affordable to do so by providing cheap, reliable, entertaining flights to popular destinations. Its brand narrative is closely linked to the wit and character of its founder, Herb Kelleher.
And at Costco, cofounder and CEO Jim Sinegal regularly uses stories of how he has built the firm by a continuing commitment to provide high-quality, low-cost products to customers rather than raise margins, so as to convey the firm's corporate value
s and illustrate how those values are being brought to life throughout the company.
Milestone stories can also portray turning points in a firm's history and communicate the character of the firm. A famous example is Johnson & Johnson's handling of the poisonings from Tylenol bottles in the autumn of 1982 in Chicago. An apparent public relations disaster was turned into a triumph by the prompt action of management to pull all Tylenol bottles from the shelves at huge expense and replace them with new tamper-proof tops. Within a few years, Tylenol had become the most popular over-the-counter analgesic in the United States. The story, told and retold, can help communicate Johnson & Johnson's commitment to put the customer first, but only so long as the firm still adheres to those values.11
The Story of the Products or Services
The story of the products and services themselves as told by the corporation was a staple of twentieth-century advertising.
The most frequently cited success story for this approach is Coca-Cola. Through the use of an unusually shaped bottle, consistent deployment of a certain shade of the color red, and clever stories to communicate the notions that Coca-Cola's beverage is based on a secret formula kept in a locked vault and that it constitutes “the real thing,” Coca-Cola created a brand worth tens of billions of dollars, despite the fact the underlying product—a brown carbonated beverage—is not outstanding, even in the firm's own blind tasting tests.12
In the twenty-first century, Coca-Cola found difficulty duplicating the success.13
In the spring of 2004, Coca-Cola decided to launch a brand of water called Dasani in the United Kingdom with a £7 million marketing push that told the story how Dasani comprised “pure water” having been cleansed by a “highly sophisticated purification process, based on NASA spacecraft technology.”
The launch ran into some snags. First, it emerged that the water used in Dasani came from ordinary tap water, piped into its U.K. factory by Thames Water, leading to widespread public derision.
This was then compounded by news that the firm's “highly sophisticated purification process” was in fact the same reverse osmosis used in many modest domestic water purification units.
Then the story took an even worse turn: it emerged that the entire U.K. supply of Dasani was being pulled off the shelves because it had been contaminated with bromate, a cancer-causing chemical.
The Drinking Water Inspectorate confirmed that the water supplied to the factory by Thames Water was free of bromate. In other words, Dasani was less healthy than regular tap water, despite being sold at more than thirty times the price. As a result, the company shelved plans to launch a natural mineral water version of Dasani in Europe.
In the twentieth century, Coca-Cola might have gotten away with those stories and successfully launched the brand to a docile consumer base. In the twenty-first century, the stories were quickly identified as deceptive. Word spread rapidly, and the brand launch failed.
Today, in the atmosphere of cynicism and distrust toward advertising that prevails in the marketplace, it's difficult to make the firm's own story of its products and services convincing. Given the track record of firms telling half-truths or even straight-out untruths, customers discount most of what they hear directly from firms.
The anonymity of the corporation has had a lot to do with it:
Most companies are adept at removing any sense of individuality or human connection from how they communicate. We commonly describe these companies as faceless. They are large inhuman blobs that do not listen or ask for our feedback, have incomprehensible policies, and use automated responses instead of real people to address our concerns. These faceless organizations are all around us. As consumers, we can spot them right away, and we universally dread our interactions with them.14
The Stories of the Customer
The third kind of stories are those of the customer. For example, an advertisement for Walgreens drugstores in a women's magazine, Bazaar, shows a photo of a young attractive woman smiling and carrying a shopping bag, apparently after leaving a Walgreens store. The photo is accompanied by a note in a handwritten font:
I see fall as an opportunity to rethink my beauty routine and get back to basics. A trip to Walgreens always leaves me feeling refreshed and ready to face the season, rain or shine. This year, I'm focusing on the foundations for a fabulous look—great hair, amazing skin, beautiful lips, and irresistibly smooth legs.15
The advertisement simulates a real customer, although the ad makes no claim that the woman in the photograph ever had these thoughts and feelings. Walgreens hopes that the fictional story will plant the idea in readers' minds that a visit to one of their drugstores can be a wholesome journey of renewal. In the twentieth century, that may have worked. Today the problem for Walgreens is that the readers can also visit Web sites like www.yelp.com and obtain an instant picture of how real people actually experience a visit to a Walgreens drugstore.16
The story has more chance of having an impact if the audience can be induced to take an interest in the characters in it. As discussed in the excellent book, Storytelling: Branding in Practice by Klaus Fog and colleagues, this was accomplished in a series of television advertisements that introduced Renault's new car, the Clio, to the U.K. public. The series began in 1991 with a fictional scene set in the south of France:
An attractive young woman (“Nicole”) is apparently on vacation with her father (“Papa”). Nicole is seen wearing a perky polka-dot dress and sneaking past her father, who is apparently asleep in the luxurious garden. She drives away in a Renault Clio to have a romantic rendezvous with her boyfriend. It is then revealed that Papa was merely pretending to be asleep: once she has left, he jumps up and goes to his own tryst with a lady friend. When they return, they cry respectively, “Nicole!” and “Papa!” The ad ends with the tag line: “Renault: A Certain Flair.”
The ad caught on and sequels were released over a seven-year period. The series helped position the Renault Clio as a car associated with France and a romantic and desirable way of life. The series became a prominent part of British pop culture. A 1996 survey showed that the actress who played Nicole in the series was recognized by more Britons than the British prime minister, John Major.
The series culminated with Nicole's marriage in 1998. The sponsors announced in advance that Nicole was getting married, but the identity of her husband was withheld until the showing of the actual commercial during a popular soap opera:
In the ad, Nicole abandons her planned marriage on the spur of the moment in the middle of the wedding ceremony and is shown running from the church to marry another man (“Bob”). This signaled Nicole's decision to abandon a traditional lifestyle (marriage and limo) and enjoy a free, modern life with Bob and her Renault Clio.
The storytelling of the series was allusive and minimalist, with the only spoken words being “Nicole,” “Papa,” “Maman,” “Bob,” and “Yes!” The series was effective because the public became intrigued by the romantic fictional life of “Nicole,” which in due course became associated with the Renault Clio.
The story of the customer can also succeed where it helps to establish a link between the brand's primary customers. In How Brands Become Icons, Douglas Holt argues that for any strong brand, there is a certain kind of person who loves the brand. If the seller can understand the story of these people and tell their story, it can resonate and help reinforce the brand.
Thus Volkswagen has a track record of appealing to iconoclasts. When it presented itself as a company that made cars for iconoclasts in the 1960s and 1970s, it was hugely successful. In the 1980s and early 1990s, when it appeared to forget this part of its history and presented itself as a maker of cars for everybody, albeit higher-quality cars, it lost ground in the marketplace. In the late 1990s, when it suddenly remembered that its core clientele had been iconoclasts, it once again prospered.17
In a similar vein, Budweiser offers jokey television ads that suggest that these funny people kidding around and having a
good time are the kind of people who drink Budweiser beer. The implication is that anyone could be as funny, and have as good a time, if only they drank Budweiser. The ads appear to be successful in promoting the brand, even though the underlying logic is not exactly rock-solid. Although in today's marketplace, the ads can make the sale, the question for the longer term is whether they are building enduring enthusiasm for the brand. At best, the continued strength of a brand based on such evanescent associations will depend on disseminating a never-ending supply of new stories in an effort to perpetuate the impression of Budweiser's distinctiveness.
Twentieth-Century Marketing: One-Way Communications
Twentieth-century marketers looked at the world through the lens of whatever they were selling, saying in effect: “We believe that our offerings will be useful to you and here's a story that will communicate why that is so.” In this mode, marketers paid attention to and studied their customers, but they generally viewed them through the lens of the company's own goods and services, while ignoring the other problems that the customers might be facing.
The Leader's Guide to Storytelling Page 13