The Leader's Guide to Storytelling

by Stephen Denning

  The communications were one-way and made through official channels. The firm operated through a system of barriers, clearances, and controls that ensured that only the right messages were sent.

  The thinking was linear. The firm created a brand idea, through selecting the right name, the right logo, and the right packaging and using the right stories in advertising to communicate its messages. The brand idea thus communicated led initially to awareness and ultimately to certain customer perceptions about it. These perceptions in turn led to customer behavior: the customer buys the firm's products or services, which generated satisfactory business performance.18

  The core elements of marketing were the four Ps: product, price, promotion, and place. The mode of operation was manipulation. How can we adjust the four Ps so that the customers can be induced to buy more?

  Twenty-First-Century Marketing: The Interactive Customer Story

  The new world of social media not only demands greater honesty from organizations but also more openness and interaction. The sending of one-way messages is proving increasingly ineffective. It may create awareness, but it doesn't lead to a positive relationship with customers. And when customers sense manipulation, they become distrustful.

  To cope with these developments, twenty-first-century marketing needs to look at the world from the point of view of the customer, with the attitude: “We seek to understand your problems and help solve them with our offerings.” They need to understand the customer's story and continuously evolve their offerings to meet their customers' needs in order to surprise and delight them.

  By immersing themselves in the customers' world, observing their behavior and listening to their stories, the firm learns how to meet even needs that customers themselves are unaware of. It seeks to anticipate the customers' needs even before they are aware of them. The world wasn't asking Apple to make cool-looking MP3 players or arrange an easy, cheap way to download music online. People didn't know they wanted iPods or easy music download services until Apple invented them. Going this route surprises the audience. “Apple did a bit of mind reading with respect to what their customers (or potential customers) would love, but didn't know could be available,” writes Chip Conley in his book, Peak: How Great Companies Get Their Mojo from Maslow.19

  Passion: The New Driver

  Success in today's marketplace means having a skilled workforce that is passionately committed to delighting the customers of the organization and then catalyzing those customers to share their surprise and delight with other potential customers.

  To the traditional four Ps of marketing—product, price, promotion, and place—is added the key driver of the twenty-first-century marketplace: the fifth P, passion. To elicit passion, companies must learn how to shed the lifeless armor of being faceless organizations and express authentic personalities that can elicit positive passion in their customers.

  Apple is an example of an organization that has mastered this mode of operation:

  The most powerful aspects of the customers' experience with Apple are not confined to the logo, the name, the packaging or the advertising. Stories are generated by the products themselves—iMac, iPod, iPhone and iPad—and by the environment of the Apple stores that encourages customers to stay, explore, and interact with its products and by the ingenuity of its offerings and their simplicity of use. The helpfulness of their salespeople in person and online reinforces the impression, as do the enthusiastic stories that potential customers hear from other Apple users. The whole experience generates a seamless set of stories that spread virally and convey the central idea: cool people choose Apple products.20

  Marketing now is thus less about crafting a set of messages that communicate the brand, as it is about creating products and services that themselves generate authentic stories by delighted customers, who share the stories with other customers.

  Branding and marketing have become complex, interactive, and multidirectional. Firms being run in a traditional, command-and-control manner are no longer sufficiently agile to operate in this manner.

  Defensive Interventions: Communicating by People with People

  The traditional organizational arrangements, in which all communications from the firm with the outside world are made through official channels is unworkable in the world of social media. For one thing, it's too slow. Media crises can now spiral out of control in minutes. Going up the chain of command to get the formal response to problems being raised is too slow to be effective. Instead, individuals need to be following what is happening in the social media and be ready—and authorized—to respond on the fly.

  For another thing, corporate communications often sound inauthentic. If a company representative intervenes in an ongoing conversation on a social media site in the traditional twentieth-century manner by restating company policies and guidelines, any issue that customers may have is likely to be aggravated. Frustrated customers will feel that they are not being listened to and sense that they are dealing with an unresponsive, inhuman machine. This is likely to lead to further concern or even anger, not only on the part of the customer who initially had the problem but also by all the other potential customers who are listening in.

  For the intervention to be effective, it has to be a communication from one human being to another. As a matter of disclosure, the intervenors need to identify themselves as employees of the firm in question, so that their financial interest is explicit, but they need to communicate as themselves. They are speaking not as “the representative of the firm who happens to be Mary Brown,” but rather as “Mary Brown who happens to be a representative of the firm.” The difference is subtle but profound.

  Because they are intervening as individuals, if they don't know the answer to a question, they say so. By listening to the stories being told, empathizing with the feelings being experienced, and telling the story of their own response to the issue, including their feelings, doubts, and uncertainties about what can be done about it, they humanize the face of the firm. If the problem can be resolved, they set about trying to find a solution and keep the customer informed of the progress of their efforts. If in the end the problem cannot be resolved, they do their best to explain why the firm is unable to act otherwise.

  The firm's employees express their own personal views about the subjects under discussion, within limits explicitly or implicitly established by their employer. If it appears that they are simply parroting script dictated by the management, their communications will be perceived as inauthentic, and they will be counterproductive.

  Proactive Interventions: Curating the Conversation

  Customers give particular weight to the views of other customers. Amazon, the online bookstore, has been particularly effective in curating customer conversations.

  Visitors to Amazon's Web site often go directly to the customer reviews, and only later come back to look at what the publisher or the author said about the book. Amazon's role as a marketer has been to create an environment where the customers' stories are likely to be told. Amazon posts negative as well as positive reviews, knowing that its authenticity as a neutral convener of different viewpoints will be strengthened.

  In a different context, Ford was able to seed customer conversations in launching a new model car.

  In launching the Ford Fiesta, the firm initiated a marketing campaign in the spring of 2009: Fiesta Movement. It distributed a hundred examples of European Fiestas to bloggers who used popular Internet sites to share stories of their experiences. Subsequently Ford brought the cars to public venues nationwide to offer 100,000 test drives over eight months. In Chicago, it offered a free shuttle service in Chicago from a site near the Union Station commuter rail terminal to Grant Park.

  In March 2010, Ford worked with American Idol to promote the Ford Fiesta in North America. The final twelve contestants of the show were given an opportunity to create their own custom graphics on a Ford Fiesta. The personalized Fiestas were revealed on the show, and fans were given t
he chance to win one of the personalized cars.

  In the campaign, Ford's focus is not on telling its own stories but rather creating opportunities and forums where customers can share their stories with other potential customers.

  Procter & Gamble has used the approach to market feminine care products to girls:

  In the Web site beinggirl.com, Procter & Gamble has created a space where girls can share their own experiences of the problems they face in growing up, while also learning about feminine care products. To be successful, the site has to preserve a delicate balance: if the site ever becomes dominated by messages aimed at selling products, its visitors are likely to vanish.

  These examples of branding and marketing are quite different from the one-way messaging of twentieth-century advertising, in which a seller relentlessly sent advertising messages regardless of whether the listener wanted to hear them. The messages might have been a narrative or an abstract proposition, but the interaction of speaker and listener was absent. As a result, the listener was rarely engaged by the communication, and the results of these communications were increasingly ineffective.

  Branding and marketing in the new world of social media is akin to authentic storytelling in that it is as much about story listening as it is about story “telling.” Authentic storytelling is an interactive process, in which the response of the listener provides guidance to the teller as to how to proceed with the performance. A master storyteller practices deep listening even as the story is being told and adjusts the pace and the flow of the story to the response of the listeners. The interaction between teller and listeners tends to create a relationship as the two human beings share the experience of following a story.

  Communicating the Brand Internally

  Effective marketing starts with understanding the customer, then deciding the character of the firm, and reflecting that decision authentically in what the firm says and does. Authenticity means owning up to what you are and what you stand for. “If the company is posing, then the people who are the company will have to pose as well. If, on the other hand, the company is comfortable living up to what it is, then an enormous cramp in the corporate body goes away.”21

  When Bill George took over as CEO of Medtronic, he would meet with doctors who used the firm's products and attended operations. He discovered some gaps between what Medtronic said it was doing and what it actually did. George recalls:

  Not all of these early experiences were positive. I vividly recall an angioplasty case where the doctor was using a Medtronic balloon catheter to open up clogged arteries. The product literally fell apart in the doctor's hands as he was threading it through the patient's arteries…. After the case, the sales rep told me he had seen this happen several times before. He had filed reports on the defects, but heard nothing back. We counted seven organizations his reports had to go through before it got to the people who designed the products in the first place. Something was terribly wrong here. In taking specific issues raised by our customers back to Medtronic's engineers, I found a high level of ignorance and even denial that the problems actually existed. Why? … The engineers were not spending any time with customers and were insulated from customer problems.22

  To George's credit, he didn't like what he was hearing, and he committed Medtronic to a ten-year program of making customer and patient focus central to the way the company operated.23

  Communicating the Brand Narrative Within the Firm

  Even delivering on an existing brand narrative usually requires a concerted creative effort throughout the organization. If an airline, for instance, decides that the most cost-effective way to deliver a “considerate” service is to speed up its check-in and security clearance procedures, it might strive for performance levels dramatically exceeding those of competitors—for example, a two-minute check-in and a five-minute security clearance. Persuading the whole organization to embrace and deliver on those goals will be more difficult than dreaming up the marketing message.24

  Changing a brand in a major way is a heroic undertaking. As noted, when Bill George at Medtronic decided to refocus the firm on the customer, he committed it to a ten-year program of change—a realistic assessment of the time required.

  As Doc Searls and David Weinberger write in The Cluetrain Manifesto:

  A company can certainly try to be what it's not. But the market conversation will expose the fakery…. Of course companies and products can change their identities (and even their natures) over time…. But such changes generally are gradual and often painful. If they are too rapid and too easy, the market conversation will be merciless in exposing the phoniness it sniffs…. If a company is genuinely confused about what it is, there's an easy way to find out: listen to what your market says you are. If it's not to your liking, think long and hard before assuming that the market is wrong. If you don't like what you're hearing, the market task is not to change the market's idea of who you are but actually to change who you are. And that can take a generation.25

  How does one persuade the staff of an organization to align their words and actions with the brand narrative?

  If the brand narrative entails a major change, springboard stories will be needed to spark the change (Chapter Three), and a sustained period of innovation may be necessary (Chapter Eleven).

  In return for employees' committing to the brand values of the company, the leader should be looking for ways to draw on the collaboration of the staff, as discussed in Chapter Seven.

  In carrying out the change, the leader needs to take an interactive approach, as discussed in Chapter Twelve.

  Base Your Brand Narrative on Your Values

  Ultimately the story of who your company is depends on the values it has. It is to this issue that I turn in Chapter Six.

  Template for Crafting the Story of the Character of the Firm

  1. What is the specific aspect of the firm that you want to communicate with the story? Its client intimacy? Its operational excellence? Its innovation and creativity? Something else?

  2. Think of an incident where this aspect was exhibited. Describe it briefly, including the date and place where it happened.

  3. Is the incident truly typical of the way the firm always operates?

  4. Who is the single protagonist in the story? Is the single protagonist typical of your specific audience? If not, can the story be told from the point of view of such a protagonist?

  5. Is the story relevant to that audience?

  6. Does the story fully embody the specific aspect of the firm that you are aiming to highlight?

  7. Does the story make clear what would have happened without the specific aspect?

  8. Has the story been stripped of any unnecessary detail? Are there any scenes with more than two characters?

  9. Does the story have an authentically happy ending? Can it be told so that it does have such an ending?

  10. Is the story distinctive of the firm? Does it differentiate the firm from its competitors?

  11. Is the story linked to the brand narrative?

  Can you show that the story is characteristic of the brand? Are there statistics, ratings, or awards, for example, to draw on?

  Can you show why this story is characteristic of the organization? Is staffing or training relevant here, for example?

  Can you show how the story is characteristic of the organization's processes, values, or something else?

  6

  Transmit Your Values

  Using Narrative to Instill Organizational Values “Acting on what matters is, ultimately, a political stance, one whereby we declare we are accountable for the world around us and are willing to pursue what we define as important, independent of whether it is in demand, or has market value.”

  Peter Block1

  Alisdair MacIntyre opens his classic book on ethics, After Virtue, with a startling assertion: our entire civilization has forgotten what ethical values really are.2 The language still exists. References to ethical values are thrown
about in everyday speech, company policy statements, and political campaigns. But the context that gave those fragments meaning is no longer available. “We possess indeed simulacra of morality,” says MacIntyre, “we continue to use many of the key expressions. But we have—very largely, if not entirely—lost our comprehension, both theoretical and practical, of morality.”

  Douglas Smith, in On Value and Values, suggests that this has happened because society has lost sight of the importance of ethical values and instead pursued value: “Value arises in conversations about economics, finance, shopping, investment, business, and markets. People worry about getting value for money or shareholder value or market value. They use value to describe business or economic prospects. Value connotes a pointed estimation of current or anticipated worth never too distant from monetary equivalence. There is no value that is not a dollar value.”3