Storytelling: the beginning
The term itself didn’t appear in the marketer’s dictionary very long ago. LinkedIn has an excellent analytical report on the topic. At the beginning of the summer of 2011, the number of specialists who had the skill of storytelling in their profiles was minimal. At that time, it was simply not thought of as a separate discipline.
But that doesn’t mean that no one was telling stories. Promotion, one of the pillars of the marketing mix, is about connecting with the market, communicating with consumers. It’s about wanting to talk about yourself, your product, to get through to the customer. This is why even the most tasteless commercial, where the product is flashed for 10 seconds in the frame and the announcer’s voice repeats a set of industry clichés, is also a story. Ineptly told, uninteresting, but a story.
There is another side to the coin. Stories are told not only by businesses, but by consumers themselves, by all of us. And often not just positive ones. In the pre-internet era, having bought a bad product on the market, we talked about it to our neighbors, acquaintances and friends – that’s how word of mouth works. So we can generalize and draw a simple conclusion – stories about products, brands, and people exist and work, even if they are not realized.
How do you learn to write stories?
We can theorize about storytelling for a long time. But let’s leave that for the textbooks and focus on some general rules and techniques you can use to create your stories.
You can’t become a great storyteller and writer in a day, a month, a year, or sometimes even a lifetime. It’s all about practice, knowing how to work with feedback, but most importantly, understanding the product, the audience, and human nature globally. Without this, the stories will sound fake. All of what follows is just a bit of technical knowledge.
So, the foundation of any story:
The hero. The protagonist. This could be you, your friend, your mom, a client, a business, a mythical character – anyone.
Place and context. The environment in which events unfold.
Purpose. Some kind of message, a moral. What the story is about.
The plot. Something that connects the previous points. The structure that makes the elements of the story interact.
Now, in more detail. With the hero everything is more or less obvious – it is a necessary attribute in a literary work, and in the commercial text-story. It is good if the reader, viewer or listener can associate himself with this character, worry about his fate. Obviously, authenticity and reality are important for this.
If you lack understanding, go to the fields and observe. Not the mythical target audience of middle managers 25-30 years old, but real people.
Beginning authors often underestimate the importance of the second point – location. It is essentially the environment in which we catch the hero of the story, the context of the story. Poor plotting is often the cause of grayness and disbelief. It’s like a detective story – can we believe someone who confuses the story and omits important details?
The next point is the goal. And this is not advertising at all. Think about why you tell your friends about your impressions of the new movie. It’s not likely to get them to go to a particular theater. In the main, you do not care, let them watch a “pirate”. You just need to share your emotions, to express your opinion, to show your position. The modern consumer of content smells bias a mile away, so trying to give him the same TV or print ads under the guise of a story can hardly be considered a good idea.
One last thing. Adjusting for the purpose pursued, the story is what happens to the protagonist in the circumstances described. There are many requirements for what a good story should be, they even teach it in higher education.
Everything else – lexical and compositional techniques, style, means of artistic expression, and more – helps the skeleton of the story to grow muscle and skin. But, as with body structure, it’s complicated. And long, so we will say a little more detail only about emotionality and manipulation.
Emotionality can be seen as an integral part of storytelling. A good story should evoke emotion; emotion is often the basis of stories. Emotional content gets a greater response-it’s an axiom. Look at which stories go viral more often, and how many “Likes” and reposts posts about homeless animals collect on social networks.
How do you make your stories emotional? There are special lexical, syntactic, morphological and intonational techniques for this. And a dozen others, too. But most importantly, just don’t exclude feelings and impressions in the pursuit of a clear and reasoned text.
Choose situations that are familiar to people, create “his to the board” characters. Consciously make stories “emotional.
Based on this, in marketing stories work and manipulation. Where emotion reigns supreme (and it often does with our thinking, ask Kahneman or Thaler), facts and rationality do not always become the basis for decision-making.
There are also many methods of manipulation, from paraphrasing or hiding the main idea to more complex techniques like the Miltonian spiral. They are used by politicians, the media, and individual authors. And so do all of us in life, though often unconsciously.
And to conclude. Storytelling is not necessarily a story in the direct literary sense. It can be anything – an infographic, a video, a meme.