Читать книгу The Strategic Storyteller - Jutkowitz Alexander - Страница 7

Psychology researchers at Johns Hopkins University discovered that the most favored of over 180 Super Bowl ads were the ones structured like stories. The product or brand being advertised didn't matter. To be loved, an ad only needed this basic structure: a beginning, middle, and end, with some conflict and tension along the way.1

Stories, even ones assembled from the barest minimum of ingredients, automatically tap into our attention, which is the most precious resource that every product of media and communications – from the biggest Hollywood blockbuster to the lowliest tweet – is in pursuit of. If you can find a way to use your particular medium to tell a story, do it. You are bound to be rewarded with the gift of willing attention.

But attention is not the only state of consciousness that stories are good at evoking. Once you are in the realm of story, your mind is also more trusting. Good stories release a cocktail of neurochemicals in the brain that simultaneously increase focus and empathy. When we are caught up in a good story, our minds are exactly where advertisers want us to be: paying attention and full of good feelings to attach to the focus of that attention.2 The more empathy we have for somebody, fictional or otherwise, the more we trust that person.

Brain scans reveal that the neural activity of a storyteller is the same as the neural activity of his or her listeners. As neuroscientist Josh Gowin puts it, when we tell stories we are actually taking our thoughts and implanting them in the minds of others.3

The hairs pricking up on the back of your neck during a horror film, or the warm feeling that fills your chest at the height of a love story are less intense versions of the same feelings you'd get if you were experiencing those moments firsthand.

This miraculous power isn't science fiction. It's simply the result of words, images, and sounds arranged in the right order.

What's more, there's an increasing amount of evidence that suggests that this synchronization of brain behavior actually translates to lasting empathy. When you share someone's thoughts, the aftereffect is that you are more receptive to the total way they see the world.4 Stories, then, transfer perspective along with emotion.

It's no mistake that certain vital industries, like finance, energy, and pharma have, as of this writing, some of the steepest reputational battles to win. These industries have been traditionally reticent to share what they do with the world. Decades of self‐defensive communications policies have insulated them from scrutiny and kept them safe. But in our fluid and volatile communications environment, safe is not enough. If you are not actively creating a future for your business, you will fall victim to a future created by others. A proactive approach to a reputation is the only truly safe approach.

Tech companies like Facebook and Apple, which are driving the transition to a digital‐dominant communications world, have so far done an excellent job, intentionally or not, of telling their own story. It's one in which they are the heroes, channeling the world‐changing forces of disruption and innovation to every corner of the economy. The companies of Silicon Valley are now some of the largest in the world, yet the feeling that they are still upstarts battling huge, conservative forces persists. This overarching narrative, which taps into currents of the narrative America tells about itself, has been of high strategic value to the tech industry.

When Apple publicly butted heads with the FBI in 2016 over the company's refusal to provide access to encrypted data on an iPhone, press coverage and public opinion sided quickly and overwhelmingly with Apple. Americans almost instinctively understood that they were siding with the forces of innovation and openness against the forces of tyranny and reaction. More than any factual nuance of the case, and whatever opinion of the case you may have, the overarching innovation story of which Apple has made itself the hero strengthened its negotiating position.

It is not just the ubiquity of its products that makes us feel so comfortable with the tech industry's place in our lives. We also consume medicine, clothing, and energy and use transportation just as frequently as we use our devices. But those industries lack the storytelling capital that Silicon Valley has amassed.

Successful new technologies have always needed stories to usher them into wider social acceptance. You can hear the evidence in our very language.

When we want to change, we talk about turning over a new leaf (“leaf” is an old word for page). When we agree with another person, we're “on the same page.”

When our plans go awry, they've been “derailed.” When things are on the verge of going well, they're “building up steam,” and when they've been going well for a while they're “on track.”

Even goofy terms like “blasting off” and “in orbit” are still in use. Each of these phrases has a nostalgic ring now, but when books, railroads, and rockets were first developed, the metaphors I've just listed were still fresh. People took what was exciting about new technology and used it to shape the way they saw moments in their own lives.

The power and the ongoing relevance of Silicon Valley's innovation story can be seen in the freshness of the metaphors it continues to give us. Being “online” is still a good thing both literally and metaphorically. The word “disruption” has flipped its polarity and gone from negative to positive, as has the phrase “going viral.” When we figure something out, we've “hacked” it. And now any small, new company, not just tech companies, employs that wonderful bit of self‐descriptive poetry, “startup,” so close to “upstart” with its inherent promise of insolence and sudden wealth.

These phrases are the atomized pieces of a single dominant Silicon Valley story that has captured the imagination of the world and, for the moment, granted an aura of invincibility to the handful of companies they refer to.

Storytelling, then, represents a remarkable opportunity for any brand that wants to forge or restore its reputation. When a pharmaceutical company, for example, conveys the wonder of curing a disease, or when an energy company chooses a new way to convey the joy of discovering how to power the world, both are sharing the best of what it is like to work there. They are offering pieces of their story to the world to be taken up and disseminated.

A set of self‐promotional talking points or the offer of a good deal bounces off the hard shell of skepticism that gets all of us through the day. But pieces of stories have a way of breaking through that shell to become tools that we use to make sense of our own lives.

To fully understand storytelling's power, think of those brands that are quite literally built out of stories – the personal brands of movie stars, musicians, and authors, and the corporate brands of major entertainment companies.

Why is Harry Potter capable of making grown men and women shed their normal state of consciousness and embrace wonder and delight? Because, by consuming J. K. Rowling's stories, many of us have effectively shared the minds and the emotions of her characters. We have lived in their world, and we have contributed our own imaginative resources to its construction. It isn't just Rowling's wonder and delight that we respond to when we read the Harry Potter books but our own as well.

Stories make information personal in a way that no other form is capable of. It's a peculiar quirk of our celebrity culture that when we chance to see an actor in person or ask an author to sign our book, we feel as if they should recognize us as an old friend. In a real way, we have actually known them for a long time, but to them we are total strangers. Such is the power of stories to evoke genuine emotion and goodwill once they are released into the world.

This power, even when employed to the smallest degree, is worth a thousand traditional PR plays pushed by TV talking heads or diffused through traditional outlets.