By profession, I am a copywriter who specializes in writing case studies, which are simply true customer success stories designed to sell the same product or service that helped the featured customer get out of a bad situation.

If you’ve ever tried to close a good novel or turn off the TV at bedtime, you know how powerful a good story can be.

If I could, I’d like to recommend two free ebooks that incorporate both storytelling and marketing. The first is Vin Montello’s Seven Story Secrets That Skyrocket Sales.

The second is my own ebook about marketing with case studies called, The Plot Thickens: Why Case Studies Create New Customers.

I hope both of these free ebooks help.

Charles Brown

Today, stories “are” as long as they “become”. Once they became established, we usually refer to them as “history” although one can argue that even our histories aren’t defined as much as we think they are.

Whereas brandmanagers and marketeers used to be the authors of brandstories (which were prefab histories by then) and whereas they seemed to have complete power over these stories, nowadays they have become actors.

An actor can influence the course of events, can stage a part of a scene, can seduce you into following him, can chase you away, but he cannot define nor control the complete outcome of the story nor the setting (the experiential context). In short, there’s a shift from controlling to contributing.

You refer to these old-school stories as an instrumental tool at the hands of marketeers and brandmanagers. These stories are poor experiental tools. I agree. But does that mean that stories as such don’t belong in the toolkit of a marketeer anymore?

Over the last years there seems to be a kind of revival of the homo ludens, ‘man playing’. It’s like we’ve come to realize that our rational, instructive way of learning has fallen short, that it doesn’t provide us with all the tools needed to control, understand, survive and change the world we live in. (from coming to sense to coming to our senses). It’s a profound social change.

The role of storytelling in this playful approach of the world is still very important. A story is a suggestion, an invitation to ‘walk along’ for a while. It can encourage us to make our way in this world.

Authoritative stories seduce (convince) you with the idea that you are lost, that there is only one goal in your life and that the author and his story are the only way to get you there.

Non-authoritative stories – the ones where your marketeer is rather an actor than an author – let you enjoy the ride. They make you aware of the possibilities along the way. They enrich the stories of your life, they encourage you to become an explorer. (in other words, i agree with helge here)

You say marketing and branding is about adding value. Can it be that marketing today is more about offering the opportunity to customers to add value to their lives (their own stories) and that they might add value to the brand by referring to that brand as a starting point or a point of reference for their experiences?

Is it possible that consumers are adding brand value when they use their ‘meeting’ with a brand as background information for yet another story? (e.g. I was playing around on the Amazon website when I discovered this or that book …). Ross says we don’t talk about brands in particular. But we do talk about our encounters with them, don’t we?

Then what role do marketeers and brandmanagers play in this era of non-authoritative stories? What should they do for / with the brand’s story? Simply make it available? Or is there more to it?

But any value created has to be in order to support and communicate the core motivation of the brand, and that means it all has to add to the same meaning. “Value” is “meaning”, isn’t it?

@Ross. What about The New Coke Zero Game – turning their story into your story? http://www.cokezerogame.com/
- To thin? :o)

Just like how, if you’re playing Grand Theft Auto III — you the player create a narrative by interacting in a game world.

But a I sit here struggling to think of a campaign or brand that’s let me tell my story on the web, I question that.

“I went on myspace, met a girl, we dated…” That’s a story, but no brand had any influence there.

“I wasted time today watching BMW’s http://www.rampenfest.com.” RampenFest is it’s own story, although just a 30 minute 30 second spot on the Web.

“I went into second life and took up residence in Scion City where I made some friends.” That’s the closest I can see to a Web story…

Any one know of a real meaningful story a person experienced online because of a brand?

I think where we diverge is around your definition of marketing. I believe that the role of marketing is to add value to companies (in fact this is also what the AMA says). Communicating meaning is one way to add value but there are more direct ways such as simply delivering more value.

I don’t think that Amazon communicates more meaning than Ask, but it definitely delivers more value (although it’s hard to compare them as they have different purposes).

If I might air my personal opinion:

Marketing in its essence is about communicating meaning in order to establish preference in a sea of undifferentiable products.

Storytelling in this case doesn’t need to be a literal story, but might just as well be an application, an experience, a mindset or a way of authoring the content etc.

I think the digital sphere is in dire need of stories, in order to create, maintain and strengthen brands, not only put a tag on top of content saying who the copyright owners are.

When it comes to time spent/wasted on rich content: An interesting research from UIE performed in 2001 (but released some years later due to the moral implications of the findings) found that even though ask.com where ten times as fast to load than amazon.com the latter was perceived as fast and effective and the former as slow. The reason being that people found what they were looking for on Amazon, but didn’t on Ask.

Humans don’t measure seconds or pageviews, they look for meaning and value. And on Amazon they found value, but on Ask they didn’t find a thing.

A different study from 2002 also found that of eight tested factors, the least significant in creating loyalty was “user friendly design”, where as “care” and “personality” hat the biggest potential and the highest “elasticity”.

Gitte Lindgaard also includes “sophisticated”, “creative”, “use special effects” and “fascinating” as elements in creating the crucially important first impression on websites.

So, my take is that storytelling is at it’s most important on the Internet or other digital channels. But as you say; it can’t be a story that is suited for “telling”, it has to be one that can be shared, discussed and participated with.