Storytelling is the Heart of Advertising
Data is a lot less convincing than most marketers think.
B2B marketing, in particular, relies on numbers, figures and metrics. Don’t get me wrong, those are all good and can make sales happen, but your audience isn’t actually being persuaded by the data. Instead, their opinions are shifted by the context, the details, and the story the data implies.
When it comes down to it, people do change their minds without data, but nobody has ever changed their mind without a story.
Photo courtesy of Free Range.
Think about it: even when your opinion is being influenced by facts and data, the data points don’t exist in a vacuum. You’re being convinced by the information that’s between the lines. What counts is the narrative behind the data.
When you hear something like, “Our product has an efficiency of 1400 cycles per minute,” it means nothing if you don’t understand the context. If it’s widespread knowledge that your competitor’s product has an efficiency of only 1200 cycles per minute, then that’s part of the story. Isolated data points must be woven into a narrative that people can latch onto.
The Neuroscience of Story
When you craft a story about your brand, you also take advantage of one of the most useful tools in marketing: neural coupling.
That’s a fancy neuroscience term that explains that when you engage with a story, your brain’s activity mirrors the subject of the narrative.
Photo courtesy of Free Range.
Reading about a smell doesn’t just light up the language-processing sections of your brain, it activates the ones that actually handle smelling. The same goes for reading about motion and activity, as the motor cortex will actually become stimulated as if you were moving.
Even an encounter with a fictional character activates the parts of your brain that handle social interactions.
While we’re all able to distinguish between reality and fiction, that line is much blurrier on a neurological and chemical level. The same regions of your mind will ultimately be activated whether you’re physically present or not.
Experiencing something in more visceral media, such as video, can have an even more powerful effect. When incorporated into a story, sensory details can activate the mind and anchor those details in the audience’s memory.
The Necessity of Emotion
Some marketers may be wondering how they’ll fit a story like this into a 120x600 banner ad. Data fits nicely, but words can get complicated. However, even when you’re limited by the format or demands of the client, you can always inject a little story and personality into an ad. It’s all about getting creative with the constraints you’re given.
Humor is just one way to crack the nut. It’s disarming, engaging, and memorable. It’s not exactly novel advice, but it’s way more effective in a B2B context than most marketers may think.
Photo courtesy of Free Range.
By default, people really don’t like ads. Hey, you probably don’t like ads and you’re reading this article. Humans are influenced by emotion, and nothing can influence emotion as effectively as a story. So, if you want people to care, you should understand the why behind the brand, product, or cause. At the very least, that core value proposition needs to promise the audience that the time they spent looking at your ad was well spent.
The Medium Is Part Of Your Message
If you just glance at their packaging, you know Tony’s Chocolonely stands for making chocolate 100% slave-free. That’s an immediately attention-grabbing message that leads to a powerful story consumers can quickly understand, which makes it easier to accept paying four bucks for a chocolate bar.
Nowadays, simple packaging can sell you on a narrative.
Take Apple, for example, which designs its boxes to provide customers with a memorable overall experience as they unpack their new purchase. Unboxing videos became so popular because Apple and imitators deliberately give the process peaks and valleys of excitement leading up to a climax—just like a Hollywood movie.
Apple spends a substantial amount of money perfecting that experience for every new gadget they come up with because they know how effective it is. That’s how they’ve become known as a company that delivers an unforgettable user experience.
The best stories work around budget, freedom, and physical possibility, and draw your eyes to the right place.
Photo courtesy of Free Range.
We’ve do similar things for our own clients. Nanosys is a company that makes quantum dot displays with an incredibly bold and bright range of colors that standard monitors and televisions just can’t reproduce.
That’s a great thing to display at a trade show, and a really horrible thing to try and sell at an expo that’s gone all-digital in response to the pandemic.
We sidestepped that problem by creating a virtual booth that live-streamed the painting of a community mural in Oakland. We chose a local artist to come up with a theme about unity and social justice and paint a wall in a section of the neighborhood to beautify the landscape.
The idea was to do some good, draw attention to the company, and associate Nanosys with vivid visuals. Local participants were encouraged to come down and see the painting for themselves.
The result? Sales engagement was up 500%.
Similarly, when Cisco WebEx wanted to put their best foot forward at two of the largest trade shows in the world, the chips were stacked against them. How do you sell the importance of a videoconferencing platform at an in-person trade show without even having a booth?
We drew inspiration from WebEx’s core narrative of making life easier for small businesses.
We sent personal assistants out onto the trade show floor armed with everything that would make the conference bearable—aspirin, snacks, phone chargers, and even restaurant recommendations. In return, attendees just had to mention #Webextotherescue on social media.
People loved it. 100k engagements and 3 million impressions later, the #Webextotherescue story left conference attendees with a lot of good memories associated with their brand.
Nanosys mural, in Oakland, CA. Photo by School of Thought.
Ambitious, Not Complex
These stories work because they engage with people on a number of different levels, but crucially, they’re uncomplicated. As much as I love the winding complexity of a good mystery plot, that’s not going to work for a brand story. “Making life easier for small businesses” is a fairly vague brand promise, but it worked for Cisco WebEx because it was straightforward enough to resonate with the audience.
The best advice is to keep things simple. It’s just easier to remember and easier to communicate.
All stories have a beginning, middle, and end. Sometimes, more than a few twists can undermine the elegance of that structure. In fact, every time you increase the complexity of your narrative, you risk making it more difficult to remember. This will ultimately add more work—both for you, and your audience.
When you lean into the story, you take control of how how your brand is perceived. By actively telling your story, you get a say in how people share and talk about your brand and there’s not much of a downside there.
Once your audience buys into the story you’ve crafted and forms a relationship with it, it has invested in your product before ever making a purchase. Those are results that speak for themselves.