The Strategic Storyteller

Content Marketing in the Age of the Educated Consumer

Alexander Jutkowitz

• Publisher: Wiley
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781119345114
• eBook ISBN: 9781119345091
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Customer Relations
• Index: Business

The world needs more storytellers.

Storytelling is an inherently innovative activity.

When organizations find their best stories and tell them to the world, they're not only building a reputation, they're flexing the same muscles that allow them to pivot quickly around crisis or opportunity, and solve problems more creatively.

For individuals, crafting stories is the primary way we can make sense of the world and our place in it.

The Strategic Storyteller is a comprehensive, practical guide to transformative storytelling. In its pages you will learn how to:

• Tap into your and your organization's unique sources of wonder, wisdom, and delight
• Boost individual and collective creativity
• Understand the storytelling strategies behind some of the world's most powerful brands
• Unlock the secrets of the great strategic storytellers of the past
• Build a place where your stories can live online
• Distribute stories so they have staying power and reach in the digital age
• Convene audiences by going beyond demographic stereotypes and tapping into enduring human needs
• Understand how unshakable reputations are built out of stories that accumulate over time

Sooner or later all of us will be asked to tell stories in the course of our professional lives. We will be asked to make a case for ourselves, our work, our companies, and our future. The Strategic Storyteller tells you how.

1
Wisdom, Wonder, and Delight

Glamour and Grammar

The career of every revolutionary ends in glamour.

I don't mean the superficial definition of glamour, an artificial sense of beauty that props up a celebrity. I am talking about its deeper meaning, which is related to the stories we tell. The word glamour literally means a magic spell created by language. To be “beglamoured” means to be enchanted. Glamour was coined long ago as a mispronunciation of “grammar,” because writing—with its power to put lasting ideas directly into people's heads without speech—seemed like magic to those who had never seen it before.

This kind of magic is still potent. You can see it in the stories we tell about political figures, especially the ones who changed history.

The journey of Mahatma Gandhi, the revolutionary who peacefully liberated India from the British Empire in the early twentieth century, began in a deserted railway station one lonely night after he found himself kicked out of a train compartment. Even though Gandhi was a lawyer and could afford a first‐class ticket, he was excluded from riding in the carriage because of his brown skin. Starting with that moment of powerlessness, Gandhi began to transform his life and then the life of his entire nation. Over the next few decades until his death, he would build a movement that ended white, apartheid rule in India.

But Gandhi's journey didn't end with his eventual assassination. It continues through his existence as a lasting icon of progress and change. His image has been used to bolster the power of modern governments, and it's also been used to sell computers in the United States. In the 1990s, Apple featured him in one of their first “Think Different” ads.

The glamour of another revolutionary, Alexander Hamilton, is currently selling record numbers of tickets on Broadway to the musical about Hamilton's life written by Lin‐Manuel Miranda. As of this writing, Hamilton's glamour is worth about $1.9 million per week in ticket sales.

Another American revolutionary, Benjamin Franklin, recognized the power of his own glamour while he was still alive. To get attention and enhance his influence in Paris, where he was stationed as the first U.S. ambassador, he exaggerated his own persona by wearing a coonskin fur cap. Franklin had worn the cap out of necessity on the long voyage from the United States to France to keep his bald head warm. But to French high society, such a primitive piece of clothing wasn't a necessity but a charming symbol of American ruggedness.

I first learned about the glamour of revolutionaries and the power of their images at an early age. When I was a boy in Chile my parents told me to rip up my Fidel Castro poster on the day that Augusto Pinochet came to power. Castro was a communist and Pinochet was a fascist, so Pinochet hated everything Castro stood for. Even though the poster was on the wall of my bedroom in the privacy of our home, my parents told me it had to come down. So that day I learned that a piece of paper with an image and words had enough symbolic power that it could somehow be a threat to people who held real political power. To my childhood self, it seemed like magic.

I also learned that, whether in pixels or print, stories take up physical space in our lives. Once created and let loose into the world, the content that a story takes shape in becomes a conduit for influence and power.

I suppose one of the reasons I chose to pursue a career as a pollster and political strategist was to follow those conduits of influence to their origins, to figure out how the magic worked. I was always sure that hiding in the reams of data I gathered on voters, there was an overarching story about whatever country I was working in. Those who understood the story were destined for power and those who didn't were sure to lose it.

As a political consultant, I was also well served by the experiences that came from splitting my childhood between two nations. It continues to give me a knack for seeing the world around me as if for the first time, no matter how long I may have spent getting to know a particular place or set of people.

This was partly because I had so frequently been reminded that I was an outsider. As a child, and later when I travelled the world as a consultant, people always ended up asking me one form of the question: “You're not from around here, are you?” It happened so often that part of my mind expected it and prepared for it.

This ability to wipe away the familiar names of things, to always look for the hidden stories, has been a lifelong source of creativity and renewal. Two of my core beliefs about innovation are that it need not be left to chance and that it always begins the moment you see things anew—because that's the moment that we are free to start telling new stories about ourselves. What started as a habit of adjusting myself to the ever‐changing circumstances of my life has allowed me to help individuals, companies, nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), and large institutions find their own hidden stories and see themselves anew.

As the careers of Gandhi, Hamilton, and Franklin show, lasting power comes from this process of finding what I call glamour.

So you can think of this book as a guide to uncovering your unique sources of glamour. In this chapter and throughout the book, you'll find useful techniques for finding and telling new stories about yourself or your organization and what to do with those stories once you have them. It's part practical manual and, I hope, part book of spells.

The Power of Stories

Even with data‐based approaches, crafting influence, online and off, will always be an art and never a science.

No matter how much data we have about people, and no matter how cunningly we may calibrate the cues that guide them through a digital experience, what governs the final decision to buy an idea or a product will never be completely knowable. This is because people don't completely know themselves.

Consider your own life—from the most trivial objects you've selected for your home to the biggest choices you've made, like whom to marry, where to live, and what career to pursue. Think of the brands you trust and the ones you don't. Can you give a complete accounting of the thoughts and emotions that lead you to say “I do” or sign on the dotted line? Even if you remember the precise moment you made a choice or first believed in something, odds are you can't say exactly what got you there.

As long as we are partly a mystery to ourselves, we will be partly a mystery to every pollster, marketer, data scientist, or advertiser who wants to reach us.

And this is good news for content marketers, because the effectiveness of what we do is based not only on data but on enduring aspects of human nature. Good content, especially compelling stories, sits between science and mystery. Stories command our attention and open our minds to receive new ideas. They aren't effective because they force ideas, but because they awaken our vital needs for wisdom, wonder, and delight.

Wisdom is a distillation of what is useful. And in our accelerated, overmediated present, providing a steady stream of truly useful information is a surefire way to differentiate yourself and elevate your brand.

Wonder stories have been popular as long as humans have been communicating. From ancient myths to superhero movies, people have always craved to know about things that are bigger, faster, more powerful, or just different from their day‐to‐day experience. Wonder also inherently contains pleasure mixed with the unexpected. We love mysteries because their solutions both surprise and delight us. We love jokes because their punch lines catch us off guard.

To catch the essence of wonder, think of its opposite: boredom. Any topic can be boring if it is presented without surprise. When we know what's going to come next, we're bored. Whenever we have even the slightest reason to guess at what's next, we are on the road to wonder.

This state of consciousness is what your brand should always strive to evoke or be linked to. When people see your logo or hear your brand name, some part of them, however small, should open up to a world of greater possibility.

This Is Your Brain on Good Content

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 n...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Table of Contents
• Introduction: A Call for Storytellers
• 1 Wisdom, Wonder, and Delight
• 2 The Age of the Educated Consumer
• 3 It's about Human Nature
• 4 It's Life Stages, Not Ages: The Generation Myth and the Power of Personalization
• 5 Atomize, Serialize, Magnetize, and Keep Your Velocity
• 6 Only Connect: Creativity and Consistency
• 7 Content Marketing Applied Part 1
• 8 Content Marketing Applied Part 2
• 9 Asymmetrical Thinking
• Afterword: The Future of Storytelling
• Index
• End User License Agreement