“Storytelling” has become a buzzword – and a bit of a confused word in advertising.
By Storytelling here, I narrowly mean telling stories – where there are people who want to do something and face some obstacle to achieving it.
Stories work with humans. I don’t think anyone fully understands it – but we don’t need to. Stories are an excellent way to pass along information. We are good at keeping our attention when someone is telling us a story, at understanding the story, at remembering the story, and at recalling things from the story later.
AI is going to make the world much more complicated. Over the next few years we will find ourselves living in a world of many more products, and of many more complex products. The many more products will mean that there are a lot more things out there trying to get our limited attention. And the more complex products will mean it will take longer for us to “get” each new product- trying to get your head around things like companies trying to sell us AI agents, or understanding if new preventative health checks for serious diseases are worth doing, or working out things like whether you should sell your house and buy in a new area that will become a lot more valuable because of driverless cars is really difficult. It’s even more complicated at work – things like trying to decide whether to buy systems that are sold as being able to take over some human work, or deciding whether to now build in-house software for more of your business because software development costs have fallen so much, or whether to buy new machines for your facilities while not knowing whether new technology will mean that those machines will be out-of-date in a year or two – these things are incredibly difficult.
When things are too difficult to understand, most people generally do nothing.
For companies (and for humanity) this is not ideal. For companies, if they can’t sell their products, they will grow slowly or fail. For humanity, it means that we waste a lot of time – as there are things out there that could improve the world but we are not adopting because we can’t understand them.
This is where storytelling comes in. It lets companies get their message across. It gets the message across in a way that people hear (without getting bored and switching off halfway through the message), in a way that people understand (rather than the message going in one ear and out the other), in a way that people remember (rather than some fact that is completely forgotten), and in a way that people remember (for example when they are in a situation the next time, they automatically remember this story about the product that could help them in these situations).
To work out the right story to tell, brands need to get to the heart of their product – to be able to see past all the complexity and completely understand what their product does for the consumer. This is much more difficult than it sounds. They then need to understand their customers and create the right story that will resonate with them – and will resonate with them in the right way where they will be able to get the value of the product and will take action to buy and use the product.
Apples’ 1984 ad is an excellent example of how to do this. Nike is famously good at this. Most of the consumer work I have done has been story-telling based. This came very naturally when TV ads were the main medium. And it always seems a little like magic how stories can take something complex and boring to most of us – like the biochemical mechanics of what a pharmaceutical product does or the relative risk-reward profile of a financial product – and make it attention grabbing, fun and often funny. This type of storytelling has reduced a little as primary media for many brands has changed from 30 second TV ads to digital/social.
As competition and complexity increases thanks to AI, we will find ourselves in a new golden age of storytelling.
The upshot for companies and creatives. It’s time to think more about storytelling for your brands. This is important for all brands – but it’s especially important if you need to communicate something complicated.