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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Fachliteratur
- Sprache: Englisch
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.
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Seitenzahl: 246
Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2017
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Table of Contents
Cover
Title Page
Introduction: A Call for Storytellers
1 Wisdom, Wonder, and Delight
Glamour and Grammar
The Power of Stories
This Is Your Brain on Good Content
Strategies of Delight
The Runway and the Beltway: Informal Networks of Influence
How Good Content Helps Us Be Our Best Selves
Content Creates Guiding Narratives
What's Old Is New Again
How to Find Good Stories
Notes
2 The Age of the Educated Consumer
Why Politics Won't Teach You about Marketing
The Educated Consumer
Notes
3 It's about Human Nature
Learning from the Best Human Storytellers
Notes
4 It's Life Stages, Not Ages: The Generation Myth and the Power of Personalization
Data and Privacy
The Evolution of Personalization
Personalization for B2B
Mobile and Omnichannel Personalization
Taking Personalization Off‐Line
Notes
5 Atomize, Serialize, Magnetize, and Keep Your Velocity
Solving for Distribution
Velocity Is Transformational
Notes
6 Only Connect: Creativity and Consistency
Building a Content Culture
Inspiring Organization‐wide Creativity
Individual Creativity
Connectivity
How Brands Evolve
Notes
7 Content Marketing Applied Part 1
Content Marketing Applied: The Content Hub
The Process of Creating a Hub
Thought Leadership
Have a Strong Visual Vocabulary
Emerging Platforms
The Best Content Hubs…
Internal Communications
Notes
8 Content Marketing Applied Part 2
Knowledge Transfer: Putting It All Together
How the Industry Is Changing
Notes
9 Asymmetrical Thinking
Notes
Afterword: The Future of Storytelling
Index
End User License Agreement
List of Illustrations
Chapter 4
Figure 4.1 Personalized Spotify Email.
Chapter 7
Figure 7.1 Minard's Data Visualization.
Figure 7.2 Unfiltered One.
Chapter 8
Figure 8.1 The Content Ecosystem.
Guide
Cover
Table of Contents
Begin Reading
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THE STRATEGIC STORYTELLER
CONTENT MARKETING IN THE AGE OF THE EDUCATED CONSUMER
ALEXANDER JUTKOWITZ
Copyright © 2017 by Alexander Jutkowitz. All rights reserved
Published by John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, New Jersey
Published simultaneously in Canada
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, scanning, or otherwise, except as permitted under Section 107 or 108 of the 1976 United States Copyright Act, without either the prior written permission of the Publisher, or authorization through payment of the appropriate per-copy fee to the Copyright Clearance Center, 222 Rosewood Drive, Danvers, MA 01923, (978) 750-8400, fax (978) 646-8600, or on the web at www.copyright.com. Requests to the Publisher for permission should be addressed to the Permissions Department, John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 111 River Street, Hoboken, NJ 07030, (201) 748-6011, fax (201) 748-6008, or online at www.wiley.com/go/permissions.
Limit of Liability/Disclaimer of Warranty: While the publisher and author have used their best efforts in preparing this book, they make no representations or warranties with respect to the accuracy or completeness of the contents of this book and specifically disclaim any implied warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose. No warranty may be created or extended by sales representatives or written sales materials. The advice and strategies contained herein may not be suitable for your situation. You should consult with a professional where appropriate. Neither the publisher nor the author shall be liable for damages arising herefrom.
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Jutkowitz, Alexander, 1968– author.
Title: The strategic storyteller : content marketing in the age of the educated consumer / Alexander Jutkowitz.
Description: Hoboken, New Jersey : John Wiley & Sons, Inc., [2017] |
Identifiers: LCCN 2017020141 (print) | LCCN 2017032080 (ebook) | ISBN 9781119351443 (pdf) | ISBN 9781119345091 (epub) | ISBN 9781119345114 (cloth)
Subjects: LCSH: Marketing. | Storytelling. | Content (Psychology)
Classification: LCC HF5415 (ebook) | LCC HF5415 .J87 2017 (print) | DDC 658.8/02— dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017020141
Cover Design: Wiley
Cover Illustration: © Group SJR
To Ali and Teddy, my bunny and bear.
Introduction: A Call for Storytellers
If we cannot tell a story about what happened to us, nothing has happened to us.
—James P. Carse
The world is in dire need of stories. Information is abundant, but stories are rare.
It is not a subjective impression that our lives are getting faster and more complex. We are speaking faster than we were a decade ago, perhaps because we have more to say given that the amount of data in the world is growing at a rate of 60 percent per year.
In response, organizations have grown 35 times more complex over the past seven decades. For those of us who live our lives inside organizations, lead them, or communicate for them, this means that our day‐to‐day experience is ever tougher to manage.
As if this were not enough, the stories we get about the world are not in agreement with one another. Open the pages of any major news outlet, and you will find stories of precarious societies riven by violence, ideological conflict, and environmental collapse. Yet against this continuous buzz of catastrophe, it is also somehow true that the share of the global population living in extreme poverty has fallen by 50 percent since 1990. Which story to believe? And if both are to be believed, what larger story can explain them both?
If we're going to make sense of all this, we need more storytellers. We need more people with the tools and the desire to dig into the world's information and build their own stories out of it.
As digital technology breaks down the barriers between jobs, 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.
This is good news, because when we tell stories, unique and useful things happen.
Storytelling flexes the same muscles that allow organizations to pivot quickly around crisis or opportunity. To construct a coherent story requires that we make connections between parts of ourselves and our companies that wouldn't otherwise exist. Having these connections ready can mean the difference between survival or failure when we are met by the inevitable shocks of the future.
Innovation and creativity are the defining words of this collective moment. Key to both is the ability to take whatever raw materials are in front of us and recombine them in new ways. These raw materials can be ideas, physical assets, parts of organizations, and the talents of the people who work for them. And when we tell stories about ourselves and our institutions, we have no choice but to learn everything we can about these raw materials, and often we have to go in search of new ones. The raw materials that make up the solutions to our toughest problems are a kind of useful industrial by‐product of the storytelling process.
Storytelling is also an inherently disruptive activity.
On a personal level, it means that strategic storytellers must expand their capabilities and learn to think in new ways. In the course of telling a story, they might wear the hat of a consultant, artist, detective, journalist, or executive.
On an organizational level, storytelling requires us to find new language and images to represent our goals and our purpose that can be understood by a wider audience, not just the small circles that already speak our jargon. By making our purpose clear to others, we make it clear to ourselves.
On a strategic level, a fully grown storytelling function within an organization can mean the difference between life and death. Stories are the lifeblood of political campaigns. In the history of U.S. politics, it's the figures with the best stories that also radiate the most power, even generations after their deaths. We all know a few anecdotes or have a general sense of the personal brand of our greatest presidents, like Washington, Lincoln, and Teddy Roosevelt. In contemporary politics, the right story can win or lose an election, pass a piece of legislation, or end a war. In business, the right story defines any company's most valuable asset: its brand.
Stories are the base unit of reputation. Not to tell your own is to have no reputation or to cede its construction to others.
And that's where this book comes in. In it are the tools to build stories in a new way that coexists with the accelerated, complex tempo of our lives.
Our most important stories don't just live in the static pages of books any more. They are shaped and told digitally, at high speed, and emerge just a half step behind experience. They are consumed and made in small windows of time and in little sips of attention.
It is my firm belief that these conditions do not lessen our stories—but only make them richer. In fact, the rapid pace and diffusion of our stories—what I call their velocity and atomization—are making storytelling a lot more fun.
In that spirit, what you'll find in this book does not need to be consumed in order—or even in its entirety—to be useful. It's my hope that you can dip into this book at any spot for a bit of inspiration or for your next urgently needed idea.
When you need to be a storyteller any page of this book, consumed in whatever niche of time you might have, is here to help.
So let's advance to the next the page (whether digital or analog) and find not just my story but the beginning of yours, too.
1Wisdom, 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 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.
Strategies of Delight
Until now, I've focused on wisdom and wonder.
But the deployment of pure delight is a powerful strategic asset. Along with the quest for power and riches, the simple pursuit of delight has shaped history.
To see what I mean, let's consider a form of delight that is universal and consumed in discrete units, but which is by nature devoid of any messaging: food.
When asked how he planned to restore the international reputation of France, the great diplomat Charles‐Maurice de Talleyrand said, “I don't need secretaries as much as I need saucepans!”5
