Unforgettable: New Rules for Business Storytelling

By Elaine Brammer

Unforgettable: New Rules for Business Storytelling solves a vexing business problem: how do you tell exceptional stories in a corporate environment? The age-old advice that works for novelists and how-to authors doesn’t translate well to the business world. Mainstream authors aren’t immersed in a tug-of-war between case study production and authentic storytelling. They don’t need to reach different audiences at various altitudes, and they don’t battle against firmly entrenched yet classically dull marketing lingo. Perhaps most important, they don’t face the same type of political battles.

Author Elaine Brammer shares everything you need to know to publish truly great stories. You will discover when to tell a story, when not to, and how to nail a storyline. You will master new video skills and learn fresh techniques to hook your audience from beginning to end. And finally, you will learn to finesse your way through business hurdles such as release forms, review cycles, and legal approvals.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Great Stories, Inc.
• Release date: Jan 3, 2024
• ISBN: 9781662940439

Book preview

INTRODUCTION

HOW DOES STORYTELLING differ from traditional content? Let me show you. Below is the exact same product presented in two different ways. Both are summary statements. Which one is the story?

Option A: Remote power management uses cloud-based analytics to schedule proactive maintenance and provide reliable power to clinics, keeping refrigerators running and protecting valuable vaccines.

Option B: Now, because of Product X, a grateful mother no longer worries whether her children will survive the next diphtheria epidemic.

Two types of content. Two wildly different levels of impact. Interestingly, it’s not about length. Option A feels really long because it is neither cohesive nor compelling. Option B is a mere three words shorter, yet it is far more powerful. It has nothing to do with presentation—both options offer a single written sentence without the benefit of video, audio, or graphics. There is no difference in the efficacy or value of the product—it’s the same product.

Every day, corporations choose what type of marketing content to create. They can build information-laden pieces packed with key messages, or they can create a human story. There is no middle ground that does both justice. Ideally, corporations create both kinds of content really, really well—but in order to do that, they have to know the difference.

It seems a simple question: What makes a story a story? Yet the business world has struggled to adopt a workable definition. And without a clear view of the target, it’s impossible to hit the mark. How can you hope to craft compelling stories when the terminology is so fuzzy?

I’m going to clear that up for you. In the following pages, you will find a precise definition of business storytelling. You will also learn when to tell a story, when not to, and how to make storytelling work in a new context. Because context matters. A lot.

Storytelling in the business world does not equate to storytelling in the publishing world, yet we have failed to recognize the difference. Marketers have struggled long and hard to pluck the very best storytelling advice from the publishing arena and apply it to the corporate stage—and that creates a problem. The world of business is so dramatically different from the world of novels that we need to reshape the approach. To keep the parts that fit, trim the parts that don’t, and uncover new knowledge to fill the gaps. Storytelling techniques must be customized to perform well on a new stage.

Novelists and how-to authors aren’t immersed in a tug-of-war between case study production and authentic storytelling. They aren’t juggling a 90-second time slot in an event agenda with the overarching goal of driving sales. They don’t need to reach different audiences at various altitudes, and they don’t battle against firmly entrenched yet classically dull marketing lingo. Perhaps most important, they don’t face the same type of political battles.

Content is not created on an island. Marketing, sales, product, legal, and executive teams all vie for input based on their own priorities—and that’s not even counting demands from the customer. Anyone who has worked in marketing knows that it takes years of experience to develop enough institutional knowledge to make headway. And that it’s ridiculously difficult to align all of the competing forces in order to cross the finish line with an authentic human story.

The approach to business storytelling is out of kilter. Despite countless books, blogs, and presentations, proven advice that tackles the how-to side of business storytelling is in short supply. Unique business challenges haven’t been addressed. Appropriate usage hasn’t been defined. Storytelling has been presented as a universally applicable tool rather than one that requires selective, informed treatment. Despite a ton of chatter, there’s not much clarity.

Storytellers need a new, customized set of rules that match the complexity of the corporate environment. They need guidance that goes beyond repurposed tips-and-tricks that tackle a tiny piece of the challenge, ignoring all of those vexing business hurdles along the way.

It’s time to lay a new foundation. To design a unique approach that fills in the gaps and answers the tough business questions. When is a story the right approach, and when is traditional content better? Whose attention will you capture with a story, and who will be left in the dust? How do you knock down all of those frustrating hurdles between you and the finish line? What defines a story, anyway? And how do you create a captivating tale that is truly inspirational?

The purpose of this book is to move the needle. To make real, measurable progress by reducing the chatter and replacing it with thorough, practical, and systematic guidance that works in the business world.

• Thorough – This is more than a book about storytelling. It’s a comprehensive look at how to successfully apply storytelling to the complex world of business. Sure, our conversation will include creative techniques. We will dig into plot lines, word choice, video skills, and how to hook your audience at the beginning and hold them all the way to the end.

But that’s not all. For example, you will learn how to predict when a storytelling approach will succeed and when it will backfire. You will unravel the mysteries of how a story will impact the audience, and determine how to objectively measure that impact.

• Practical – Here I will provide seasoned guidance on how to recognize and tackle all of those corporate-specific challenges. This is practical, on-the-ground, how-to advice. You will learn how to anticipate and finesse your way through review cycles, unclear expectations, hazy communications, customer complications, legal hassles, and frantic keynote requests. This is the information you need to help your story cross the finish line.

• Systematic – This book is broken down into logical areas of study. You can tackle all of it or part of it, depending on your role.

Part 1 lays the groundwork for a deeper understanding of corporate storytelling. Here you will find the foundational knowledge to inform both strategy and execution. Everyone from the C-Suite to marketing, public relations, and sales teams will find answers to their big questions. What exactly is storytelling? How does it impact the bottom line? Can someone finally clarify the difference between a case study and a story? Are stories always better than traditional content, or does it depend on the audience?

Part 1 will fill in knowledge gaps, bring your target into focus, and help you make informed decisions about how, where, and when storytelling fits into your content strategy.

Part 2 is nitty-gritty instruction for reviewers and storytelling practitioners—the folks who actually create the content. This is where you will find prescriptive guidance to improve your storytelling technique. Do you need practical instruction on how to formulate the best storyline? New skills to help you define your hero? Advice on holding audience attention? Here we will cover everything from improving your writing skills to upping your video expertise.

If you want to improve your hands-on storytelling skills—or your ability to offer helpful feedback—Part 2 is for you.

Part 3 will help marketing, public relations, and communication teams find answers to their tough questions. How do you get a key customer to sign a release form? Negotiate your way past features and benefits to a compelling storyline? Finesse your way to legal approval? How do you get all of the internal factions pulling in the same direction long enough to publish a compelling story?

If you count story production in your job description, Part 3 is for you. It will put the final touches on your storytelling skills and help you clinch your next project.

And finally, you will find a segment called Fingertip reminders after each major section. This is not meant to be a replacement for reading the section. As a matter of fact, it may not make sense without having first read the detail, but it will provide you with a readily-accessible reminder. And if you still have questions or find you need a deeper review, just flip back to the preceding section.

Now we’re ready to get started. Through ten-plus years of navigating the murky waters of business storytelling, I have built and polished a new, end-to-end approach that has helped me create award-winning stories for Fortune 100 companies. Today, I’m excited to share it with you. In the following pages you will learn new methods and techniques to help you create inspirational brand stories that customers love, remember, and share.

HAVE YOU EVER wondered if storytelling is worth all the buzz? Why not just stick with traditional content? As with many business decisions, the answer lies in the bottom line—and a healthy bottom line relies on healthy sales. So how do you leverage your marketing expense to increase sales? Set the right goals.

Most high-level goals for content marketing sound something like this: Elevate brand awareness and perception in order to improve market position. Rephrased in street lingo it might sound like this: Inspire customers to think of our product first, recognize it as best, and choose to buy it more often. And what type of content does the best job of reaching the most people with the most positive impression? Storytelling.

Sounds simple, right? Not really. Business storytelling is a unique skill. It cannot be reduced to a broad-brush tool that you simply layer over traditional content. There is no magic storytelling applicator that suddenly turns everything into a story.

Storytelling requires more judicious treatment. A more selective and informed application. Switching to more conversational language won’t get you there. Neither will simply creating a beginning, middle, and end to your content. The storyteller must understand exactly what storytelling is, why it can be a powerful tool, who will feel its pull, and how to execute it properly.

Our first job will be to deconstruct different types of content. We will start with the why, the who, and the what, and leave the how for later. Why are you creating a piece of content? Who is the target audience? And what is the defining structure? This will help you delineate between a story and any other asset. First up, let’s take a closer look at a staple of the marketing world: the ever-popular case study.

THE UBIQUITOUS CASE STUDY

If you only have a hammer, you tend to see every problem as a nail.

—Abraham Maslow

YOU CAN LEARN a lot from nomenclature. If your purview is limited to marketing, you may think case studies are a marketing thing. Today, yes they are. But not exclusively. And historically, no. They were definitely not a marketing thing.

French scientist Frederic LePlay developed case studies in order to study finance in the 1800s. It was a new research tool, and it caught on. By the early 1900s, the case study had gained popularity at The University of Chicago,¹ where the Department of Sociology expanded its usage to the social sciences. A sociologist might, for example, use a case study to evaluate why a young adult male is unable to sleep in his new apartment. Or perhaps to determine the effect of mainstream education on an individual with learning disabilities.

Broadly speaking, case studies are an established research tool that is used in a variety of disciplines, particularly in the social sciences. Once the research is complete, the final step is to create a case study report. In simplified form, it looks like this:

• Background

• Problem Statement (Situation)

• Solution

• Results

• Conclusion

Look familiar? The sciences, of course, require a more expansive report than a marketing piece. The background includes more context. The problem statement calls out the questions that must be answered. The analytical tools are explained. There are more sections. More detail. But in essence, the format is the same. The business world simply borrowed the research-based case study report and applied it to marketing.

I don’t know who first applied a case study methodology to marketing—I’m picturing a scientist in the midst of a radical career change—but it was genius. Case studies provide a reputable way to take a validated product experience with a positive outcome and communicate it to the world.

The approach has been largely successful, but also widely misunderstood. For many companies, case studies have become the default for customer content. Instead of adding a tool to the marketing arsenal, case studies have become the tool to share a customer experience. Sort of like a toolbelt with all hammers and no drill.

Sometimes a case study is the right answer, but choosing the very best type of content to resonate with a particular audience using a particular message for a particular reason is far more nuanced. There’s a bit of faulty logic in the all case studies all the time approach. Case studies speak to some of the people some of the time, but they don’t speak to all of the people all of the time. In fact, the audience for case studies is quite narrow.

So here we go—it’s time to look at the why, the who, and the what of case studies. Then we will do the same for stories and compare the two, so you can more easily choose the right tool for the job.

The right tool for the job

The first question you should ask yourself when creating a piece of content is why you are creating it. You won’t be able to pick the right tool until you have a good handle on the job, so let’s start by figuring out the purpose.

Broadly speaking, you have two choices. Marketing content typically fits into one of two buckets—it’s either informational or inspirational. There’s a bit of stylistic crossover, but only one primary purpose.

Toward the top of the sales funnel is where the inspirational content enters the picture. This is where you will find those compelling stories that grab your attention and hold it from beginning to end. The ones you become invested in. The ones you remember.

As you get closer to the bottom of the funnel, that’s where you will find the informational assets. Case studies fit into the informational bucket. I know, I know—marketers have been working frantically for years to do the exact opposite. To somehow turn case studies into engaging, full-funnel stories complete with drama and victory. To meld the two separate types of content into a piece of Franken-content that serves both purposes.

I would advise against that approach. One-size-fits-all is not better than a targeted asset. Maintaining