Creative trend: Sharing stories, not shouting facts

“Today, if you want to succeed as an entrepreneur or leader, you also have to be a storyteller.” Richard Branson: business magnate, billionaire and founder of the Virgin Group.

By Liz Sunter September 28, 2018

The importance of storytelling

Storytelling is the original form of entertainment – from our earliest beginnings etching stories onto cave walls, to gathering around a campfire to share a tall tale. As children, we learn morals through fables and fairy tales, and as adults we gather around the water cooler (or your office’s equivalent) to pass on stories of the day. Storytelling engages people much more than simply presenting data – it’s a scientific fact.

When thinking about the way storytelling has infiltrated marketing, consider the ways that our consumption patterns have changed. The stories brands tell need to create connections with consumers in the same way people connect person to person, with emotions, personalised interactions and realtime events.

In order to do this, brands need to be authentic and engaging. They need to strike the right balance between entertainment and information; pure storytelling doesn’t say much about your product or services and could be a waste of money and resources, but an onslaught of aggressive marketing isn’t likely to yield results either. One Spot reported that a whopping 92% of consumers want brands to make ads feel like a story – that kind of demand is hard to ignore.

How brands are using different storytelling techniques to engage consumers

Consumer led storytelling– GoPro

92% of people say they trust their peers’ recommendations over a traditional advert – and action camera company GoPro has certainly taken advantage of that fact. The purpose of their product is literally to pump out exciting content, and GoPro’s marketing uses that content to market to a wider audience.

“We believe the best stories are being lived by our customers,” says Nick Woodman, founder and CEO of GoPro. “We want to help people self-document themselves engaged in their interests or passions.” GoPro’s online user channel encourages consumers to upload their videos and highlights the best ones, whether that be a thrill seeker climbing Shanghai Tower (the world’s second tallest building at 650 feet), or a surfing pig in Oahu, Hawaii.

With their target market doing the hard work of content creation for them, GoPro have saved a huge amount of money on production costs. The company more than doubled their net income from 2010 to 2011 to £18.8 million, spending only £38,000 on marketing. They repeated this feat in 2013, increasing marketing costs by only £31,000 but making £21.4 million more in net income.

Ethical brand storytelling ­– Nike’s Equality campaign

Nike’s Equality campaign aims to tie personal stories to wider social narratives, and make customers feel like they have a personal stake in the brand’s story. When it was initially launched, the campaign focused on the idea that “worth should outshine colour”, and held up the diversity of the sports world, where success is based on skill rather than looks, as a model for the rest of society.

Nike feature a mixture of A-list and grassroots sporting talent in their collateral for the campaign. By highlighting initiatives from a range of communities, Nike encourage customers to see investment in the brand as an investment in their own community.

This kind of ethics-driven storytelling can be high risk, but it’s also high reward. After a recent ad featured Colin Kaepernick, some customers posted videos of themselves burning their Nike merch, but the company have stood by the ad and its star, and their stock is currently up 36% compared to the same time last year – a £4.6 billion increase in market value.

Immersive storytelling – Alzheimer’s Research UK

Brands exploring the immersive worlds of augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR) in their storytelling include Alzheimer’s Research UK, with their ‘A Walk Through Dementia’ app, which is designed to put you in the shoes of someone living with dementia. Viewers then used Google Cardboard and 360 degree video to attempt various tasks, with the barriers dementia presents built in.

“The challenge we’ve got as a charity is how to communicate the reality of what dementia is like for people,” said Tim Parry, a spokesperson for Alzheimer’s Research UK. “Using virtual reality is a uniquely powerful way of doing that. This project is about trying to simulate, lots of the kind of issues that people with dementia face on a day to day basis that some people might not realise.”

As well as drawing potential donors, volunteers and carers into a story that’s not theirs and giving them a more visceral connection to a new viewpoint. Most importantly, the app doubles up as an awareness-raising exercise, but can also be used to help new carers understand how dementia may affect a loved one.

Storytelling tech

By 2015, 75% of the world's most valuable brands had already created some kind of virtual or augmented reality experience to engage with consumers. With global revenue for AR and VR predicted to reach £109 billion by 2020 (that’s a compound annual growth rate of 198.0% over the 2015-2020 forecast period), there’s a strong argument for investing in AR and VR tech to take your brand storytelling to the next level, and help your company cut through the noise by delivering memorable, immersive stories for your audience.

While the cost of investment has made some companies (and consumers) reluctant to invest in VR and AR, the amount you need to invest is falling. 360 degree cameras are becoming increasingly affordable, and platforms like Facebook 360 and Google Cardboard present customers with a low-cost entry point to your virtual worlds.

You can even start developing AR experiences on your iPhone thanks to the ARKit tools built in to iOS. Apps such as Safari, Messages, Mail, News, and Notes can natively ‘see’ virtual objects in 3D or AR, and iPhone’s combination of motion sensors, dual cameras and a ultra-fast A12 Bionic processing chip make it easier than ever for apps to accurately monitor a user’s environment and insert AR elements in a way that feels timely and natural, allowing them to become a participant in your brand’s story, rather than just a consumer.

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