Copyright

Copyright © 2018 by Robert McKee and Thomas Gerace

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: McKee, Robert, 1941- author. | Gerace, Thomas, author.

Title: Storynomics : story-driven marketing in the post-advertising world /
Robert McKee and Thomas Gerace.
Description: New York : Twelve, [2018]
Identifiers: LCCN 2017042100| ISBN 9781538727935 (hardcover) | ISBN
9781549167454 (audio download) | ISBN 9781455541973 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Marketing. | Storytelling.
Classification: LCC HF5415 .M26125 2018 | DDC 658.8—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017042100

ISBNs: 978-1-5387-2793-5 (hardcover), 978-1-4555-4197-3 (ebook), 978-

1-5491-6745-4 (audiobook, downloadable)

E3-20180215-JV-PC
 CONTENTS

Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Acknowledgments
Epigraph
Introduction: The Marketing Crisis

PART ONE: THE MARKETING REVOLUTION

Chapter One: Advertising, A Story of Addiction
Chapter Two: Marketing, A Story of Deception

PART TWO: STORY CREATION

Chapter Three: The Evolution of Story
Chapter Four: The Definition of Story
Chapter Five: The Full Story
Chapter Six: The Purpose-Told Story

PART THREE: PUTTING STORY TO WORK

Chapter Seven: Story and the CMO
Chapter Eight: Storified Branding
Chapter Nine: Storified Advertising
Chapter Ten: Storified Demand and Lead Generation
Chapter Eleven: Building Audience
Chapter Twelve: Storified Sales
Chapter Thirteen: -Nomics
Conclusion: Tomorrow

Also by Robert McKee

Notes
Newsletters
 To Mia, Her love gives all things meaning.
—Robert McKee

To my parents, Ann Jones Gerace and Samuel Philip

Gerace, who taught me to love a good story.
—Tom Gerace
 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

We offer special thanks to Mia Kim for her inspired and tireless leadership
of the entire Storynomics enterprise. We would still be outlining if Mia had
not kept us on task.
We are grateful to Linda Boff of GE, Raja Rajamannar of Mastercard,
Caleb Barlow of IBM, Jeanniey Mullen of Mercer, Natalie Malaszenko of
Overstock, David Beebe of Marriott, and Patrick Davis of Davis Brand
Capital who graciously shared their time and wisdom with us.
We owe thanks too to Tricia Travaline, Genevieve Colton, Adam
Vavrek, Ruben Sanchez, and Dara Cohen who have done heavy lifting to
make the Storynomics enterprise a success. We are grateful to Marcia
Friedman and Tom Hardej, who edited our early copy and helped ensure
consistency of voice, and to Carl Rosendorf, Ann Gerace, Darryl Gehly,
Dan Baptiste, Rob Murray, Caleb Gonsalves, Lauren Meyer, Michael
Gowen, Kent Lawson, Bob Dekoch, Jim Rossmeissi, and others at
Skyword, Boldt, and beyond, who read early drafts of the book and
provided invaluable feedback along the way. And we thank Jim Manzi, for
his unwavering support and belief in the power of story to drive change.
I will hazard a prediction. When you are 80 years old and in a quiet
moment of reflection, narrating for only yourself the most personal
version of your life’s story, the telling that will be most compact and
meaningful will be the series of choices you have made. In the end,
we are our choices.
—Jeff Bezos, 2010 Princeton Commencement Address
 INTRODUCTION
THE MARKETING CRISIS

Look around. It’s happening. In ever-escalating millions, consumers are

cutting the barbed wire of ad-imprisoned media and disappearing into a
forest of paid subscriptions and ad blockers. No use searching for these
people. They’re gone and they’re never coming back.
Now look ahead. Before long, all public and private communication—
entertainment, news, music, sports, social media, online searches—will be
ad-free, leaving sides of buses as the publicity medium of last resort.
Millennials, that vital under-forty market, are not only banishing
advertising from their lives but sneering at the institution itself, denouncing
its bragging and promising as deceitful, manipulative, the next thing to
micro-aggression. In fact, a recent study revealed that over the past five
years, television viewing by people under forty dropped 30 percent, while
ad-free over-the-top services like Netflix skyrocketed.1
This massive consumer exit and the resulting drop in ad revenue has
tossed umpteen media firms—Tribune Media, 21st Century Media, SBC
Media, Relativity Media, Cumulus Media, Next Media, Citadel
Broadcasting, the Sun-Times, Borders, Blockbuster, Reader’s Digest, and
dozens more multibillion-dollar corporations—into the Dumpsters of
bankruptcy.2
In 2015, 76 percent of marketers surveyed by Adobe claimed that
marketing had changed more in the last two years than it had in all the
decades since the birth of television. Many chief marketing officers swear
they will never again trust advertising to deliver customers. Some CMOs
condemn ad agencies for wasting time and money trying to be Super Bowl–
creative instead of market-effective. Others blame the noise from free
online ads that drowns out their paid ads. Still others complain that falling
return on investment (ROI) and rising costs make advertising just too damn
expensive. Of course, if advertising suddenly redelivered the mass
consumers of decades past, all would be forgiven.
The more the push strategies of bragging and promising lose traction,
the more marketers turn to the pull tactics of effective storytelling. To
support their efforts, the Harvard Business Review has published dozens of
articles on the persuasive power of story for both leadership and branding, a
myriad of TED talks have championed the neuroscience behind storified
messaging, and how-to writers have poured out dozens upon dozens of
story-in-business manuals that could fill a wall at Barnes & Noble.
But despite published enthusiasm, boardroom misgivings about the
nature and use of story run as wide and deep as ever. Now and then, an
inspired campaign uses story to effect (for instance, the “What’s the Matter
with Owen?” campaign by GE, “Misunderstood” by Apple, or “Click,
Baby, Click!” by Adobe),3 but overall, corporate storytelling continues to
sputter and stumble in confusion, more a trend than a tool. This is true not
only for the marketing arms of most companies, but also for the PR and ad
agencies that service them. The dream of story-driven commerce is still a
dream. With Storynomics, we intend to turn this dream into reality.
Part 1, “The Marketing Revolution,” investigates the problem. Once the
causes of a crisis are exposed, its cure becomes self-evident. Chapter 1,
“Advertising, A Story of Addiction,” asks, “What went wrong?” and traces
the rise and fall of advertising from Ben Franklin to today. Chapter 2,
“Marketing, A Story of Deception,” traces the problem back beyond
advertising to the taproot of marketing logic.
Part 2, “Story Creation,” explores the solution. The next four chapters
examine the core elements of story, how they fit the mind, how they move
consumer action, and how to design them for effect. Chapter 3, “The
Evolution of Story,” begins with the first human thought and follows the
mind’s evolution into storied consciousness. Chapter 4, “The Definition of
Story,” lays out the components of the universal, timeless form that
underlies all storytelling in all cultures. Chapter 5, “The Full Story,” delves
deeper into the elements of story to help the reader develop her craft.
Chapter 6, “The Purpose-Told Story,” takes the reader through the step-by-
step process for designing the ideal marketing story.
Part 3, “Putting Story to Work,” turns solution into action. To transform
the way your organization connects to its customers, you must harness your
marketing, branding, advertising, and sales to the pulling power of story.
The following chapters show you how to storify all four voices. Chapter 7,
“Story and the CMO,” casts the marketer as the master storyteller who
envisions a campaign and then guides creatives as they transform the
concept into storified action. Chapter 8, “Storified Branding,” demonstrates
the use of story to overcome the public’s antipathy to corporations and win
brand affinity. Chapter 9, “Storified Advertising,” argues that ads work best
when the interruption tells a story that hooks, holds, and entertains. Chapter
10, “Storified Demand and Lead Generation,” looks at how thinking and
planning in story form guides marketing’s grand strategy and takes your
corporation to long-term success. Chapter 11, “Building Audience,”
explains how brands can integrate into the digital ecosystem to earn and
expand audience, allowing the stories they tell to reach the masses. Chapter
12, “Storified Sales,” lays out the full range of face-to-face storytelling
options from point of sale to the viral cascade known as word of mouth.
Chapter 13, “-Nomics,” demonstrates how marketers can directly measure
the value of their storytelling and compare its efficacy with that of
traditional advertising.
The conclusion, “Tomorrow,” looks forward, forecasting the impact of
new and upcoming technological change on the use of storytelling in
marketing. We examine how the impact of story will continue to grow, and
our ability to create immersive experiences will take a leap forward, while
essential story form remains the same.
Justin Smith, CEO of Bloomberg Media Group, said, “All business is
bifurcated into two distinct worlds: the struggling traditional segment that
longs for a simpler, more profitable past that will never return; and the
vibrant, entrepreneurial segment that is reinventing commerce before our
eyes.”
This book was written for you reinventors. We coined the infinitive to
storify to name the transformation of data into story form, the adjective
storified to describe data that has undergone that change, and the noun
Storynomics to title the story-centric business practices that drive fiscal
results.
The difference between data and story is this: Data lists what happened;
story expresses how and why it happened. Data compiles facts by quantity
and frequency; story reveals the causalities behind and beneath those facts.
Story eliminates irrelevancies, concentrates on dynamic change, and then
reshapes factual subject matter into a structure that links events into chains
of cause and effect, played out over time.
Storynomics taps this enormous potential in the business world. Those
marketers who master storytelling techniques will plant and harvest a
timeless bounty as they invent the future.
 PART I

THE MARKETING REVOLUTION

 1

ADVERTISING, A STORY OF
ADDICTION

It started innocently enough. In the 1700s, weekly newspapers detailing

local life and politics in the American colonies first sprouted everywhere,
but then shriveled and died for two reasons. One, printing required a license
from the Crown that specifically prohibited satire of the king’s
representatives. A cartoon ridiculing the royal governor may have delighted
the paper-buying public, but it bought the cartoonist a ticket to the whipping
post. Two, newspaper publishers who kept their political heads down
struggled nonetheless because paper and ink were costly and revenue
depended on subscriptions—a luxury beyond the reach of many. Shrinking
subscriber bases drove most papers out of business.
To survive, publishers needed a new business model. Advertising was
virtually unknown, but each new immigrant ship brought settlers anxious to
establish businesses. As they opened shop, craftsmen from coopers to
clothiers tried to spread the word. Ads began to appear in the backs of
newspapers, providing publishers with a critical new source of revenue.
Newspapers that advertised used the new income to lower subscription
costs, and with that sell more papers. Broader reach meant greater
influence, which in turn allowed publishers to charge more for advertising.
As customers filled their shops, tradesmen bought more ads, papers thrived,
and commerce enriched the ever-expanding colonies. Before long,
advertising transformed both the publishing industry and the enterprises it
served until the two became interdependent.
Benjamin Franklin, one of the most successful publishers of the day,
leveraged this model with particular deftness. He personally taught business
leaders the fine points of print marketing. As the back pages of his
Pennsylvania Gazette filled with ads, the paper quickly became
Philadelphia’s favorite. Building on this financial success, Franklin set up
an intercolonial newspaper network from South Carolina to Connecticut,
earning him the title Patron Saint of Advertising.1
Throughout this era, merchants realized that the more prominent the ad,
the greater the impact, but standard newspaper practice packed most
advertisements cheek by jowl in the back pages with a few between articles.
Businesses experimented with size, design, font, and page placement of ads,
seeking new ways to impact readers with their messages. In time, they
discovered that the most effective advertising strategy was interruption,
placing ads directly in readers’ way as they read a story. This technique
hooks the reader’s interest with a news story, then interrupts midstream with
a brand message. Sudden intrusion into the reader’s flow of thought forces
the brand’s message into a consumer’s consciousness.
Publishers, fearful of annoying their subscribers, resisted this tactic at
first, but addicted as they were to ad income, they soon made the practice a
newspaper norm, forcing readers to jump from the front page through the
ads to finish a story.
With hindsight, we now realize that the instincts of those nineteenth-
century newsmen were accurate—the more we interrupt consumers, the less
we satisfy their overall experience. From the earliest days of advertising,
the scent of annoyance has wafted between interrupt ads and interrupted
context—be it news, fiction, or sports or other live events. Audiences
simply learned to tolerate it.
At the end of the nineteenth century, rail lines connected cities, allowing
manufacturers to reach far beyond the limits of local delivery trucks.
Businesses rushed to capture rapidly expanding markets by shifting from
local to regional or national campaigns. Ivory Soap was one of the first
brands to launch truly nationwide advertising, with an initial ad buy of
$11,000.
By 1897, surging success increased Ivory’s ad budget to $300,000 and
earned an estimated 20 percent national market share at its peak. Many
other recognized brands quickly followed suit.
Newspapers were just the beginning. In the early twentieth century,
inventor and entrepreneur Guglielmo Marconi hoped to use his patents to
control all wireless communication and create a subscription model for
radio. But in 1906, an international treaty signed in Berlin decreed that no
person, company, or country could monopolize the radio waves. Early
broadcasters, therefore, had no choice but to establish the first completely
ad-supported media.2
 When commercial television began in the 1940s, broadcasting adopted
radio’s interrupt advertising methods, and fast became the dominant form of
media consumption. At their height, the three major networks (ABC, NBC,
CBS) reached a combined fifty million viewers every night during prime
time. For sixty years, the television commercial was the primary way
Americans learned about new products.

Television outperformed all other media because it combined mass reach, a

rich visual medium for messaging, and guaranteed audience attention.
Marketers poured more and more money into television advertising over
time, creating increasing demand for ad inventory.
And with that spend, ad addiction grew stronger—media companies
could not get enough. They began to cram more advertising into each
broadcast hour to drive their revenues and profits higher. In the 1950s,
advertising accounted for four minutes of viewing time per hour. By the
1970s, commercial time had doubled. But with the growth of cable TV in
the 1980s and then the open Internet in the early 1990s, audiences
fragmented and advertising rates for individual shows began to fall. Ad-
supported networks and cable channels scrambled to protect revenues by
shoving still more advertising at an ever-shrinking audience. By 2011, cable
networks were running ads for almost one minute out of every three.

CONSUMERS RESIST

By 2006, however, new technologies stepped in to help consumers skip ads.

The video recording device TiVo marketed its “30 second skip” feature as a
key benefit. Cable providers soon launched video on demand (VOD) so
subscribers could bypass ads more easily than ever. A study by the
Association of National Advertisers and Forrester Research showed that
marketers watched the adoption of these services with nervous pessimism.
Seventy percent of advertisers surveyed thought DVRs and VOD would
“reduce or destroy the effectiveness” of the traditional thirty-second ad.3
In 2006, Advertising Age predicted this: “When DVR usage reaches 30
million households in the U.S., expected within three years, almost 60% of
advertisers say they will spend less on conventional TV advertising; of
those, 24% will cut their TV budgets by at least 25%.”
Time magazine reported that from 2009 to 2013, the average cost of a
thirty-second prime-time TV commercial dropped 12.5 percent. When
falling ad rates shrank revenues at ad-supported networks, they squeezed
even more ads, albeit at a lower cost per ad, into their shows. In February
2015, the Wall Street Journal reported that cable networks were subtly
speeding up the action in each broadcast hour to generate more time for
ads.4 The Journal quoted one studio executive as saying, “It has gotten
completely out of control. Actors’ performances are being seriously hurt by
running shows this way.”
To continue to capture ad revenue, media companies experimented with
new options, shifting content onto services like YouTube so they could
“pre-roll” the ads that appeared before short videos.5 At Hulu, they fell back
onto their old habits, recycling the same tired interrupt ad model that once
worked on broadcast TV. Either way, marketers could at least guarantee that
viewers saw their ads, because their media partners prevented fast-
forwarding to skip ads.
These new capabilities, however, came with a price. By 2013, the cost of
targeted online video ads had shot past that of television advertising,
because pre-roll ads on YouTube and interrupt ads on Hulu guaranteed
viewership and online delivery enabled more powerful ad targeting.6

In 2016, marketers were projected to have spent a record $605 billion on

advertising around the world. Digital ad spending surpassed television ad
spending for the first time, as budgets continued to shift to Facebook and
YouTube.7 And advertising is projected to continue to grow, albeit at a
slower pace, in 2017 as media companies, new and old, continue to work to
find new ways to interrupt consumers on behalf of brand marketers, all the
while denying viewers the best possible experience.8
 But one important thing has changed.

CONSUMER’S REVOLT

Although the early Internet connected the globe and offered sufficient speed
for consumers to browse and read articles, connections were not fast
enough for reliable video delivery. Even short YouTube videos needed time
to buffer, or they would stall during playback.
But by 2005, broadband adoption in the home surpassed dial-up in the
United States. With this faster connection came a game changer for
consumers: choice.
Consider Netflix, which was originally launched as a DVD subscription
service in 1999, competing with Blockbuster and other video rental stores.9
With broadband adoption now at scale, Netflix launched a fledgling
streaming service in 2007, offering consumers the ability to watch a small
selection of the Netflix film library on their laptops. One year later, the
company launched the service on game consoles and set-top boxes that
allowed people to watch Netflix easily on their living room TVs.
Early Netflix consumers loved having instant access and enjoyed
watching their favorite films and, later, television series completely ad-free.
They were happy to pay a simple subscription fee of about $10 per month
for unlimited viewing. Netflix invested new subscription revenues to grow
its library, steadily adding films and then television shows, which the
company licensed from traditional media partners.
Subscriber growth soared. In the fourth quarter of 2016, Netflix
surpassed 93.8 million subscribers, dwarfing the reach of broadcast and
cable networks.10 The company is expanding at an accelerating rate, adding
more than two million subscribers each month in countries around the
globe.

Growing subscriber revenues provides Netflix with a powerful competitive

weapon. To expand and retain its subscriber base, Netflix borrowed a
modus operandi from HBO and began to invest in original programming.
Netflix series like House of Cards and Orange Is the New Black created
rabid fans who spread word of Netflix online and off. In January 2016, the
Wall Street Journal reported, “With… a $5 billion content budget for this
year, Netflix is willing to outbid most any [sic] local TV network or
streaming service.”11

It seems simple, in hindsight. Netflix returned to the same subscription

media model that drove early newspapers. But instead of succumbing to the
temptation of advertising, which would have put the company’s financial
incentives at odds with its customers’ desires, Netflix kept the two aligned.
The company committed to delivering the best entertainment experience
possible for its customers, and that meant not interrupting that experience
with ads.
Their customers responded by shifting their viewing time to Netflix. In
February 2017, CNBC reported that Netflix viewers consume 116 million
hours of programming every day, completely ad-free.12 From a marketer’s
perspective, that’s 116 million hours each day when their customers go
dark, due to Netflix alone.
Netflix inspired an industry. HBO NOW and HBO GO, over-the-top 13
services launched by HBO in 2015, drove audience viewership for Game of
Thrones alone to over twenty-five million people in 2016.14 Spotify had
fifty million ad-free subscribers for its premium music service in March
2017, after adding twenty million subscribers in the year prior.15 Apple
signed up twenty-seven million subscribers to its ad-free music service in
its first two years of operation and was adding more than one million
subscribers monthly.16 YouTube introduced an ad-free option in September
2015.
Even Netflix’s rival Hulu, which launched a competitive streaming
service one year after Netflix, has seen the light. Hulu was created as a joint
venture among 21st Century Fox, NBCUniversal, and Walt Disney Co.
Unlike Netflix, Hulu was established to move the traditional network
advertising model online. Hulu charged a lower subscription fee than
Netflix and showed commercials to users before and during programming.
But by June 2015, the market had spoken. Hulu’s audience numbered
nine million, just 14 percent of Netflix’s total audience at the time. Hulu
announced it was evaluating options.
Three months later, Hulu capitulated and launched an ad-free service,
for just $2 more per month. The company sent a note to former subscribers,
thanking them for showing Hulu the way, and inviting them back to Hulu,
this time for an ad-free experience.

CBS learned a similar lesson. In November 2014, CBS launched All

Access, an over-the-top subscription service that included interrupt
advertising. In August 2016, the company capitulated to consumer demand
and started offering an ad-free version for just $4 more per month.17
HITTING ROCK BOTTOM: THE DECLINE OF TRADITIONAL
MEDIA

On January 22, 1996, the New York Times launched on the Internet,
providing readers around the world with access to news the night of
publication. Circulation of US newspapers fell 37 percent from 1990 to
2015 as consumers moved online, with the fastest drop in subscribers
coming in 2005.18
By 2006, marketers recognized the trend. Over the next four years, they
cut newspaper advertising spending by half, and it has continued to drop
every year since. Newspapers have responded by trimming costs,
sacrificing much of the content that their subscribers love.
 Slow connectivity protected broadcasters for a time. Consumers
remained captive if they wanted to watch long-form programming. But
today, the Netflix phenomenon is taking a heavy toll. Traditional television
advertising viewership began a rapid decline in 2010.19
Television advertising is starting to go the way of the newspaper as
marketers adapt to shrinking broadcast audiences.20 A decline in ad
spending, felt precipitously in print in 2007, began to hammer broadcast TV
in 2015.21
BANNER BLINDNESS AND BLOCKING

The consumer revolt against advertising is not limited to the adoption of

streaming video and music services, however. Since 2008, marketers have
been tracking a phenomenon called banner blindness, in which readers of a
web page literally look around ads when browsing a page. Eye tracking
studies, which use technology to monitor what part of a web page users
actually view, initially identified the phenomenon.22
A study by Infolinks found that “after being asked to recall the last
display ad they saw, only 14% of users could name the company, the brand,
or the product, suggesting that brands are wasting millions of dollars in ads
that consumers don’t remember.”23
And then the news for marketers got even worse. In September 2015,
PageFair and Adobe announced that 198 million people were using ad-
blocking software on their desktop devices globally. The study found that
ad-blocking adoption is growing at 41 percent annually. One month later,
Apple introduced an iOS software upgrade allowing Apple mobile devices
to support ad blocking as well. The study estimated that $41.4 billion in
advertisements would be blocked worldwide in 2016. A new front had
opened in the popular revolt against interruption and emotional
manipulation.

Eye tracking studies show readers ignore ads.

The rapid decline of interrupt advertising created a crisis that hit media
companies first. As consumers ignore, block, and pay to avoid advertising,
brands have begun to cut advertising budgets. The resulting drop in ad
revenues has left media business models upside down.
 The second phase of the crisis will strike brands in nearly every industry.
Marketers, dependent on advertising as the primary way to connect with
their customers, are suddenly unable to reach them. Their brands are
already starting to fade to dark, but many CMOs have yet to realize it.

THE MARKETING CRISIS

For three centuries, most companies have used the same approach to reach,
acquire, and retain customers: They advertised to them. The approach was
simple and consistent. Marketers identified the news and entertainment
stories that their customers enjoyed most, then interrupted those stories with
ads describing their products and services. By showing those ads repeatedly
to customers at scale, they built growing brand awareness. If they created
ads that connected emotionally with their customers, brand awareness
became brand affinity.
Today’s advertising crisis also created an unprecedented marketing
crisis. Advertising has been a tried-and-true method to reach audiences
since Ben Franklin published newspapers. As consumers block, ignore and
pay to avoid advertisements, marketers must scramble to find a new way to
reach their customers. Brands that fail to connect will surrender to
challenger brands that discover the secret.
 2

MARKETING, A STORY OF
DECEPTION

Not only do consumers object to interruption, but they hate being played.
In the early decades of advertising, word of mouth traveled slowly,
allowing snake oil salesmen to make false claims with impunity… until,
that is, customers sickened by their cures horsewhipped them out of town.
As the telegraph and then the telephone ricocheted reputations around
the country, fake goods gave way to more trustworthy products, and false
claims segued into the conventional braggings and promisings that still fill
contemporary ads. Today’s elixirs promise whiter teeth, thinner waistlines,
and fewer wrinkles, with “laboratory studies” to back them up. In short,
marketing became more honest, but not so honest that today’s consumers
believe whatever they’re told.
In a world of immediate, global information flow, exaggerated,
underperforming claims backfire. Consumers compare marketing promises
with their real-world experience, and when the two don’t line up, they mock
the brands that played them with scathing product reviews, public tweets,
and Facebook posts. Through decades of false promises, marketers have
trained consumers to distrust advertising.
 Don’t take our word for it. Since the 1960s, comScore/ARSgroup has
gauged the efficacy of advertising by measuring its impact on “share of
choice.”1 Today its research finds that advertising overall is rapidly losing
effect, and when aimed at millennials, it’s virtually useless.

THE TWO TYPES OF MARKETING DECEPTION

Historically, marketers have driven sales through two types of pretense, one
rational and the other emotional. This chapter looks at each approach, why
it worked in the past, and why it fails today.

1. Rational Communication

Classical marketing theory asserts this premise: Human beings are rational
decision makers who, when faced with an important choice, gather relevant
facts, weigh alternatives, then choose the best option. Therefore, to
persuade consumers, present your claims in a factual, logical, scientific
manner.
That’s the theory. In reality, what advertising passes off as logic is in fact
rhetoric. Rhetoric imitates science by presenting evidence and drawing a
conclusion, but the difference is that science weighs all evidence, both for
and against a theorem; rhetoric slants its argument by laying out only the
evidence that supports its claim, while ignoring or refuting every point that
contradicts it. In other words, science seeks the truth; rhetoric seeks the win.
Marketing, in essence, is a public forum for rhetorical debate, a platform to
persuade the consumer that one product’s features outperform another’s.
Ivory’s classic ad executes this method to perfection. Procter & Gamble
(P&G) offered a laundry soap bar that would float instead of sinking in the
tub. Marketers explained the advantage in their ad: It saved time and
frustration for people who otherwise would have to search around the
bottom of a murky tub when they dropped a competitor’s bar. Other soaps
may have cleaned better (that is, after all, the purpose of soap) but Ivory, of
course, never mentioned that.
 Do you remember where you learned to use rhetorical persuasion? How
to argue using inductive and deductive logic? Writing junior high school
essays. Do you remember your seventh-grade syllogism lesson?

“All kings are tall.

He is a king.
Therefore, he is tall.”

In the Ivory case:

“The best soap floats.

Our soap floats.
Therefore, our soap is best.”

For example: Business-to-business marketers often print up a checklist

of product features so the client can compare what’s on offer against the
competition. With never-failing regularity, the marketer’s product scores
tops on every feature on the list, whereas the competitor’s product leaves
blanks. Amazing.
As the savvy prospective buyer scans the chart, he knows two things: (1)
The company self-selected only those categories in which its brand scores
best. (2) Categories in which the product scored worse than the competition
were left off the list.
Now more than ever, marketing via rhetorical argument provokes
skepticism in the mind of the customer and a negative attitude toward your
product or service.
This isn’t to say that people distrust all facts, just facts used to persuade
a sale. And that distrust directly affects what they are prepared to pay for
what’s being sold.
Dan Ariely, James B. Duke Professor of Psychology and Behavioral
Economics at the Fuqua School of Business and director of the Center for
Advanced Hindsight,2 demonstrated this skepticism in an experiment with
would-be stereo buyers. Ariely compared how two groups of audiophiles
responded to a music system. Members of one group read what they
thought was an overview by the manufacturer, and the second group read
the exact same material, but believed it was by Consumer Reports. He
writes:

All of the participants took half an hour to listen to a composition by

J. S. Bach and evaluate the stereo system. How powerful was the
bass? How clear was the treble? Were the controls easy to use? Were
there any sound distortions? And finally, how much would they pay
for the system?

As it turned out, the participants liked the stereo much more if they were
told that the information they read came from the unbiased Consumer
Reports. They also said they would pay, on average, about $407 for the
system, far more than the $282 offered by those who read the
manufacturer’s brochure. Mistrust of marketing rhetoric runs so deep that it
colors our perception of products—even in the face of firsthand
experience.3
If the inductive logic of rhetoric delivers suboptimized marketing
results, why do businesses still gravitate toward it?
First, education. We were taught to start an essay with an opening thesis:
“I’m going to prove this.” Then, point by point, we’d prove it. Finally, we’d
write a conclusion: “I have proved this.” Today we use that same format at
work. A PowerPoint presentation is just a junior high school essay with
special effects.
Second, the prestige of science. Business leaders strive for scientific
planning and choice making, for predictability and precision. All to the
good. But in truth, business is not science. Despite access to massive sets of
data, marketing decisions will always call for as much instinct as strategy.
The fundamental problems never change: how to capture attention, hold it,
and reward it; in short, how to turn people on, not off.

2. Emotional Communication

At the heart of an effective creative philosophy is the belief that

nothing is so powerful as an insight into human nature, what
 compulsions drive a man, what instincts dominate his action, even
though his language so often camouflages what really motivates him.
—Bill Bernbach

Post–World War II America exploded with optimism. Product debuts

spiked, TV viewership skyrocketed, and the television ad fast became the
most powerful way to influence consumers. But as more and more
commercials jammed the airwaves, claims and counterclaims blurred
consumer judgment. Which toothpaste actually brightened teeth best?
The Doyle Dane Bernbach (DDB) agency thrived because Bill Bernbach
and his partners pioneered a new connection with consumers. DDB steered
clients away from rhetorical praise for their product’s features. Instead they
set the obvious ethical questions aside and aimed powerful emotional
appeals directly at the consumer’s subconscious desires and needs.
According to one biography, Bernbach spoke to clients “. . . not of
advertising, but the art of persuasion. To persuade the consumer, the
creators of ads needed to touch people’s basic, unchanging instincts—their
‘obsessive drive to survive, to be admired, to succeed, to love, to take care
of their own.’”4
The first step to mastering emotional manipulation is to realize that there
are only two primary emotions, pleasure and pain.5 Each, however, comes
in many varieties: deeply felt positives such as happiness, peace, love, joy,
as well as the sensory delights of beauty and comfort, versus profound
negatives of grief, anxiety, dread, fear, loneliness, along with physical
miseries that range from toothaches to migraines. In chapter 6, we’ll look at
how storified marketing moves a consumer’s deep emotions, but for the
balance of this chapter, let’s focus on the surface of physical feelings.
At the sensory level, something either feels good or hurts. An appetizer
may delight your taste buds or repulse them. But if experience is only
sensory, why do we feel more pleasure when we look at an authentic work
of art than a copy?6 If the sensory perception were the same, why does the
thrill we feel standing before van Gogh’s The Starry Night run far deeper
than the glum scrutiny of a forgery?
As Paul Bloom, professor of psychology and behavioral science at Yale,
explains in his book How Pleasure Works, “What matters most is not the
world as it appears to our senses. Rather, the enjoyment (or suffering) we
get from something derives from what we think that thing is.”7 Bloom
claims that we are essentialists. Our response is conditioned by our beliefs
of what things really are, what their essential nature is.8
In 2008, researchers at Caltech studied the link between the price of
wine and how much people enjoyed it. Volunteers in the study were offered
wines priced at $10, $35, $45, and $90 per bottle. First they compared the
$35 bottle with the $45, then the $10 bottle with the $90 bottle. Participants
reported in both cases that the more expensive wines tasted better than the
cheaper ones. What’s more, the pleasure GAP they reported was greater
when they compared the $10 and $90 bottles.
In actuality, the $10 and $90 bottles contained the exact same wine.
Previous researchers had discovered the relationship between high price
and the perception of high quality and wrote it off as snobbery. But the
Caltech study used an fMRI (functional magnetic resonance imaging)
device to observe the volunteers’ brain activity. The imaging revealed that
when the participants drank what they believed to be a more expensive
wine, the region of the brain linked to pleasure lit up.9 It wasn’t snobbery.
They actually enjoyed greater pleasure from the wines they believed were
more expensive.
The same applies to physical pain. At Harvard University, Kurt Gray
and Daniel Wegner administered electric shocks to study participants. The
study paired forty-eight subjects with a partner in a separate room who had
the option to either play an audible tone for them or administer an electric
shock.
Gray and Wegner separated the participants into two groups. In the first,
participants were told that their partner had chosen to shock them, and
moments later they got a jolt. In the second, the participants were told that
their partner had chosen to play a tone sound, but then, as if by accident,
they, too, received an electric shock. The same voltage was used in both
groups.
The finding: Participants who believed they were shocked intentionally
felt the shocks more painfully, and the pain lingered throughout the study.
Those who believed that the shocks were unintentional experienced less
pain and a quicker recovery.10
For both pleasure and pain, the meaning of the perception, not the
sensory experience alone, determines how much pleasure or pain people
experience. Because pleasure and pain are great motivators, creating these
experiences within an ad promised to be marketing’s most powerful tool.
Unfortunately, however, this insight devolved into the techniques of
seduction and coercion. Seduction entices someone to do something with
the promise of pleasure; coercion persuades them to act with the threat of
pain.
Consider the ad on the following page: As you look at it, does the taste
of Bud really matter? Sex sells.
Fear also sells. Political ads coerce with fear of terrorist attacks, fear of
losing your job, your health care, your income. Home security companies
coerce with images of burglars jimmying your windows. Tech companies
turn threats of hacks, viruses, and data theft into sales.11
Emotion-targeted tactics have paid off since Bill Bernbach championed
the “Mad Men” revolution. So why not stick with tradition?
Why not? Because today these ploys not only fail, they offend.12 People
with money to spend are savvy consumers of media. After exposure to tens
of thousands of commercials, they can smell seduction and coercion before
the logo hits the screen. That’s why nearly two-thirds of millennials use ad-
blocking software to cut manipulators out of their lives.13
 What’s left? If emotional manipulation angers people, and if rhetorical
persuasion strikes them as BS, how can you connect with your customers?
How can you solve your marketing crisis?

STORY

Stories are equipment for living.

—Kenneth Burke

We advocate a solution that’s tens of thousands of years old, the mode of

communication that best fits the mind, that best connects one mind with
another, that wraps the clarity of a rational message inside an emotional
package and delivers it with sticking power: story.
A well-told story captures our attention, holds us in suspense, and pays
off with a meaningful emotional experience. Emotional because we
empathize with its characters; meaningful because the actions of our
protagonist deliver insights into human nature.
The word itself, story, confuses many marketers. Some, for example, use
the words content and story as if they were interchangeable. But as we’ll
discover, that’s like conflating paint in a can with a masterpiece on a wall.
Many assume that because they’ve seen and heard a lifetime of stories,
they could easily create one. But that’s like thinking you can compose
music because you’ve been to concerts.
Many hear the word story and imagine a tale told to children at bedtime
or yarns traded over beers at a bar. Those are indeed stories, designed
simply to entertain. At the other end of the spectrum, great stories have the
power to change how humanity sees reality. Storified truths have built
civilizations and religions that billions follow. Novels like Uncle Tom’s
Cabin created political movements that led the way to war. TV series like
All in the Family and Will & Grace called out bigotry and paved the way for
LGBT justice. And as we’ll demonstrate in Part 3, thanks to storified
marketing, innovative brands can tell stories that change how their
consumers view the world, and blow past their competition when they do.
In short, story is the ultimate I.T. I in that storytelling demands
information—a wide and deep knowledge of human nature and its
relationship with the social and physical realms. T in that a well-told story
demands skillful execution of its inner technology, its mechanisms of
action/reaction, changing value charges, roles, conflicts, turning points,
emotional dynamics, and much more. A craft underpins the art.
Story structure, as we’ll see in the next chapter, is intrinsic to the human
mind. Why then do we need to learn its craft? Isn’t storytelling natural? By
the same token, children can sketch stick figures. Isn’t drawing also
natural? Yes, both are, but to achieve excellence, authors and painters move
beyond instinct to experiment and master their craft anew.
After centuries of struggle, the mathematics of perspective, for example,
was finally discovered by Renaissance artists seeking to perfect realism. Art
schools have taught this technique ever since because if we expected young
painters to discover the secrets to perspective on their own, it would take
their entire careers to achieve what they can learn in a single course. Most,
in fact, would never discover it.
Similarly, a form shapes story and a craft executes the telling. If you
study story technique, you can learn to hook, hold, and reward your
audience’s attention, as do the finest of films, plays, and novels. If you
refine these skills, you can build bonds of loyalty between your brand and
your clients. And finally, if you master storified marketing, as did the likes
of Apple, Red Bull, Dove, and GE, your brand will, like theirs, resonate
around the world.
 PART 2

STORY CREATION

Story: The evolutionary adaptation to

consciousness
 3

THE EVOLUTION OF STORY

The target of all business strategy is the human mind, that biological engine
built by evolution to constantly create and consume stories. Storified
communication is not just another selling technique, but the key to
capturing, engaging, and rewarding customer attention. As research has
repeatedly shown, when marketing storifies its messages, consumers listen.
In the age of distraction, attention caught and held is the marketer’s single
most valuable asset.1
To bring home story’s unique ability to capture and hold audience
attention, this chapter traces the evolution of story from day one. What
follows is a speculative saga that spans hundreds of thousands of years and
blends multiple scientific interpretations of human fossils2 into a three-act
adventure that begins with the birth of consciousness. It builds as the mind
battles for survival, and climaxes with the triumph of storified thought.

ACT I: THE FIRST HUMAN THOUGHT

The nervous systems of billions upon billions of creatures evolved into

greater and greater complexity over hundreds upon hundreds of millions of
years. Then beginning two to three million years ago, severe planetary
changes forced the central nervous systems of anthropoid bipeds to add
brain matter, gray and white, at an average rate of one milliliter every three
thousand years.3
The front-most portion of the prefrontal cortex known as Brodmann area
10 sits just behind the forehead. During human evolution, its six cortical
layers expanded enormously in both size and reticulation, forcing the skull
to grow wide and high. Over time, mutation by mutation, the hominid
cerebrum gained one full liter of mass and became so tumescent, so
structurally complex, its hundred billion cells so interconnected, that the
brain, straining to the breaking point, erupted with the first human thought:
I am.
The silent awareness of “Me” suddenly transformed a brain into a mind
and turned an animal human. Animals react to the objects around them, but
the human brain turned itself into an object. Consciousness, in effect, split
itself in two.4
Self-awareness is like a mild schizophrenia. When you look at yourself
inside yourself and think the thought You idiot!—who is angry with whom?
When you’re pleased with yourself, who pats whose back? When you talk
to yourself, who listens? How do these inner transactions work?
It goes something like this: Behind your active mind, at the irreducible
crux of your humanity, an awareness observes your every thought and deed.
This core self is the “proprietor,” so to speak, of your mind. As if looking
through an inner prism, this subjective self splits off a version of itself, and
then watches this doppelgänger think, choose, and act in the world. The
core self then judges its outer self, positively or negatively, seeking to
change its thoughts and behavior.
The core self’s observation of itself, strange though it may seem, is both
natural and persistent. Tonight, as you dream, you will become a self-aware
audience of one, watching yourself perform in your dreams as if you were
an actor in an oddly unrealistic film.
Awake, you’re doing it now. If you were to ask yourself Who am I?, a
sense of “Me” would rise up from the bedrock of your being. This
awareness of “me-as-owner-of-myself” hovers behind your foreground
consciousness, observing your waking thoughts, watching you read this,
and noting how you’re doing. Don’t bother to turn and look. You cannot
face yourself within yourself, but you know that “Me” is always there,
always mindful, always watching.5
 When self-awareness invaded the first human mind, it brought with it a
sudden, sharp sense of isolation. The cost of self-consciousness is a life
spent essentially alone, at a distance from all other living things, even your
fellow human creatures. With that first, primordial I am moment, the mind
felt not only alone but also in terror. For self-awareness brought another,
even more frightening discovery, unique to humanity: time. The first human
being suddenly found herself alone and adrift on the river of time.

ACT II: THE SECOND HUMAN THOUGHT

In the wake of I am came the second human thought:… and someday my

time in time will end. Not long after the birth of self-awareness, time-
awareness flooded the mind, bringing with it dread. Fear is an emotion we
feel when we don’t know what’s going to happen; dread is the emotion that
grips us when we know what’s going to happen and there’s nothing we can
do to stop it. And one dread is certain: Our days will stop like an unwound
watch.
Prior to self-awareness, our Pliocene ancestors, like all animals, lived in
the corporeal comfort of a perpetual present. But when the sense of I am
separated self-awareness from its primal instincts, visions of a painful
future streaked through the newly minted human mind.6 What’s more, the
mind discovered that not only is the future in doubt, but the surfaces of
people and things cannot be trusted; that nothing is what it seems.
What seems is the sensory veneer of what we see, what we hear, what
people say, what people do. What is hides beneath what seems. For truth is
not what happens, but how and why what happens happens. With neither
science nor religion to explain life’s unseen causalities, the suddenly self-
aware mind must have roiled in confusion as chaos, enigma,
meaninglessness, and brevity made life unlivable. The mind had to find a
way to make sense out of existence.7

ACT III: THE STORY-MAKING MIND

That’s when story rode to the rescue. Gene by gene, natural selection
implanted the mental mechanisms of story-making into our DNA. As David
Buss puts it, story-making is “. . . an evolved psychological mechanism, a
set of procedures within the organism designed to take a particular slice of
information and transform it via decision rules into output that historically
has helped with the solution to an adaptive problem. A psychological
mechanism exists in current organisms because it led, on average, to the
successful solution for that organism’s ancestors of a specific adaptive
problem.”8 In the case of human beings, the problem was chaos and the
dread of death.
The storifying mechanisms of the mind work in this way: Throughout
the day, the body absorbs millions of bits of raw, sensory stimuli.
Somewhere below the level of consciousness, the mind sorts through this
mass and imposes decision rules that sort the relevant from the irrelevant. It
ignores 99 percent of all data and concentrates on the 1 percent that grabs
attention.
And what grabs attention? Change. As long as conditions remain secure
and constant, we pursue the business of life, but come change, and we’re
suddenly under threat or surprised by good luck. In either case, we react.
Subconscious survival systems kick into gear—chief among them story-
making. Instantly, the core self triggers the mind to storify this event.
The brain flexes its storifying muscles in Brodmann area 10. Here, the
past flows into the future as the mind recalls previous events and projects
possible outcomes. The mind compares prior happenings of a similar kind
with its current experience, so it knows what to do now and what to do in
the future should this ever happen again.9
The mind, of course, does not convert every trivial change to story.
Instead evolution has taught us to focus on meaningful, dynamic change.
Storified thought interprets every event in terms of its core value. In
story creation, however, the word value does not refer to mono-concepts
such as success, truth, loyalty, love, or freedom. Those words name only
half a value. Dynamic events affect our lives not as singularities but as
binaries of positive/negative value charge. They pivot our lives around
experiences of success/failure, truth/lie, loyalty/betrayal, love/hate,
right/wrong, rich/poor, life/death, winning/losing, courage/cowardice,
power/weakness, freedom/slavery, excitement/boredom, and many more.
Values pump the lifeblood of story.
 For an event to be meaningful, the mind must sense that the charge of at
least one value has undergone change. The reason is obvious: If the charge
of a value at stake in a situation does not change, what happens is a trivial
activity of no significance. But when a value’s charge changes from positive
to negative or negative to positive (for instance, from love to hate or hate to
love; from winning to losing or losing to winning), the event becomes
meaningful and emotions flow. Because a well-told story wraps its telling
around emotionally charged values, its meaning becomes marked in our
memory.10
This is why a fictional event can be more memorable than an actual
happening. Well-told stories implant patterns of possible behaviors as if
they were the memories of actual experiences. These become matrices for
future actions. The confused values in real life often make events
forgettable, while the clarity and power of a fictional emotional charge
cement it in memory as a powerful future reference point.11
To make sense out of life, the story-making mind strings meaning-
charged events through time, connecting and unifying them by cause and
effect. At story’s end, meaning is not only understood rationally but also felt
emotionally.
The form of story, at its simplest, goes like this: As the telling opens, the
central character’s life, as expressed in its core value (happiness/sadness,
for example), is in relative balance. But then something happens that upsets
this balance and decisively changes the core value’s charge one way or the
other. He could, for example, fall in love (positive) or out of love
(negative). The character then acts to restore life’s balance, and from that
moment on a sequence of events, linked by cause and effect, moves through
time, progressively and dynamically swinging the core value back and forth
from positive to negative, negative to positive. At climax, the story’s final
event changes the core value’s charge absolutely and the character’s life
returns to balance.
The evolving mind’s mastery of storied perception gave it the means to
streamline the overwhelming deluge of actuality into a manageable,
efficient, human-size reality. Its story-structured processes imposed order,
unity, and meaning on a chaotic, discordant, meaningless existence. Thanks
to storied thought, humanity learned how to survive with purpose and
balance. As Kenneth Burke put it, story equips us to live.12
THE EIGHT POWERS THAT PROPEL STORY

In order to storify thought, the mind evolved and perfected eight powerful
faculties. When used in concert, they interconnect our impressions of
people, places, and things scattered through our past, present, and future
into the coherent assemblage we call reality.

1. Self-Awareness: The power to distinguish the mind’s subjective, core

self from its objective, public self and observe the outer self as if it were a
separate personality.
Self-awareness, as we noted above, came with the first human thought.
Although time changes the objective self, the core self feels that it lives
unchanged and outside of time. Nonetheless, “Me” also realizes that it
cannot exist without its objective self, and therefore dreads its loss.

Over time, storied thinking reshaped perception; the mind found

meaning in existence and belief in life after death. With purpose in one
hand and immortality in the other, humanity finally took its place in time.

2. Other-Awareness: The power to look behind the eyes of another

person and sense within him a consciousness very much like your own.
With other-perception, your mind infers that whatever happens inside
itself also happens inside the minds of others. Strong other-awareness
becomes empathy—a combination of identification and insight such that
when something happens to another person, it feels as if it happens to
you.13

For the storyteller, other-awareness guides the creation of the characters

that make the choices and take the actions that carry out the story.

3. Memory: The power to store and recall experience.

The past makes the future in this way: Memory builds an understanding
of people and the world by recording patterns of experience, stacking them
one on top of another by what they have in common, and then telling itself,
“This is how the world works.”
The mind then uses these patterns from the past in an effort to control
the future by taking actions designed to make history repeat itself.14 But
often, at critical moments, our memory-based sense of probability explodes
when a tried-and-true action triggers a wholly unexpected effect, leaving us
feeling that when it really matters, memory betrays us.
As we will see in upcoming chapters, these violations of probability
become the turning points that propel all stories.

4. Intelligence: The power to extract knowledge from both formal

learning and everyday experience, and then apply deductive, inductive, and
causal logics to reason to factual, truthful conclusions.
The finest intelligence also spots fallacies and refutes them. In
storytelling, knowledge generates content—the setting and its cast of
characters.

5. Imagination: The power to reshape reality into undreamed-of

possibilities.
When knowledge becomes time-worn, the mind loses energy. But even
the most calcified knowledge, stirred with imagination, can renew itself,
becoming flexible and life giving.
In like fashion, the same old story, told over and over, risks emptiness
and boredom. So story-makers call upon imagination to give their tellings
limitless variations.

6. Insight: The power to see through appearances and perceive inner

causalities.
An insightful mind reads surface signs and then senses the hidden forces
that move within and cause things to happen. Data, for example, only
measures the outer results of what has changed; insight discovers how and
why what has changed has changed.
The storyteller, as we will see, uses this keen perspective to show us a
world we think we understand, but then cracks open reality to first surprise
us, then deliver a rush of insight into the hows and whys of that world and
its characters. A lifetime of story-driven insights civilizes human beings,
builds institutions, and makes culture viable.

7. Correlation: The power to create.

The correlating mind takes two things it already knows, and then seeks a
hidden connection, a third thing that joins the two in a way no one else has
ever seen before. This analogical logic is the essence of creativity. The
discovery of the third thing fuses two known things into something utterly
new—not just an innovation or refinement, but something unexpected and
unprecedented.
Throughout history, master storytellers have constantly correlated new
content with new forms in previously unimagined ways. But no matter how
creative and revolutionary their tellings, the best stories always make a
human sense, always shine a new light into human needs and human
desires.

8. Self-Expression: The power to perform.

The self-aware mind harmonizes these distinct powers to thread its way
through multidimensional, multileveled, ongoing realities, piecing causes to
their effects, weaving people and events into story form. Telling begins in
one mind, but it ends in another. None of the mind’s gifts would matter if
the stories it creates could not be performed for other minds to experience.
From the earliest, talented storytellers performed three kinds of stories
around the fire: action epics of hunting, combat, and survival against the
elements; tales of the supernatural powers that control nature; and myths of
immortality in an afterlife realm. The first became the foundation legends
of civilizations, the second made sense out of time and space, and the third
founded the world’s religions. Together these stories taught the tribe how to
live in this world and prepare for the next.

THE STORY-POWERED MIND

The mind builds stories to bridge the gap between itself and the universe,
between itself and the past, present, and future. Story form imposes order
on chaos; it penetrates the enigma of the seems to express the cause and
effect of the is; it unifies events to bring meaning out of meaninglessness.
Knowledge expressed in story form gathers other human beings around its
themes, uniting communities and building cultures.
So, in the marketing context, the takeaway is this: Storified
communication is the most powerful form of messaging because story fits
the mind; story fits the mind because the mind converts actuality into story
in the first place. It’s a tautology. As Hamlet says, “There is nothing either
good or bad, but thinking makes it so.”
This is why story alone represents a way out of today’s marketing crisis
—once you master story’s structure and how telling works.
 4

THE DEFINITION OF STORY

To master storified marketing, CMOs need solid working answers to

fundamental questions: “What exactly is a story? What are its primal
components? How do these elements interact within a story? How do I
create a powerful marketing story? How will this story create and convey
the meaning I want to express? How does this story play out within my
consumer’s mind? Influence her feelings? Guide her choices? And most
important, how will this story motivate my customer to a positive,
profitable action?”
Story, like art and music, is a word you think you understand until you
try to define it. You might wonder why. After all, you have heard a lifetime
of stories; you can cite hundreds of examples; you tell stories every day to
your friends, co-workers, and self. You assume you know what story is, and
yet your definition seems ambiguous at best.
Reference books offer little help. Consider this from the Oxford English
Dictionary: “An account of imaginary or real people and events told for
entertainment.” For the working marketer, a soft definition like that is
beyond use. No one can work with a tool if he doesn’t know what it is, what
it does, and how to fix it when it breaks.
To make matters worse, Roget’s Thesaurus runs thick with confusing
metonyms like account and misnomers like journey. When a marketer
mistakes one of these softer versions for the real thing, he mistakenly