Last week, I posted about Seth Godin's book All Marketers Are Liars, and I've been thinking about stories, how they work in everyday life and what this means for marketing ever since.

Understanding the World

A story is a series of connected events or ideas that we tell ourselves in order to establish order and spot patterns in an inherently chaotic world. One of the primary reasons people tell themselves stories is to connect cause and effect, and to make predictions about the world around them.

So, to take a simple example, if a vase is perched on the edge of a table, it falls and breaks, the sequence of events — the story — is obvious. Without the ability to put this into a narrative, it would just be a series of individual events — a broken vase, a falling vase, a vase on the table — that didn't have a connection.

People tell stories (about how a vase broke in this case) in order to process the world and to make it intelligible.

Stories are also a sort of mental shorthand; instead of having to re-learn everything every time, we recognize similar patterns and think that the "story" will run much the same way again. In the example above, if we saw the vase fall and break once, and then, in a different situation, see a broken vase next to a table, we might guess that it also fell off a table.

Part of the power of a story is its ability to link into previously established expectations.

Lists

Humans are typically not very good at remembering isolated information, but can remember it as part of a narrative. If people are presented with a series of facts, they're unlikely to take them in. Whereas, if they are part of a story, they make sense and are more persuasive.

A list of facts might be:

Acme Stores
10% off
Mention code Hqwdasg123
code good until Dec 31
Stores in New York only

A better story (with a coherent narrative) would be:

"Acme is offering an end-of-the-year special in all of its New York stores! Mention this ad, and we'll give you 10% off."

When trying to communicate information, if it's told as a story, it's much more intelligible and memorable.

Details

Stories can also be used to help people think through a process you want them to follow.

A call to action works this way. "Click here to learn more!" is really a story that says "If you click on this link, it will take you to a new page where you will learn more about the product you have been looking at."

This is powerful and it works because it gives people a cause and effect framework, or narrative, to move forward with.

Story Format

It's not enough just to tell a story, though.

At an old job, we would sometimes have extra media that needed to be filled and went preferentially to certain companies as a value add.

If I called up a company and said that we had some space and would they like it, they took it about 50% of the time. They were busy people and couldn't always get things together.

However, if I called them up and said, "We have this media open. I thought of you; we can give it to you as a value add. The only thing is, I have to have an answer today, otherwise it will go to another company."

The success rate was more like 80%. It was partially the urgency that got people to focus. It was probably also a question of status and winning; they were beating out another company to a prize spot. How I told the story (both times completely honestly) re-framed how they thought about their answer.

Godin's Argument

To tie this back into All marketers Are Liars, Godin's argument is that marketers should tell a really good story — one that attracts people and that people instantly connect with and understand — and this will help set a product apart and sell it. A really good story is also "sticky"; it stays in people's minds.

For instance, Apple has told a very persuasive story that their products are cool, and this has helped to make them successful.

Apple's story helps people slot the products into a category ("cool"). Once this is established, people don't have to re-analyze the products each time they see them; they already know what to expect.

The other powerful part of Apple's story is that because the products are cool, the effect is that the people who use them are also cool. While it doesn't stand up to rational analysis, it works in emotional terms.

(There's a Marketing Genius post that talks about the 5 drivers that sell a product - money, looks, popularity, health and sex. Apple is tapping into at least one of these, and arguably more.)

Conclusion

As I noted in the earlier post, I find Godin's conclusion about the power of large stories to market products convincing. I think he's pointing to something much more fundamental about how people think, though.

For people to follow and understand something, it's more effective for it to be a story than a series of facts. The story can be anything from the big marketing story behind a new product to the small stories we tell to direct people through a website or convinve them to sign up for a piece of media.

The stories give people a framework that means they don't have to analyze every action. Instead they can move forward with the narrative.

Not everything boils down to a story, of course. People have other ways of dealing with the world; but stories are powerful.