Creativity or Curiosity: Discovering Stories Worth Telling
Creativity or Curiosity: Discovering Stories Worth Telling
A week or so ago, I met a new client for coffee. We connected when they were referred to Argonaut by one of our oldest and most loyal clients. So, there was already a pretty solid foundation of trust. At the same time, this client was new to the idea of storytelling in marketing. They wanted to know how storytelling worked and how I could be sure that they had a story to tell.
When we first launched Argonaut Productions, we spent a lot of time explaining the difference between what we do and what clients had come to expect from a marketing agency. Over the past 13 years, we’ve watched “storytelling” move from the margins to the center. Now a business is more likely to know that storytelling is something they want—even when they’re not sure how to be a storyteller.
“Everything Starts With A Story.”
~ Joseph Campbell
Wherever you go for expert marketing advice, you’re sure to find somebody promoting storytelling as the solution to all your problems. Maybe you think it’s just the latest trend and it will pass. Maybe you’re curious but you’re not sure how to tell the story of your organization. It’s okay to be skeptical. It’s wise to ask questions.
The new client that I met for coffee was somewhere between skepticism and uncertainty. As I answered their questions, they began to see the benefits of storytelling more clearly. They started to get excited about the process of finding their story and the best ways to tell it. Some of you might be interested to hear more of our discussion. I’ll do my best to tell the story below.
Beyond The Buzz: Tell Stories That Build Community
One important side-effect of storytelling coming into vogue in marketing and advertising is that now there’s a real demand for proof. When there’s money involved, decision-makers want to see the evidence before they take the plunge. And so, over the past few years, we’ve gotten a lot of great data from a lot of studies that show how effective storytelling is as a marketing tactic.
Is it a little bit ironic that we have to use facts and figure to prove that storytelling works better than facts and figures? In a way, I guess it is. But copywriters and other creatives in the marketing world have always known that decisions get made on emotion. They also know that when you provide evidence to back up your emotional appeal, you give somebody what they need to feel certain about their choice.
“It’s a complicated and noisy world, and we’re not going to get a chance to get people to remember much about us. So, we have to be really clear about what we want them to know.”
~ Steve Jobs
When you get right down to it, marketing is a competition for attention. The competition has gotten fiercer as everything has been adapted to the digital transition. While a jingle or a tagline puts cutting through the noise and winning the competition first, a storyteller knows it’s just as important to ask what you’ll do with someone’s attention once you have it.
The old features-and-benefits approach to advertising aims for conversions. It’s transactional. It hopes to persuade a buyer to make a choice. In contrast, a storytelling approach aims for a commitment. It’s relationship-based. It knows that individual listeners become audiences and audiences become community when you create and communicate a reality that can connect them.
So, when you choose the storytelling approach, you’re making a choice to build a community around your business. The stories you tell invite the audience to make a commitment to your culture and your core values. When listeners see themselves in the characters you present and the tales you tell, they’re more likely to act in response to your call.
Tell The Story Your Audience Needs To Hear
Let’s go back to the new client, the meeting over coffee, and their questions. Once they understood the difference between storytelling and other marketing tactics, they wanted to know more about how Argonaut could make it happen for them.
The short answer to “how” we work with clients to find stories to tell and ways to tell them is that we have a Discovery Process. But that didn’t really satisfy this client’s curiosity until I went into the details of what the process is, how it works, and why it’s so important.
The “WHAT” of Storytelling
A brand’s story is the foundation that supports all of the marketing and advertising work that gets done. If you get the story right, you can tinker with social media ads to get more shares or email subject lines to get more opens. But at the end of the day, you’ll be confident that your house is a home. In other words, when you get their attention, you’ll know exactly what to do with it.
The story a business tells its audience should define the shared community that connects them. Your story shouldn’t focus on what you do or how you do it. It should focus on WHY you do what you do. That means focusing on things like core values and culture in ways that are compelling enough to connect you in an enduring way.
What should your story be about? What you can expect your story to do? These aren’t questions that should be answered in the abstract. They deserve to be explored for the unique relationship between your organization, your audience, and your shared purpose or project.
Stories told to persuade have to tap into the shared connection between the storyteller and their audience. Our discovery process doesn’t invent stories to tell. Instead, we search for the version of a tale that will connect the teller and the listener. That makes curiosity more important than any tool or skill.
The “HOW” of Storytelling
Storytelling is fundamentally human. We told stories before we had the written word. So, in a lot of ways, the recent turn to storytelling in marketing and advertising is just a recognition of how important it is to stay true to the basics. But even in that light, storytelling as a strategic approach to messaging needs to be understood as a tradition. It didn’t come out of nowhere.
One of the places I look to for clarity on the origins of storytelling is in the unique approach to direct-response copywriting that grew out of nonprofit fundraising. People like Jeff Brooks and Tom Ahearn helped develop an approach to writing fundraising appeals that made donors the heroes of the story an organization told.
I see a lot of the elements of the “storytelling” approach in that tradition. Of course, storytelling didn’t really burst onto the scene in marketing until Donald Miller started promoting his “Storybrand” method. That approach advises a company to make the customer the hero of the story and position their business as the guide that helps the hero complete their journey.
It’s an approach that works well when you have a product to sell. The customer/hero is struggling. The guide/business provides them with a solution. They overcome the challenge and live happily ever after. But what if there is no one-time purchase, affordable subscription, or easy answer to the challenge? What if happily ever after doesn’t fit with the story you have to tell?
The “WHY” of Storytelling
I’ll forever be indebted to Simon Sinek for his TED talk “Start With Why”. It inspired me to develop a discovery process that is more art than science. Over the years we’ve created and refined an approach that relies on curiosity to discover a customers’ “WHY” and creativity to discover a way to tell stories that engage audiences.
It’s good to have a tool that’s right for the job. It’s good to have the skill to use that tool well enough to get the job done. But the art of storytelling needs more than skills and tools. It needs purpose and inspiration.
At Argonaut, we work with mission-driven organizations. You might think that getting to a client’s “WHY” is easy when you work with customers who are dedicated to a cause. But, more often than not, we still have to do some work to get out of their own institutional jargon and into a space where the emotional import of the mission can stand its ground against rationality.
Telling stories that inspire an audience to take actions that support a charitable cause doesn’t line up with the
[hero + guide=happy ending]
framework very often. We find that a story that starts with “WHY” and shoots for commitment and connection rather than conversion is almost always a better way to engage an audience.
Creativity AND Curiosity: Resources for Storytellers
Talking about storytelling as the art of crafting a message that will build a community helped our new client to understand why their business should tell its story. Talking through the “WHAT”, “HOW”, and “WHY” of storytelling helped them understand that they had a story worth telling and that we had the skill to tell it in ways that would be heard by their community.
At that point, they pressed me to go deeper into the art and skill that went into each tool that we use to discover stories that connect a company with its community. As I’ve already said, curiosity is the most fundamental and crucial element of what we do to discover the story that a business needs to tell or that an audience needs to hear. But the whole story is that creativity and curiosity work hand in hand.
“We tell ourselves stories in order to live.”
~ Joan Didion
Our approach to storytelling isn’t something that we came up with on our own. We learned how to do what we do by tapping into an evolutionary process that runs from direct mail fundraising, through the digital transformation, and into contemporary content marketing. The fact that we specialize in using video in the presentation of the stories we tell is more of a specialized adaptation than an innovation.
A good story brings something to life. It creates a human connection between the storyteller and the audience. Spoken language, the written word, film, and now digital video—they’re different forms of messaging. They’re a menu that a storyteller can choose from. Each form offers resources that free both the story and the teller in certain ways. At the same time, each form has constraints.
Find The Story
The client I was talking to wanted to know how they could use storytelling to grow their brand if their story wasn’t unique or special. I assured them that their story was special even if it didn’t seem that way to them. In fact, that’s why our first step aims to discover a customers’ “WHY”. They seemed a little bit skeptical, so I pushed back a little harder.
I told them about a podcast that I listened to a couple weeks earlier. The woman being interviewed was very interested in etymology and she spent some time talking about a term that she had begun using to describe the work that she did. The term was “maieutic” and it had its origins in ancient Greece. It initially meant “midwifery” but over time it became associated with the Socratic method.
I was really intrigued by her discussion of the term and its significance. I started to see our discovery process as another example of a maieutic art.
Every organization has a story. Maybe they spend so much time living inside of it that they cease to appreciate what’s special about it. But that’s where our discovery process comes in. In a sense, we are the “midwife” that helps them bring those ideas out into the light. It’s a process that can be messy and even dangerous, but it’s worth it to get to the “why” of what a client does.
Tell The Story
Discovery is a maieutic art. Presentation, on the other hand, relies on the creative use of the forms that make a story recognizable. Language, writing, film, and video are forms of presentation. But other kinds of forms are more fundamental to the storyteller’s art.
Storybrand urges us to fit the story we tell into just one of those forms. Even within that single form, we are free to be creative with the characters and events so that our story will breathe life into them in ways that engage the audience.
But the problem with that form is that it only works well when it can offer the audience believable images of a happy ending. What if the audience you’re speaking to and the project you’re speaking about don’t resolve in a world where everything’s going to be okay?
There are other forms of storytelling where the hero doesn’t ride off into the sunset. For a lot of nonprofits, the story they need to tell is one where there’s always more work to do. They need their audience’s support today and they’ll need it again next month or next year.
The Argonaut Approach to Storytelling
Storytelling is an approach that leads to a message that will engage an audience on a deeper level. It is an art that depends on the right mix of tools and skills to find and tell a story that will connect listeners as an audience and turn an audience into a community.
We don’t approach storytelling through the rhetorical act of invention. We start with discovery instead. We get to know the culture and core values that a company has so that we can make them the central themes in the story we tell. Only when we have discovered the central themes do we turn to creativity as a tool of invention to help us find the right way to tell the story.
“A hero is not a champion of things become, but of things becoming; the dragon to be slain by him is precisely the monster of the status quo.”
~ Joseph Campbell
The nature of the stories we tell makes it easy to move from the themes we discover to a specific example. The characters in the story fit naturally into the narrative. When the story you need to tell is one of cooperation and lasting commitment, you can be creative about who the hero is, who the guide is, and “WHY” your community matters.
We’ve used this approach to tell stories that forge commitments. We’ve worked with law firms and hospitals. We’ve worked with nonprofits in the start-up phase as well as endowed foundations. We’ve never worked on a project where we couldn’t find a story to tell and an engaging way to tell it.
What Can Argonaut Productions Do For You?
If you’re interested to know more about storytelling in general, what storytelling can do for you, or how we can help you discover and tell a version of your story that will engage your audience—give us a call.
All of our projects start out with an initial consultation. It’s always free and there’s never any obligation to make a purchase. It’s just an easy way for us to learn more about who you are and what you hope to achieve through storytelling. If it seems like we’re a good fit, we’ll outline a process that works for you and make a plan to get the ball rolling.