The worlds most industrious storyteller explains how brand bewitchery will build your business Pa...

Albert Einstein once said that if you want your children to be smart, tell them stories. But if you want them to be brilliant, tell them more stories. Park Howell, welcome to the Speak PR Podcast. Thank you so much for joining us from what sounds to be a rather roasting Arizona.

Well, Jim, thank you so much for being here. And it is indeed hot here in Arizona. I think it's gonna be 114. I can't do the Celsius, you know, equation there. So you'll have to do that for me.

But it's just hot.

It's awesome being here.

You are by all accounts the world's most industrious storyteller. And you've just launched a book called Brand Bewitchery: The Story Cycle System. So welcome. Would you like to just give us some background to the story and what is brand bewitchery? How does it impact businesses?

Brand bewitchery. You know, I've been in the advertising, branding, marketing world for 35 years. And actually before that, Jim, I studied and got my degree in public relations. At Washington State University. And I was in the PR world. Yeah, no, I worked for a couple of agencies and I found myself in a cubicle writing press release after press release in the inverted pyramid style and just the facts, ma'am, and get them down. And I found it really boring. And I was lucky because there was a PR firm that I was working for, my very first job, had a very small struggling ad department and they were getting overwhelmed with work. And so they said, Park, can you come in and write a few ads? And I started writing ads and I go, oh, This is what I want to do. So I left the PR world and went to the advertising world or worked with agencies that had both advertising and PR. And I started my own firm in 1995 called Park& Co. I knew as I was doing that work, it was really easy back then when our brands owned the influence of mass media, our clients did. We had what? We had radio, we had TV, Billboards, outdoor, you know, direct mail, events, public relations, and no Yelp. But I found that in 2006, all of that really started to change, Jim, as I'm sure you experienced too, with the advent of the internet and e-commerce and blogs. And now today, what, 14 years later, it has so shifted. When before, Brands used to own the influence of mass media. Now the masses are the media and they own your story. They own my story. There is— we are bombarded with content that our brains cannot remotely digest at all. And that's when in 2006, I started looking for an answer and that's where I found story. And that was the genesis of me finally writing and producing Brand Bewitchery, my new book. How to wield the StoryCycle system to craft spellbinding stories for your brand.

What made you sort of realize that out of this sort of sea of digital and social that a story should emerge?

Here's the thing. Our middle child, our son Parker, had just started film school at Chapman University in Orange, California. They have a very, very prominent film school out there. He graduated in 2010 and he has been in Hollywood ever since. He is a director, does a lot of work in virtual reality and mixed reality motion graphics and that kind of thing. There was something in me that just said, okay, I have to evolve as a communicator. He is going to school to become a competitive storyteller, the most competitive storytelling capital of the world, LA.

Yeah.

What do they teach him? What does Hollywood know that I should know that could give me a decided advantage over my competition and help me really understand with my clients how to communicate and help them hack through the noise and hook the hearts of their audiences. That's where I found storytelling.

Okay. Just tell us then about the book which has just come out recently. Congratulations. And I've got my copy on my Kindle and I'm enjoying it greatly. In your book, you write about the need for us or for the business person to, or business owner to be a mentor. to their customer's hero. Everyone that's listening is a business owner and making this real that it's not telling stories like book at bedtime. This is really about how you convert your story into a promise, into a client or a customer.

Absolutely, Jim. And it begins by thinking as a storyteller. It begins by thinking through the narrative mind. And here's what I mean by that. So what I learned as my son was going to Chapman, and I said, send me your books when you're done with them since I'm paying for them, because I would like to know, you know, what they teach you. I found the hero's journey. I saw it as this amazing strategy that we could use in business storytelling strategy. And that was the inspiration for my 10-step Story Cycle System.

Nice.

The key to the hero's journey and the key to every great story, it's always about a single character. The single protagonist. It's not always— it's not about a family, it's not about a group, it's not about a church, it's not— it's always about a single individual and the journey they're on. That got me to thinking back in the olden days before 2006 when brands owned the influence of mass media, they were very brand-centric. They were just cramming content down people's faces and say, you have to do it our way. If you want to be cool, you have to buy our product and whatever. And that totally changed when people started telling their own stories online, calling brands out, asking for authenticity and honesty. The brands today now have to make a significant paradigm shift and realize they are not the center of their brand story.

Wow.

Their customers are. And once you put your customer at the center of your story, it requires you to understand them, to empathize with who they are and what they're about, what they want in life, where they are on their journey, to get what they want and how you can be there as their mentor guide to help them accomplish that. So it's just a total paradigm shift of take yourself out of being the center of the story and place your audience there. And it'll give you a whole new view on how to communicate about your brand.

Right, so that's interesting because I guess companies always talked about being customer-centric, but now the technology has meant that they have to be customer-centric or else the communications that they're issuing out won't be relevant anymore, right? It'll be ignored. So now you talk about these different stages and these 9 brand descriptors, Park. Could you share with us then, how do you define 9? Normally it's 3. In PR, it's 3, right? Normally to keep it simple.

It's the power of 3. And actually 9 is divisible by 3. So I agree with you wholeheartedly. Big believer in the power of 3. Here's how that came about. It came about through helping people pull together their brand story strategy using the Story Cycle system. And it was what people started naturally doing. And I call it the OOOH exercise, as in O-O-O-H, OOOH.

All right, nice.

And the 3 O's, there's your power of 3s, stand for this: organization, offering, And outcomes. Then what I ask you to do, I ask you to think about this. Give me 3 one-word descriptors that describe your organization in general. Give me then 3 one-word descriptors that describe your offering, your product or service.

Uh-huh.

And then finally, give me 3 one-word descriptors that describe your outcome. What do people actually achieve? By using your product or service. Once you have those 9, so again, divisible by 3 to the power of 3.

Right, right.

Then I ask them to go and tell me a story. Tell me, grab each one of those words. You're gonna end up with 9 different stories. Tell me a story about this particular word, about your real-world impact and how your brand expresses itself and shows up in the world. It's a beautiful way to proof out what you're trying to do when you're creating your brand story, they are so often very aspirational, as they should be, but sometimes it's hard to get your employees on board. It'd be kind of like, geez, Park, where'd you pull that out of?

Yeah.

That doesn't sound like us at all. But then you overlay these stories and say, well, it actually is very much us. Here's an example of a customer service. Here's an example of working with a vendor. Here's an example. It not only proves out your brand to prove that what you really stand for is true and authentic, but it also gives you amazing content that you can use in public relations and inbound outbound marketing and on your website. And it changes your focus from telling case studies, which are typically kind of brand-focused, to what I call case stories. Again, placing your audience, your customer at the center of the story, and you show up at the very end to help them achieve something. But the story is about them, not about you. So for me, for the Business of Story, my organization, I have 3 words: MAJ, which is kind of that sorcerer, that, that, you know, person that is very studied in the magic of storytelling. That kind of describes me. Industrious, and as you mentioned at the beginning of the show, I am the world's most industrious storyteller, as coined by one of my clients, and I liked it so much I just ran with it. And I say that because I use story to build things, to build careers, to build businesses, to build brands. And then optimistic. I'm a very optimistic guy. The Business of Story is about optimism, and a true story well told typically has very much of an optimistic bent to it. Here's one. Okay. This is a word about my offering. The Business of Story is primal. So that's the thing about storytelling. It is a very primal way we Homo sapiens communicate. We're the only known being that actually use story and story structure and problem-solution dynamic.

Yeah.

And so in my offering, what I demonstrate is how primal this is and how we can move from being intuitive storytellers to intentional ones. So if I can read real quick, the various narrative frameworks you can use to tell a story have a rich, proven history of effectively connecting with people and moving them to action. In fact, they are primal to us storytelling monkeys. In the fall of 2018, I was working with 60 engineers and executives at the Palo Verde Nuclear Generating Station in Phoenix. They were a smart and very logic-driven crowd. So I shared with them how our minds are hardwired for story by telling them a tale of Thog the Caveman. Jim, this is one of my favorite tales to tell. Yeah. One evening, Thog returned to his cave looking a little worse for wear. His plump cavern roommate Larry grunted, Thog, you no look so good. What happened? He explained, Thog go to stream to catch saber-tooth salmon for dinner. Uh-huh, grunted Larry. But saber-toothed tigers show up. Uh-oh, belched his roommate. Thog give tiger salmon. Tiger like salmon better than Thog. So here I am, safe in cave with you. Aha, said Larry, nodding at the insight. And there you have it, a perfect 3-act story structure delineated by Larry's uh-huh, setup, Uh-oh, conflict, and aha, resolution. It's story structure so basic even a caveman can do it, is what I like to talk about. But it's setup, problem, resolution. And then I go on to teach people how to use the and, but, and therefore, which is the exact same story dynamic, but we can use it in public relations and marketing and branding. And it is super, super powerful.

And then you've got these sort of different stages. You've got heroes, stakes, disruption, antagonists, mentor, the journey, the victory, the moral, and the ritual. Pat, would you like to tell us, you know, talk us through those?

So if you think about the 10-step story cycle system, again, it was inspired by Campbell's Hero's Journey, which is anywhere from 12 to 17 steps depending who you read on it. This is mapped to business, and you can think of it in the 3-act structure. So act 1 is simply Setup. And those are the first 3 steps of the Story Cycle System. So as you're thinking about your brand in a narrative framework, the setup is your backstory. And what I mean by that is, what is your number one position in the marketplace? What do you functionally do differently and more distinctively than your competition? This, by the way, Jim, in the 10 steps is the only time we think about function. Everything else now we start humanizing it. Step number 2 is heroes. And people say, well, people aren't really heroes. And I just say, it's a metaphor. And what the heroes are is I like you to identify your top 3 audiences and prioritize them. They are the heroes in your journey.

Right.

You may have 4 or 5 or 6 different audiences as most companies do, but I only want you to focus on the top 3 because I find you get those dialed in, the rest of the work kind of flows through your audiences. So take one of those, you take your backstory as a brand and now here's There's an audience and they want something. And that takes you to step number 3, stakes. And I break that down to 2 different things, Jim. In stakes is what do they wish for and what do they want? What I mean by what do they wish for is emotionally. They wish to look sexier. They wish to look smart. They wish to have optimism. They wish to get rid of that fear. What emotionally do they wish for? to achieve in their life? And then what do they want physically to buy to fulfill that wish? So for instance, in my world, people wish to become better, more confident, and compelling communicators. And they want a proven system that they can deploy, that they can measure the outcome. So it becomes very physical to deploy it and to measure it. And the only reason why they do it is to fulfill that wish. So make no mistake, Every business is in the wish-fulfilling business. And it's the problem we're solving for. So as you're setting the stage and the backstory, your audiences, what do they wish and want? You are arriving at what problem do you successfully help them overcome? And that then launches you into act 2. And that is the next couple steps of the Story Cycle System.

Park Howell, storyteller extraordinaire, the world's most industrious Storyteller. Now, Park and I spoke at length about storification. And so what I've done in order to keep the episode to my sub-20 minutes is I've separated this episode into 2. So there's going to be another session with Park that's going to be coming up just behind this one. So do stay tuned. And in the meantime, I wish you the best of health, a profitable business, and a happy life.

Thank you.

And that you keep on telling stories. Thank you.