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

Hello and welcome to this 3rd and final episode with Park Howell, the world's most industrious storyteller. Park has recently launched a book called Brand Bewitchery: The Story Cycle System. And on the radio, I asked him a question about his book, which is that he says the internet has transformed everything and that most people may not even be listening to what we're saying. So how do we create stories, compelling stories, that make us into great storytellers. Here's Park to share more.

Well, you know, you think about the massive amounts of channels and the millions and millions and millions of messages that are being sent virtually every minute, if not every second out there. We are being bombarded by content. And here's the thing. So our cerebral frontal cortex has done this brilliant job of building technology that has evolved at the astounding compounding rate of Moore's Law that everyone's familiar with in technology. Yet, you and I are still walking around with our limbic system, the same brain that has not appreciably changed for over 90,000 years when our ancestors were navigating and trying to survive the savanna. is the same system that has evolved at the snail's pace of Darwin that you and I and every listener here is trying to use to navigate and survive the bombardment on the internet.

Yeah.

So, it's no wonder that you, me, everyone have a hard time of connecting to stand out and be heard in this noisy, noisy world. That's what I mean when I say the masses have become the media. You don't just have a few TV stations and radio stations and print production, your newspapers and magazines to choose from anymore to push your story out. Everybody's a TV station, everybody's a radio station, everybody's a print production house, and they are live 24/7 with global reach from the privacy of their own kitchen table. So I say that it's kind of like, you know, attention deficit disorder, has become a communicable disease and we are all the viruses. And the only way to hack through that noise and hook the hearts is with an anecdote. An anecdote is the antidote.

That's what I was going to say. You use that in your book. You say the anecdote is the antidote. So from a practical point of view, if you're a business owner and currently if you go on Google, for example, you search for a product or a or a company or a service, you get as many competitors as you do the original company you're looking for. So how does your story system, the Brand Bewitchery, how does that kind of surf this amazing wave of digital media?

Well, you make a really good point, Jim, that we all live in a land of abundance. We don't operate in scarcity anymore. because there are abundant public relations people that people can choose from. There are abundant brand communicators and even brand, quote unquote, storytellers people can choose from. So every listener here has immense competition. And the only way that you're going to stand out is to be able to effectively use these primal elements and proven frameworks of storytelling, again, to hack through the noise and hook the hearts of the limbic system, to demonstrate what you stand for and why you're different, why you are distinctive, and then how do you tell that story so you actually get through and in between the ears of your audiences? That's the power of storytelling and how it works.

And so in terms of the— one of the things I've been looking at is called the Cascade Theory. Have you heard of it? By a chap called Watts. And it's about how—

No, it hasn't.

And I did a blog post about this, about how what we need to do is not find one great influencer and hope that they will influence others, but find many other people who are easily influenced. And it's the masses of people with a low threshold to be influenced that will then trigger a cascade, which is where then a message or a story would be Shared virally across the world. So what advice could you give somebody that's running a company to create that story that goes viral, that benefits from this cascade theory, that kind of resonates on a deep level with enough people to make it a worthwhile exercise?

Well, first and foremost, I think that virality is utter luck. You can kind of get some things set up to maybe make yourself a little bit luckier, but you have to hit it at just the right time with just the right message. So, I would caution your listeners, don't go for virality. Go for making a really powerful point with the few people you actually care about, who you are for. That's a great point. Those audiences that you can, you can really help. That's all you need. You don't need everybody. You need, you know, a handful or an armful of great customers that you can embrace and go from there. And you do that by telling first an origin story. Why do you do what you do? Why did you get into this in the first place? When you can reveal yourself in an authentic and vulnerable way, people are now no longer buying from a brand, they're buying from a business or a person. You have humanized your person because we want to do business with people we trust, like, and feel like we want in our social network. Brands don't do that for us, you know.

Isn't that an irony that somehow with the proliferation of technology, we've become more human-oriented, you know?

Yeah.

At a time before when we didn't have as much technology, we relied on big brand billboards advertising through the TV, as I remember, or through the radio or further. And actually, as we've become more enraptured with our technology and more sort of almost distant through holding phones, we reach out even more for that human connection from a company than we did before.

Yeah, it's funny because we think we're even more connected than we were before. And I guess we are technically, but the lack of connection people really feel with one another, and especially now with COVID where everybody is separated and talking basically on Zoom sessions, That people are crying out and they want to have that human interaction, that human connection.

Mm-hmm.

And that's where story comes in. There's not a product sheet with features and functions and benefits that is going to matter to anyone anymore. They wanna hear about you. Why did you build the product? What does it do for me? I'm interested in that. And then maybe at the very end of that buying cycle, they say, well, let me look at the product sheet. But don't lead with the product sheet. Lead with the stories. Everything about— it could be your origin story, why you started it. It could be the quest story, the story about, I started that, but then I really want to grow here, and yet I had this problem and fell into this hole, and the universe punched me in the nose here, but I overcame that and got out of it. Now I'm offering this.

Yeah.

There are all different kinds. There's then the customer, you know, story, the case story of showing, hey Jim, Here, let me introduce you to Bob. And he's just like you. Bob wanted the same thing, but Bob tried to do this and then Bob tried to do that. But it was when Bob came to us and we helped him do this, now Bob is here. A true story well told is what people are looking for. And that's where storytelling comes in. It can be very simple too. It doesn't have to be these long drawn-out stories. You can tell an anecdote in under 1 minute that can have an unbelievable power.

So then conceivably one of the issues then is making sure that that anecdote is understood company-wide, because in the old days when we, you know, when I was young and I worked in a shop selling furniture and toys and so on, the shop, the physical presence and the cash register and the uniforms we wore told the story. But now we're buying things without actually even going somewhere, so Presumably, the story and everybody knowing the story internally becomes even more important because there aren't some of the other, if you like, brand infrastructure items that we used to have to wear or work in.

Well, think of them as like a cast. They are a cast in your narrative production of the brand or business that you are operating. And gosh, everyone knows the drama that you live day in and day out in that. So they are already living in your narrative. But if you as the business owner don't control that narrative, they will make up their own stories about you. And it's probably not the story you intended unless you intentionally tell a story.

So is the business owner the hero or are they the producer or the director?

Well, they're the producer, the director, their audiences are the hero. I would go back to them placing, if you're talking to your employees, place them At the center of the story because it makes you have to understand who they are, what they care about, and what journey they're on, so that you as the producer-director know what kind of story to create to connect with their worlds, to help them achieve what they want. Help them get what they want, they'll go out of their way to help you get what you want. And the beautiful thing about this is stories, you know, truth and trust are 2 of my 9 one-word descriptors. Stories are a vehicle that deliver the truth that creates the trust.

Right.

So it could be bad news. You share that in a story and be truthful about that bad news, it creates trust in your audiences. They believe you. But if you come in and tell a fiction, if you lie, if you tell a made-up story to try to overcome or add a sheen to something that's gone haywire, You will be found out. It will eventually— the truth will eventually materialize. And the trust will be around the internet.

That's right. The internet could be all— it could be global within minutes. Could you give us, Park Howell, could you give us one or two case studies for the business people listening to this of how story and working with you made a difference to somebody's business?

Let me give you, since you asked for 2, I'll give you 2 quickly. The first one is gonna be very customer sales-centric. I was in Melbourne, Australia about a year and a half ago, March of 2019, with my wife, Michelle. And we were out there with one of her old childhood friends who had moved to Melbourne many, many years ago and is basically Australian now. She has the accent and everything. We were sitting with her and her boyfriend at the time, gentleman by the name of Per, and he was a Swedish sailor. He— we were sitting down and he was talking about story and storytelling. He had, as a young man, sailed from Stockholm, I think he was 22 years old, on a 24-foot sailboat by himself, spent 6 to 8 months at sea to Melbourne all by himself, and got there and he loved it so much he remained in Australia. And he sold car washes, high-end German car washes, sold and serviced them into Australia. So, he was asking me very skeptically, how does story— I don't really get storytelling in business and whatever.

Yeah.

And I asked him, I said, Per, could you take me to a time like Tom Hanks in Cast Away when you were at sea and it kind of seemed like all was lost and something supernatural happened, you know, like the whale came up and flipped water on you and He kind of laughed in his Swedish, you know, brogue. No, no, no, that never happened. And then I just gave him a long pregnant pause, got a little uncomfortable, and he said, well, there was that one time. I said, oh, what's that? He says, well, I was sailing through the Galápagos Islands and I came down to a channel I had never sailed before, and the sun was starting to go down. It was starting to get dark. It was early evening. And back then we didn't have GPS. We just had a sextant and a compass and dead reckoned. way through. And he goes, I didn't really wanna take on and navigate this water that I didn't know at dark. So, I decided to weigh anchor and hang out in the mouth of this channel and I would get up early in the morning and go. So, we're listening and he goes, have you ever heard that really weird screeching sounds that dolphins make in the wild? And I go, nope, never have. He goes, well, I woke up to that and I went up top, up on deck, and I had 8 dolphins circling around frantically my sailboat and they were screeching at me. And I woke up and I looked around and I realized the tide had gone out much further than I had anticipated. And in about another 30 minutes, me and my boat would be impaled on these lava rocks. So, I pulled up anchor and navigated, you know, successfully the channel and made it to my destination. And I asked Per, I said, do you think they were warning you? And he goes, what else were they doing there?

Yeah.

And then, kind of this sort of sly grin came over his face and he says, Park, I just realized every big sale I ever made of a car wash came after I told about one of my sailing adventures at sea. Had nothing to do with business.

Yeah.

And I said, Per, why do you think that is? He goes, I have no idea. I said, I'll tell you why. Because in the telling of that personal story and your courage and your journey at sea, People get to know you. They say, I think I want this guy on my team. He's industrious. He can get himself out of trouble. He's willing to take risks. He's willing— I want a guy like that to have my back if I'm going to spend a lot of money on a German car wash in Australia. That is the power of story. A true story well told. Right.

That's a great one. That's a great one. And then you also had another one about A chat with the car.

Yeah, so I was speaking at Social Media Marketing World, a very large, the largest gathering of social media marketers in the world in San Diego every year. And this was about 4 years ago. And I was doing, maybe 5 years ago actually now. They invited me in to do the very first workshop on business and brand storytelling and it kicked off the whole event. I had about 600 people in the room. It was great fun. In that room, as I got done, talked to a lot of people and whatever, left, and in the corridor, a handsome young man comes up to me. André Martin-Holmes was his name, and he had this French accent, but in English, you know, I wasn't quite sure where he was from. And he said, I loved your presentation. I wanna talk to you about helping brand my business. And I said, you know, who are you and what is your business? Well, his business is he was selling cars. used cars in Quebec, Canada to at-risk buyers. So people that had poor credit. And I thought to myself, I don't know if this is really the kind of brand I want to work with. I work with purpose-driven brands and I could just picture the car shark out there taking advantage of these people that want these cars. Well, I'm so glad that he circled back with me because we started working on his brand story and I found out a whole other side to André's brand story. His thing is not about just selling a used car to an at-risk buyer. His thing is about his purpose of his brand is to help people repair their credit. And he said, Park, these are people that have lost their credit because, not their fault, just things have conspired against them. It could have been the global recession, maybe they got a divorce, maybe they had healthcare issues that drained them of their money, maybe they lost a job. But these are genuinely good people that have had bad luck.

Yeah.

And I wanna help them repair their credit through the purchase of a car. So I go, wow, that's really fascinating. So we sat down and took him through the Story Cycle system and uncovered all these elements of it. And it came down to his purpose. His company is called Prêt Auto Partez. I don't say that very well in French, but it's like ready, car, go in the translation. Prêt Auto Partez.

Yeah.

And his brand purpose is Prêt Auto Partez is your vehicle to financial freedom.

Nice.

Because here's the thing, in Canada, it takes you 2 years of, you know, dutifully paying your bills off. So, this car is gonna do that every month for you to repair your credit to where you can level up and do other things. Before you can buy a car at Andre's dealership, you have to go through a 2 or 3-hour financial planning session where you reveal completely where you are, They have financial planners that help you figure out how much you can actually afford to pay on that car and then work with you after the purchase to make sure that you do that. You're accountable to it. They are now the number one car dealer in Canada for at-risk buyers, not because they're car sharks just selling them anything, but because they are helping them repair their credit. They have a bigger goal and purpose in life.

Yeah.

That's why they are their vehicle to financial freedom.

That's a wonderful story. And lucky that we got to hear that because it really shows that there have been many hardship stories at the moment. And, but many great stories will come out of it. And this sounds like a really good one. Lucky that we've got your brand story cycle to guide us. So apart from the business story, where can people find out about you? I've heard you're going to be doing a course at Stetson University. Which actually, I was interested to hear, was actually founded by the people that actually made the hats, which is fantastic news.

Yeah, it's interesting, isn't it?

Yeah. So how can people find out about you? I mean, obviously we'll put you in the show notes, but anything else that you'd like to share?

Thanks for that, Jim. You know, please visit me over at businessofstory.com. And I have a lot of free tools and information there for you to use to start crafting in telling compelling brand stories that sell. Of course, I've got my podcast which is 5 years old now. It's over about 265 episodes and ranked among the top 10% of downloaded shows in the world and it is all focused—

Congratulations.

Storytellers. Thank you. Use it, you know, working with storytellers from around the world to help business leaders of purpose-driven brands understand how to use story in their life. And then, of course, on Amazon, if you're interested in my book, I would love to have you go and buy it. Brand Bewitchery. You can find that on amazon.com, both print and Kindle version. Greatly appreciate a rating and review after you get it because it's what— how new authors like me get found in the Amazon jungle.

Thank you so much for joining us on the Speak PR Podcast.

Well, thank you, Jim, so much for having me. And I'd like to end with, as your listeners are becoming better storytellers and working through this, I want them to remember that the most potent story you'll ever tell is the you tell yourself. So make sure you make it a great one. Thanks for having me here, Jim.

So there we had Park Howell, the world's most industrious storyteller and author of Brand Bewitchery: The Story Cycle System. With that, I thank you so much for listening. I pray that you have good health, a robust business, and that you keep on telling stories.