The worlds most industrious storyteller explains how brand bewitchery will build your business Part I

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 SpeakPR 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 going to be 114. I can't do the Celsius equation there, so you'll have to do that for me.

But it's just hot.

Yeah, 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 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 in 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 and Company. 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 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. Before, Ranj used to own the influence of mass media. Now the masses are the media. And they own your story. They own my story. 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 B Witchery. My new book, how to Wield the Story Cycle 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, in 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, Louisiana.

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 coffee 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 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. 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 on 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 or 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, 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 taking 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 in. Cause 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 nine brand descriptors part could you share with us then how do you define nine? Normally it's three. In PR it's three, right? Normally to keep it simple, it's the power of three.

And actually nine is divisible by three. So I agree with you wholeheartedly. I'm a big believer in the power of three. 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 OO exercise, as in O o o H, ooh, nice. And the three O's. There's your power of threes stand for this organization offering and outcomes. Then what I ask you to do, I ask to think about this. Give me three one word descriptors that describe your organization in general. Give me then three one word descriptors that describe your offering your product or service. And then finally give me three one word descriptors that describe your outcome. What do people actually achieve by using your product or service? Once you have those nine, so again, divisible by three to the power of three, then I ask them to go and tell Me a story. Tell me. Grab each one of those words. You're going to end up with nine 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 because 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, it 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 proofs 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 and 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 three words, mage, which is kind of that sorcerer, that 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 am a very optimistic guy. The business of stories 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. 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. One evening, Thog returned to his cave looking a little worse for wear. His plump cavern roommate Larry grunted, Thog you know, look so good. What happened? He explained, Thog go to stream to catch saber too. Salmon for dinner. Uh huh, grunted Larry. But saber toothed tigers show up. Uh oh. Belched his roommate. Thog give tiger salmon. Tiger likes 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 three act story structure delineated by Larry's aha 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 set up 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, antagonist, mentor, the journey, the victory, the moral and the ritual part. Would you like to tell us, you know, talk us through those?

So if you think about the ten step story cycle system, again, it was inspired by Campbell Hero's Journey, which is anywhere from 12 to 17 steps, depending who you read on it. This is map to business. And you can think of it in the three act structure. So act one is simply. And those are the first three 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 two 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 three audiences and prioritize them. They are the heroes in your journey. You may have four or five or six different audiences, as most companies do. But I only want you to focus on the top three 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 there's an audience and they want something. And that takes you to step number three, stakes. And I break that down to two 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 to 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 audience is 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 separated this episode into two. 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 best of health, a profitable business, and that you keep on telling stories.