If You Can’t Answer These Questions… You Don’t Have A Story

On today's show, we're going to talk to you about storytelling. It's the most important skill in marketing, period. We're going to deep dive into what are the great story arcs and story archetypes. We're going to show you some of the best examples of brand storytelling, and I'm going to leave you with a storytelling framework to instantly make your marketing storytelling better and make sure your ads are the ones that are remembered. I'm Kip Bodnar, CMO at HubSpot. This is marketing against the Grain. Let's get into today's show. Welcome to another episode of Marketing against the Grain. And today, we're talking about one of the most important and most powerful aspects of marketing. Heck, life, anything. And we're talking storytelling. My favorite quote on storytelling comes from Morgan Housel in his new book, Same As Ever. And it's a simple quote. It says, storytelling is leverage. Storytelling is how you get an advantage in life. And the best story always wins. That is because you can have the best information. You can have the best data. The best information doesn't win. The best story wins. And what we're going to talk about today is how you tell a remarkable story. Storytelling is something that I have become obsessed with. I'm reading books from the best advertising storytellers, the best media storytellers, everything I can get my hands on, because I believe it is one of the foundational life skills and the core marketing skill. I think one of the best frameworks, the best examples of storytelling comes from one of the best fiction authors of the last century, Kurt Vonnegut. And I want to share a video with all of you where Kurt outlines his storytelling framework in a way that is so clear and so interesting that. That I think he does a better job explaining it than anybody could. So we're gonna pull this up.

Ill fortune, sickness and poverty down here. Wealth and boisterous good health.

So he's setting up a story wave, a story arc. Good stuff happens on the top, bad stuff happens in the middle or the bottom. Excuse me.

B stands for beginning.

And then he's like, look, your story has a beginning and your story has an end. It's pretty incredible. It's very simple.

Relativity really is the shape of the curve to what matters and not their origins.

This is a key point. Storytelling is about relativity. You need ups and downs, and you need the shape of the curve to look the way it needs to to match the story you're trying to tell.

It needn't be about somebody getting into a Hole. But it's just a good way to remember. Somebody gets into trouble, gets out of it again. People love that story. They never get sick.

People do love the story. Somebody gets into trouble, somebody gets out of trouble. It's a simple story structure, but we as humans love it.

Beautiful curve and easily fed into a computer called boy gets girl. But it needn't be that. Just a way to remember it. Start on an average day. Average person not expecting anything to happen a day like any other, finds something wonderful, just loves it. Oh, God damn it.

Oh, that. Average person finds something wonderful, loses it, comes back up.

Got it. Back again. People like that now. People do like that. Gets a little complicated as computers can now play chess. So I don't know why they can't digest this very difficult curve I'm going to draw for you now. And it so happens that this is the most popular story in our civilization, Western civilization, as we love to hear this story. Every time it's retold, somebody makes another million dollars. You're welcome.

He's about to share the most popular story in the Western world. The type and archetype of story about.

Below average days and people. But we're going to start way down here. Worse than that.

Starting at the worst part.

Who is so low? It's a little girl. What's happened? Her mother has died. Her father has remarried a vile tempered ugly woman with. With two nasty daughters. Big daughters. You've heard it, see. Anyway, there's a party. Can't go. She has to help everybody else get ready. She has to stay home. Now, does she sink lower? No. She's a staunch little girl and she has had the maximum whack from fate, which is the loss of her mother. She can't go any lower than that. Okay, so the fairy godmother comes, gives her shoes, gives her stocking, gives her mascara.

Talking all about the Cinderella story and how Cinderella starts at the very bottom. She gets a fairy godmother that helps her slowly work her way up. Loses it all again.

Now, there's a slight inclination to that line as I've drawn it, because it takes perhaps 20 seconds, 30 seconds for a grandfather clock to strike 12. Does she wind up at the same level? Of course not. She will remember that dance for the rest of her life. Now she poops along on this level till the prince comes.

So you're back to the bottom and then she comes to the very top. So those are three clear story frameworks that you can use. Whether you're writing an ad, whether you're writing a marketing copy, whether you're retelling a story to a family member, whether you're positioning your product or your service right, there are three core stories that in literally four minutes, Kurt Vonnegut was able to break down for us in a very simple and clear way. Part of the challenge with storytelling is the upfront work. What is the story I'm trying to tell, and what is the shape of the curve that I want to look like? Am I starting in a happy place, getting sad and going back to happy, or am I starting down here in a tough, challenging spot and clawing my way up, losing it, and then finally at the end of the story, working my way back? That is the core challenge with storytelling. It's not that the frameworks are hard. You just saw Kurt Vonnegut break them down in four minutes. For us, what's hard is being a person and taking the moment to say, what is the type of story I'm telling and how can I package it for my brand. To bring some of these stories to life, I want to give you some examples. I want to share some stories that brands have done to follow some of these formats so that you can understand them. So, for example, one of the most successful stories in marketing history is Apple's Think different campaign. And this campaign is all about how Apple is for the misfits, the wild ones, the people who think different, right? Microsoft's over here for these boring, stodgy people. IBM's over here for these boring, stodgy people. If you think different, if you're a misfit, you're with Apple. And this story completely mirrors what Kurt Vonnegut talked about with the man in the Hole story. How you start off in kind of this negative place and then you work your way out to a very happy, differentiated ending. And it follows that story arc perfectly. Instead of a movie or a book, it does it in a 30 or 60 second ad spot. This type of storytelling, these types of frameworks can be applied anywhere. One of the other most successful stories in marketing that has ever been told is the marketing campaign Just do it by Nike for their very first commercial in 1988. I want to share that with you. All right now you got the Golden Gate bridge. Walter Stack, 80 years old, runs 17 miles every morning.

Every morning people ask me how I keep my teeth from.

I love the humor. How do you keep your teeth from shattering in the wintertime? I leave with my locker. And that is such a simple story, right? And this is the bad to good narrative. All over again, right? You have somebody who is 80 years old. He's out there running in the cold, cold. Why would he do that? Because he has to. Because he likes doing. Because he just has to do it. That seems like such a basic commercial to and story to all of us now. You have to remember in 1988, that was transformational. People weren't running, people weren't doing this. People didn't have the attitude around health and fitness that they do today. And that is incredible. And it's this simple story structure that enabled Nike to break out and over decades, build the Nike brand and keep this incredibly durable tagline of just do it and keep it working for them. You also know that when it comes to storytelling, the company that is the best at storytelling is Disney. There are some great books out there. There are great examples. But what you should do is if you're a parent especially and you're watching some Disney movies, you should get clear on the different storytelling frameworks. Kurt Vonnegut gave us. 3. There are really seven storytelling archetypes. And so if you're a parent and you're with your children, you're watching Disney movies. One of the things I strongly recommend is to dissect the story of the movies you're watching with kids so that you can understand how they got there. Reverse engineer that, understand the components of that story. Because all of these stories come back to one of seven archetypes. The first is overcoming the monster. The hero of that story has to go and beat this monster out in the world. Countless, countless examples of this in movies. Rag to rags to riches. Somebody starts terrible and they end up on a real high note. We talked about Cinderella earlier in the podcast. Cinderella is the classic, iconic example of rags to riches. Annie. There are lots of stories that fall under this. Rags to riches, the quest. The protagonist must sit out in pursuit of a treasure or a place or a goal. You ever watch Star Wars? You ever watch Indiana Jones? Indiana Jones, my personal favorite of the quest stories. You're watching a quest story. And the quest is often a very good marketing story because you can make your customer the protagonist. And your customer goes on a quest for transformation or quest for a new skill that is supported or helped or aided in by your product. Right? So the quest is a very, very powerful. Then you've got voyage and return. So this person goes and travels to a strange place, learns experiences, makes discoveries, and then comes back with the lessons they've learned. So this would be like Frodo, Lord of the Rings, for example. That would be an example of a voyage and return story. You've got a comedy. This is all of your classic comedy movies where the protagonist experiences light hearted, confusing events. Pick a Will Ferrell movie. Step brothers, Old School. This is the comedy story, Comedy archetype, tragedy. So many of Shakespeare's plays were tragedies where the main character has this trait or flaw that they cannot overcome and it ends in a sad and tragic ending. I think tragedy is the hardest of all these archetypes to use for marketing. Happens sometimes, but it is by far the hardest to do. One of the other most common marketing archetypes is the last of our seven story archetypes, which is Rebirth, which is this protagonist goes through a transformation and, and ends up better at the end. This is a completely classic, especially a business to business marketing story archetype. Because we want our customers to go through this process of learning, hopefully using our product, our service, being helped by maybe our company and coming out on the other side being better, being more successful, right? And the promise of that and the stories of that are really, really powerful. And so when you talk about storytelling, it's knowing the type of story curve you're having and which of these archetypes you're actually doing and actually using to tell the story to your customers, to your prospects. Okay, so I want to break this down in kind of the last part of our show today and say, how do you go and do this? So I want to give you a playbook for telling compelling stories for your brand. The first thing you need to do is pick the type of story. And we spent a lot of the show talking about that. Once you have your type of story, you have to define your core message. What is the one thing you want people to think, feel, believe? For example, Apple with its Think different campaign that was all about innovation and non conformity. That was the message, that was the feeling that they were trying to get out to everyone. It's not a paragraph, it's a sentence. It is those kind of core emotion that you want to deliver to everyone. That's how we define our core message. The next is you have to know your audience and create emotional resonance. So now you have your core message and you have your story archetype. You have to say, hey, does my story archetype work with my audience? And this is kind of your check. It's like I think it did. But now that I have the message in the archetype go through and say, hey, does my archetype, does my the emotion. I want these People to feel actually work with the audience I'm trying to deliver. Great example of this was Dove's Real Beauty campaign where they wanted to reject body of stereotypes and talk about the real truths of how people, and especially in this case, in Dove's case, women, felt about their bodies. And that is deeply understanding the audience and telling them maybe an untold truth about them as part of the story. Then you have to craft the relatable story. You need to draw the arc. And what's great is you don't have to go and write or write a big script or produce a big video. You can just hit, you can outline the core beats of the story and then map them to the story curve and say, oh, do I actually have the right components to have the up and down? Or as Kurt Vonnick would say, the distance between the different points in the story to actually have emotional resonance and actually compel the audience that I'm trying to get to. Then once you have your story curve, you have to double down on authenticity. People can spot a contrived story from a mile away. And so, for example, you want to tell a story that you are uniquely suited to tell. So Patagonia, for example, is deeply committed to the environment and sustainability, so they can tell stories around that topic with huge credibility. But if you were a different company who didn't have that commitment and maybe even had anti environmental practices, you can't tell that story just because you want people to think that you have those things. You have to have the actions to back up the story and you have to have the credibility in the market to back up that story. And that is where authenticity comes in. Patagonia is the classic example of this here. Then let's say you've done all that, you've come out with the perfect story, then you need to publish that story in consistent ways across channel and you need to have the different formats. You might have 6 second ads, 30 second ads, you might have some long form keynote presentations that you're going to give around it. You need to take that story and format it for the different use cases of how you need to reach your audience and how your audience needs to hear and experience this story. If you can do those things, you will be better than 98, 99% of the marketers in the world because so many of folks in the world just think about their product telling the facts and features and speeds and feeds of that product and fail to wrap it in a story. The biggest thing I can tell you today is that the best product doesn't win the best technical specs doesn't win the cheapest price doesn't win the best story wins. And I hope that I gave you some tips today that are going to help you make better stories in the future. I hope that you watch that video from Kurt Vonnegut multiple times, link it up in the show notes, it'll be down there for you. And drop a comment on YouTube. Hit that subscribe button if you like today's show, you follow up questions, leave us comments on YouTube, and I'll be back with you real soon on another episode of Marketing against the Grain.

This data is wrong every freaking time.

Have you heard of HubSpot? HubSpot is a CRM platform where everything is fully integrated. Whoa.

I can see the client's whole history. Calls, support tickets, emails. And here's a task from three days ago I totally missed HubSpot Grow better.