Given on Monday I’ll be attending the Moth in London, this felt like a good time to repost this piece. The original can be found on LinkedIn here.
It’s time to own up: I am a member of a book club. Our monthly meetings aren’t restricted by style or genre and we’ve read widely from fact, fiction, and pulp. Coming up in August though, we’re having a slightly different meeting. You see, we’ve been reading The Moth: 50 True Stories.
The Moth
For those that don’t know The Moth, it started as a non-profit group in NYC in 1997. It now records a weekly podcast and, since 2009, has run a national public radio show in the US. Its purpose is simple; it exists to celebrate the most original of human pastimes: storytelling.
Individuals get up on a small stage and speak for a short while about experiences they’ve been through. Each experience is unique, and each story is true.
Why Storytelling?
Since the cognitive revolution (for an introduction to this, and many other interesting topics, I can’t recommend Yuval Noah Harari’s Sapiens highly enough), we as a species have practiced the art of recounting tales. From word of mouth histories, to the great classical myths and legends that have transcended their original societal echo chambers and are still told the world over today. Storytelling is a huge part of being human.
For me, the reason storytelling is so engaging is simple: we are programmed to empathise. The development of human history has been one of allowing ever-increasing numbers of people to engage in societal activity; from an extended family hunter-gatherer society in prehistoric times, to the intra-national system which today links people the world over.
Human development and what we term progress has been based primarily on the ability for ever larger groups to share common purpose and combine our individual brains into an extended neural network with the power to promote systems the size of the EU, the IMF, and the World Bank (of course, we’ve now reached the point where we’re developing neural networks between machines; we’re calling it AI — see here). The basis of all this is simple: storytelling.
The ability to tell a story that resonates between people is the greatest enabler of human potential. From teaching our children, to determining political direction, to architecting the great decisions of our age, such as the Paris Climate Accord, the ability to craft and deliver a coherent message with which people identify is the cornerstone to success.
Reading the stories in The Moth is an exercise in emotional responsiveness, with reactions ranging from unfettered joy to absolute despair. Each story evokes a reaction, demands a response, and drives some level of response.
Your Story Is Your Brand
Whilst I read the book, there was a persistent voice in the back of my head asking why — when we are so innately aware of the power of storytelling — do so many brands persist with the old-school advertising methods of focusing on features and product rather than the story behind them?
Same as everyone else, I love a good stat and one I heard recently should give marketing leaders and business owners across sectors pause for thought: as a population, we wouldn’t care if 74% of the brands we encounter dropped off the face of the earth. 74%. That’s a lot of chaff encountered as we run through the fields of wheat.
One brand ahead of the game in this area, of course, is Nike. Seeing themselves as a service to help you get active, rather than a purveyor of products, the story is told in Phil Knight’s Shoe Dog about how he started the brand due to being an avid runner. Now, everything they do is based around the exercise experience and their Just Do It campaign neatly sums up the story they tell: that starting today is the answer to reaching the health/fitness/sport goals you’ve always dreamed of.
Still though, there’s so much work to be done. In our company, Gnatta, we’re reviewing our marketing approach to refocus away from what our powerful product does, to why we do it: the story of brands being able to engage each and every customer, which was our founding mantra. It’s going to be a long journey, and we’re under no illusions how tough it will be. However, maybe one day, if there’s a brand equivalent of The Moth, we’ll be able to stand on stage and tell our story to the world.
If we evoke a fifth of the response many of the stories in the book have elicited from me, we’ll be on to a winner.
