Marketing’s “Storytelling” Problem
Marketing is all about communication. There are foundational laws to how communications work, and there are always emerging trends that claim they’ll improve on established practices. Those claims should be carefully tested before they are adopted, but when they appeal to intuition or common sense, trends often get more immediate traction than they may deserve. In many organizations today, the concept of “storytelling” as an important aspect of marketing communications appears to be one of those trends.
Advertising should effectively bring art to communications, but in evaluating the format of the art of marketing, decision-making around how best to turn communications into business results is ideally approached not based on the intuition or aesthetic opinions of the decision makers, but as a science.
If there is any broadly accepted firm scientific foundation for marketing practice developed from a science-oriented objective academic standpoint that can guide decision-making as universal “laws” for how marketing works, it is found in Byron Sharp’s book “How Brands Grow.”
Sharp begins Chapter Twelve with this: “ The key marketing task is to make a brand easy to buy; this requires building mental and physical availability. Everything else is secondary…Building mental availability requires distinctiveness and clear branding.”
It is hard to find people who argue with this definition of the key marketing task when they hear it. Where the arguments based on intuitions and aesthetic opinions quickly emerge is around the definition of “distinctiveness” for their brand. And increasingly, an organizational over-emphasis on attempts to be creatively “distinctive” are undermining the second requirement: clear branding.
The creative side of marketing can be really fun, so it’s no surprise that marketing teams want to be in a perpetual creative process. And since we all know that people love the stories found in media content, but don’t generally like ads, it seems like common sense to try and get consumers to like (notice or engage with) our brand’s advertising by making it more like the stories that draw people into content.
But here’s the thing about “mental availability” — you don’t have to actively enjoy what’s building it in order for it to work.
Yes, gaining attention for your content is critical — marketing communications must be noticed first in order to build mental availability. And it certainly doesn’t help if your branding is noticed just because of how annoying it is (though variations from strange to just the borderline of annoying can have a place for brands with “edgier” character). But there is a big conceptual chasm between developing advertisements that will be noticed and developing advertisements that are meant to be consumed in some specific episodic order in an effort to engage consumers with some degree of “brand storytelling”.
From Brand Character to Storytelling
Perhaps the process toward “storytelling” was set in motion with the recognition that clear branding is helped by establishing a clear brand character. This allowed advancement in marketing communications by allowing brands to establish and distinguish themselves in consumers’ minds with a sort of “persona” for the brand that consumers could more easily align with their own personal character.
Perhaps it was inevitable that where there is a brand character, it would come to feel that there needs to be active brand storytelling, especially when all that creative work around developing and testing stories is so much more fun than the spreadsheet side of building the business.
But what would the spreadsheets say about the potential of storytelling in supporting the brand via marketing’s core task to “generate mental availability”?
Step one in generating mental availability is reaching as many prospective consumers as possible. Step two is having the brand noticed by those we reach to establish “brand salience” as Sharp calls it, or “the propensity for a brand to be noticed and/or thought of in buying situations”. Sharp notes that this propensity is based on:
“…the quantity and quality of memory links to and from a brand. Quantity refers to the number of associations a buyer has about a brand name. Quality has two aspects: strength of association and relevance of the attribute.
…Over time brands build memory structures; most of these are very simple, such as associations with color, pack shape, fonts and tone. The associations are vital because they allow consumers to recognize a brand and its advertising.” (HBG 193–195)
The number of people with mental availability around the brand, or reach to all possible consumers, increases the potential consumer base. Mental availability is established in part by the number of associations with brand name, or frequency of noticed exposures in media terms.
There is also the requirement that the content be noticed — and here is the question for marketers. Do we assume that attention will be difficult to gain so we increase the number of tries (frequency) to get it? Or do we try to win attention faster through more attention-getting creative that extracts a special/more focused view among all the ads the consumer sees? The “breakthrough creative” school of thought, which includes the push for “brand storytelling”, focuses dollars in the second approach.
A Storytelling Story-Problem
When staking this claim, the expectations of the benefits of noticeability as a “quality” of content are too often loosely assumed using intuition vs. carefully evaluated using math. For example, when “noticeability” of our ad campaign is believed to require multiple ads shown in some specific order for “storytelling” purposes, there are downstream requirements for what needs to work for this approach to do better than average. Let’s look at a simple marketing “story problem”.
Brand X has a prospective consumer market of 10,000 consumers and converts the equivalent of 2,000 consumers a year 1x each. They earn $10,000 in revenue from this. They know, via 3 years of data through media mix modeling, that marketing incrementally drives 10% of that revenue ($1,000 or 200 incremental consumers), and that this delivers ROMI of $2 (every $1 spend yields $2 of revenue).
Over these past 3 years, it has cost them an average of $10 to reach 1000 consumers with 1 impression. They reach their market of 10,000 consumers at a 1x frequency for $100. They spend $400 of their $500 marketing budget on media, so they reach each consumer 4x through the year. The 200 attributed sales from 40,000 impressions gives media a .5% conversion rate.
This year, Brand X wants media to deliver 10 more sales (5% improvement) for the same budget. Leadership believes that ads need to be “higher quality” to do this, and has become convinced that the 4 impressions served this year need to be served with distinctive assets presented in a specific order to tell a story about the brand that has involved Brand X’s executives in its development. They believe that presenting content in this very specific way will break through to more people to convince them to buy.
Using digital targeting that allows the story to be presented in order raises the cost per 1000 impressions to $12. (It may also raise costs on content developing and testing — but that is not considered here). The brand cannot raise it’s media budget, so the overall reach for 4x impressions will be reduced from all 10,000 potential consumers to only 8,333 consumers. If these consumers converted at the same .5% on all impressions, there would be only 167 units sold. Because we need 210 units sold via this method, leadership is effectively claiming that the “storytelling” approach will yield a conversion rate of .63%.
Most likely, no one involved in the planning for this campaign has worked through this “story problem”, and leadership has definitely not staked themselves to the quantified hypothesis that storytelling will cause a 26% or greater improvement in conversion. But there is no way around the fact that this is the claim they are making, even if it hasn’t been stated explicitly.
Real Strategy Quantifies Performance Claims
Making a strategic “investment” that requires a significant improvement in a known historically stable (on average) variable should require some justification for the expected improvement. Not explicitly quantifying performance expectations so they can be assessed for realism & achievability is a problem when establishing strategy. In this case, what makes Brand X believe that this 26% increase in conversion rate is possible?
More importantly, for the marketers reading this who find themselves moving to “storytelling” programs that increase content costs, increase CPMs for reach, and require longer durations and/or higher budgets to achieve full reach, and higher conversion to break-even on those budgets (or to make up for lost reach without increased budgets); are you doing this story problem to understand what would make this work better for the business than what you’ve been doing, or are you shifting from what’s known to what’s not known based on decision makers’ intuitive sense that because they like stories in media, your brand should put stories in media to make ads more effective?
“Storytelling” and other Trends Need Careful Evaluation
Bottom line, there is a lot of evidence that a strong frequency of distinctive marketing communications that build brand salience is critical to supporting sales, But the idea that storytelling is a good way to build that distinctiveness is only a theory.
For brands who believe that their consumers need a story to really understand their benefits, this theory can be put into practice in today’s media market as a hypothesis and tested, but it must be recognized that it carries higher costs than brands would pay for reach on average, and so must deliver a quantifiable increase in performance to overcome that. When deciding to try “storytelling”, typically brands are not quantifying the required increase in performance to assess if they think it is truly achievable.
And it’s good communications practice to know that creative variation and rotation — of content that carries some shared brand “DNA” — is needed to help with attention building by avoiding “wear-out” and therefore allowing increased effective frequency. But if it has been established well, the brand’s “archetypal” character shouldn’t need “stories” any more than any of us need to hear the whole myth retold to understand the story behind characters like Narcissus, Achilles, Midas or, perhaps most fittingly, Icarus. Like these mythological characters, a good brand character contains the story within the character.
As with a journey to any extreme, before moving to a storytelling strategy, decision-makers should know what it will take to survive and thrive there. Perhaps this is good advice for brands considering any new trend in communications delivery; have you quantified how it can lead to stronger results than you core practice built around marketing’s key tasks?
Before anything else, have you built a brand character that carries a story within itself? Are you reaching all the people you can as often as you can with that distinctive and consistent brand character in cost-effective ways that vary enough to have a chance to be seen. Are you relying on new tricks to become above-average in a crowded marketplace, expecting consumers to apply a special type of seeing to your ads than they do to all others (acting from uniqueness bias)? Or are you realistic about ad uptake in general, so giving consumers more chances to make that view through frequency management? And do you have your products where people can easily find and buy them?
Do the above well, and you are doing marketing really well. That’s the simple but powerful moral of the marketing story (problem).
