The Power of Narrative

Why POV Stories Work (and Why You Should Care)

We all navigate the world through stories. Some just know how to do it better than others.

Situation

Recently, I’ve been working on a project to improve the website of a non-profit client that is striving to modernize how it communicates with the world. Accustomed to the one-to-many, broadcast-model world of yore, this organization continues to wrestle with how to best move away from attempting to tell the brand story it wants to exist and instead toward allowing its customers to write and tell their own versions of that brand story as they experience and understand it.

I was hired to fix one aspect of the customers’ potential touch-points with this organization: the content on its lead-generating website.

Now, this client puts a not-so-small fortune into ads to drive people to this site. And this produces a lot of traffic. Because of this, the site ought to be able to improve people’s perception of the organization — an explicit business goal. Yet stakeholders continually debate how to create this attitude shift in the marketplace.

If there’s one thing I wish I could help my colleagues and any organization in a similar situation understand, it’s how the human mind relies on narrative to make decisions. This knowledge can only improve the timing, delivery, and impact of one’s message.

Challenge

As of 2018, my client’s website is woefully underutilizing the single most powerful asset in its brand arsenal — millions upon millions of converted leads who are in many cases deeply dedicated to the organization. These people have emotion-laden stories of struggle and triumph that are moving even to people who have no interest in what my client is selling.

Yet we’re slow to adopt any content strategy that would leverage these stories in any meaningful way. We continue to create the same fact-based, institutional-voice content for our client that we’ve been doing for years. This content seems to come from the assumption that visitors simply lack the logical understanding of our client. I don’t have to wonder what outsiders think of what we create: we’ve asked them in a series of different tests. And it’s evident in the way they come to, navigate around, and ultimately leave the site—especially those that don’t convert.

Their responses are telling. “You spend too much time talking about yourselves.” “Don’t tell me what you believe, show me how it impacts people like me.” “Show me what good you’re doing in the world.”

In other words, they don’t want a product. They want an experience. And they want it to support their deeply held worldview.

In short, the content doesn’t hit home with people because it does little to motivate them personally. Odd, considering that my client amounts more or less to a lifestyle brand. Not so odd, though, since many clients I have worked with — from tech to banking — have also suffered from content similarly focused on themselves and/or their own organizational structure. Branding is a universal challenge.

It’s a false assumption to think that you have something that people are just waiting around for the chance to get their hands on, and that all it takes is a list of features to convince them to buy. If this is all it took, history wouldn’t be littered with companies with revolutionary products that failed all the same.

So, if being good or even innovative isn’t enough to ensure success with customers, then what is? Let’s delve into the science of the mind and brain to find out.

The Power of Relationships

We all know from life experience how to manipulate others. We’re all more than moderately successful in getting our friends and loved-ones to do us favors, to change their minds, to alter their behavior, etc.

How? Simple. We lean on their emotions.

But observing that this works is a far cry from understanding how and even why it does. So what is it about our emotions that makes us all susceptible to another’s machinations?

To get to the why (and therefore better understand how) we motivate (a euphemism for “manipulate,” really) and are motivated by others, let’s look at the basics of behavioral economics, which Simon Sinek puts simply:

People don’t buy what you do, they buy why you do it.

According to this, people don’t believe you based on facts.

People act based on promises.

People are interested in possibilities.

Those are not logic propositions; they are emotional motivators.

From Relationships to Social Movements

This is what drives social movements — fads, trends, protests, etc. It’s the emotional promise of something better. This presents hope. Improved outcomes, stronger relationships, a deeper sense of self, etc.—these all tap into our instinctual drive to seek a better station in life. That is experiential. It is not transactional.

Some companies out there do this extremely well — think Apple, Tesla, and Nike. These companies have become experts in leveraging the basic emotional instinct we all have to seek a better situation. Growth and advancement are experiential.

These brands give their audiences far more than just a product (Sinek’s What) in exchange for money. Sure, the products have to be useful; but it’s not merely the exchange of money for property alone that motivates people to camp out days in advance for a new iPhone. People don’t only buy what Apple sells; they also buy what Apple represents. And often it’s the idea of what others will think of them because they bought that gadget. Again, relationships are experiences.

Some may argue that an iPhone isn’t even the best of breed out there. So why do people clamor over it, but not a Samsung?

Certainly, it’s not because of the value chain or shareholder value. These are no doubt a huge part of the utility these companies offer. They are particularly adept at uniting disparate parts, orchestrating production, and creating supply chains in ways that their buyers could never do (Sinek’s How). But few consumers even know about these to be motivated by such trivialities.

No, the real reason people go to great lengths to buy from, follow, and advocate for these brands is that these brands, like any social movement, effectively convey a reason to believe (Sinek’s Why). Often despite — or maybe even precisely because of — the controversy doing this may cause.

Providing a reason to believe gives customers meaning. It’s social capital. In return, these audiences reward the brands with loyalty. Besides profit, a byproduct of this exchange is this: the brands gain influence to change their users’ attitudes and behaviors about other distally related things. The only limit to this earned power is the brands’ ability to relate the other things back to the original Why. This is why Apple (a hardware company?) can stand up for human rights and still have it make sense. It’s why Tesla can diversify from cars to batteries, solar power, and even mass-transit tunnels and rockets and mars colonization—and have people believing it could all happen. It makes us see a better future. A better experience. That’s far more intoxicating than exchanging cash for a widget.

So what do you do if you want to be like these companies and move past What to employ a Why effectively?

Quite honestly, to really understand this, it pays dividends to understand how the brain works on a fundamental level. For a simple introduction to neuroscience, have a look at my article “How the brain works: neuropsychology for dummies.”

If you want to skip all that, let’s just say that we humans are driven to connect. More than just driven, we are physically hard-wired.

Connections: What’s Behind It All

At the close of the 20th century, researchers indirectly discovered what has come to be called “mirror neurons” — a set of brain structures that studies have shown allow us to learn by observation. That is, when we observe someone acting in a certain way, e.g. sticking their tongue out, we feel compelled to “mirror” the action by doing the same in return.

These mirror neurons are thought to be located in several positions in the brain, and one key area is the inferior frontal cortex, i.e. between the limbic and prefrontal cortex. Due to their location, it appears that mirror neurons serve as a highway for information to travel on between the “emotional brain” and the “logical brain.” (For more on these terms, read “How the brain works: neuropsychology for dummies”).

That is, it appears that mirror neurons are key in both interpersonal communication (logical brain) and the expression of emotion (emotional brain).

This discovery provides an explanation behind why people are sometimes motivated by new information and sometimes not. In short, it recognizes that external stimuli (e.g. language, as processed by the prefrontal cortex) and internal reactions (e.g. emotion, as induced by the limbic system) are part of the same brain mechanism: both are functions that all humans use to understand themselves as a part of their environment.

This discovery shows the importance of empathy on everything from child development to adult behavior. This created a renewed vigor among scientists, who now see social connection as a basic human need, just like food and shelter.

So, how is social connection created? Simple: stories.

Narrative: Learning by Watching Others

Narrative is instinctual. In fact, throughout history telling stories has been the key tactic we humans have used to build communities and, thus, fulfill our basic need for social connection.

Even in primitive societies — and especially in illiterate cultures — oral narrative in the form of evolving, collaborative storytelling is the primary means of knowledge transfer. It’s the way these cultures train their younger generations in the skills they’ll need for survival.

Moreover, even in our modern societies full of technologies primitive groups can’t even fathom, storytelling is immensely important. That is, regardless of technological advancement of the group, narrative continues to be a valuable tactic for building and maintaining our ingroups. It is the way we all learn our place in the larger universe of uncertainty. It is the source of meaning — both personal and collective.

The existence of mirror neurons helps to explain the role of narrative in all human societies. That’s because a second discovery has been made about what mirror neurons do for us: they also fire when we hear stories being told:

Mirror neurons — those brain cells that allow us to experience the emotions of another person, like feeling sad when we see a sad person — also fire when we’re at the movies or reading books or whenever we witness a story character emoting.

So what does this mean?

It means that science has discovered why we can learn even when we’re not directly present, i.e. by indirect observation. That’s exactly what stories are.

For example, we don’t need to experience death to know that it is sad. By merely hearing someone explain how they’ve dealt with the death of a loved one, we also learn important emotional and social lessons.

From Observation to Our Own Thoughts

Whether it’s stories about death or other societally important topics, we are surrounded by narrative. Movies, books, news, or just talking with friends — every moment of every day we are confronted with stories about someone who did something that we can learn from. We quite literally navigate our world through narrative: we make sense of our surroundings, our position within our social groups, our possibilities, and even our own bodies through stories. And when we’re not consuming stories, we’re making them up in our minds, giving words (in our prefrontal cortex) to the emotions we felt or are feeling (in our limbic system):

Like our language instinct, a story drive — an inborn hunger for story hearing and story making — emerges untutored universally in healthy children. Every culture bathes their children in stories to explain how the world works and to engage and educate their emotions. Perhaps story patterns could be considered another higher layer of language. A sort of meta-grammar shaped by and shaping conventions of character types, plots, and social-rule dilemmas prevalent in our culture.

What’s more, consuming stories is more active than we ever thought. Far from a passive pastime, it helps us understand ourselves and gives us greater empathy toward others.

The story doesn’t even have to be true; fictional stories work to the same end:

[R]eading fiction significantly increase[s] empathy towards others, especially people the readers initially perceived as “outsiders” (e.g. foreigners, people of a different race, skin color, or religion).

And it’s not the propositional logic provided by stories that is at work here; it’s the empathetic impact:

Storytelling, especially in novels, allows people to peek into someone’s conscience to see how other people think. This can affirm our own beliefs and perceptions, but more often, it challenges them.

Indeed, narrative is an effective method for bypassing the stumbling blocks that arise due to various limitations in communication. In short, empathy and understanding can become the sole reason for telling a story:

Humans are inclined to see narratives where there are none because it can afford meaning to our lives — a form of existential problem-solving.

In fact, truly effective storytelling immerses its audience in such a way that they go beyond empathizing with the subject of the story and begin to assume that they are the subject:

A story is immersive when it effectively induces a deictic shift, which is the moment when you assume a viewpoint of one of the characters of the story, and you forget yourself.

It is because of our biology and social nature that stories have power. The power they have is one to change attitudes. They do this by changing meaning.

TL;DR: Stories Change Minds

Because of the powerful position narrative has in human culture, stories can shift the way people think. This is potential gold for organizations in all sectors of the economy.

As it concerns my client, this is what is missing from its current content. The lack of story means that its site is void of the positive influence that it can prove it has had on people’s lives. Eschewing this in favor of bland description has created nothing more than brochure-ware. Listing facts does not motivate people to read; it certainly doesn’t make them want to act — to change themselves in any way. In fact, it only makes them dig in their heels. They want to fight back with logic.

No, there is no single more effective means of relaying information than to allow people to tell their own story. There’s a reason why UGC is considered the holy grail of marketing.

Leveraged appropriately, compelling stories of real people facing and overcoming challenges can be used effectively to

• reduce the deficit of understanding potential leads may have toward an organization, i.e. by giving them a reason to relate;
• help potential leads to understand what they are being asked to do and address their doubts and struggles by showing how converted leads have dealt with similar issues;
• assist key strategic audiences in discovering for themselves how the organization intersects with their personal interests, i.e. by showing how individual organization members and organization experiences combine to support and improve their communities.

Now What?

“So,” you might be saying, “what do I do with all of this?” Well, the first step to solving your content problem is recognizing you have a problem. The next step is knowing what you’re working with. I hope this article helps somewhat to that end.

But, if you’re looking for what to do with your content, that’s what I plan to do in a series of articles. For the truly impatient, consider reading “What Narrative Is (and What It Isn’t).”