Moment 101 - This 1 Skill Will Transform Your Life: Will Storr

Why do you connect with certain adverts or businesses? Is it because of their impressive facts or statistics, it’s more likely that you had an emotional connection that is hard for you to even describe rationally. In this moment Will Storr discusses how humans are storytelling animals, the very language of our brains are stories and they are the way we process the world around us. That’s why it doesn’t matter if you are a Fortune 500 company or talking to a new person, if you aren’t communicating with stories you aren’t communicating. Listen to the full episode here - https://g2ul0.app.link/cubZsa7Cdyb The conversation cards waitlist is now open, join now - http://bit.ly/3l7dhKG Will - https://willstorr.com/ https://twitter.com/wstorr?ref_src=twsrc%5Egoogle%7Ctwcamp%5Eserp%7Ctwgr%5Eauthor Watch the episodes on YouTube - https://www.youtube.com/c/TheDiaryOfACEO/videos Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:03Steven Bartlett?

  In the diary of a CEO, we have hundreds of questions that have been left by our guests. And we've put them on these cards. And on these cards, you have the question that's been left in the diary of a CEO. The name of the person who wrote the question. And if you turn it over, there's a QR code. If you scan that code, you can see which guest answered the question and watch the video of them answering it. Every time I've done this podcast, and every time we've asked the kind of questions we ask here, I feel a tremendous sense of affinity to the guest. And our aim with these cards is that you can create that sense of connection through vulnerability at home with the people you love the most. And I have some good news for you.

• 0:44Steven Bartlett?

  As of today, you can add your name to the waiting list to be the first in line to get your own set of Conversation Cards at theconversationcards.com. That is theconversationcards.com. On that point of storytelling, you mentioned storytelling there in our narrative. Your book in 2019 was about storytelling. I, having worked in marketing, was very compelled to read this book for the, probably, you know, we talked before we started recording, that a lot of people will see a book about, with the word storytelling on the front of it, and think that they can use it from a marketing capacity or in a business sense. What have you learnt about how people can tell great stories in the context of business and marketing?

• 1:25Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, so quite a lot. I teach business storytelling at Section 4, which is an American ed tech organisation. So I do a course there in the science of storytelling for business. And, you know, we are storytelling animals. We think in story. We, you know, narrative is basically, you know, how we experience ourselves and life. And so, as I say in that course, if you're not communicating with story as a marketer, you're not communicating. You know, logic and facts and data and statistics, that's not the language of the brain. The language of the brain is beginning, middle and end, a character, overcoming obstacles. I think a lot of the stuff we've been talking about

• 2:10Speaker 01

  Is important, especially the idea that people think with their feelings. You know, it's feelings first, story second, the story justifies the feelings. And so if you want to tell persuasive stories, you need to first understand exactly who you're communicating with. And you need to understand how they feel about the world, how they feel about themselves, how they feel about.

• 2:35Speaker 01

  You know, justice and what their values are. And so that means understanding them kind of tribally, what groups do they belong to? Who are their heroes? Who are their villains? What motivates them? What demotivates them? So, so before you can sort of write the story, you need to figure out how they feel about the world.

• 2:53Steven Bartlett?

  So a bad story then would be one that was, because you know, I thought about this a lot. And my previous business was very successful in storytelling. So my first company, Social Chain, it's grown to be a very big business, maybe a thousand employees worldwide. We were, we started out as a, as a marketing agency, never had a sales team. Because we, we focused on telling stories, those stories were told on social media and on stage by me. So when I would go up on stage and talk about our agency to try and win business from Apple or Coca Cola, whoever it was. I would actually start by talking about me and my relationship with my mother. And that would be the first sentences out of my mouth when I walked on stage. If there was a thousand people or 15,000 people there, it would be about my mother. And through that story about my mother and my, and my upbringing and my battles and all those things.

• 3:37Steven Bartlett?

  Eventually you'd learn about our business and what we do and about the great work we do. But that was the preface of it. And that meant we never needed a, a, a sales team. I've always believed that if I'd walked on stage and started with a case study.

• 3:51Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 3:53Steven Bartlett?

  I would have, I would have had to have a sales team at Social Chain knocking on doors.

• 3:56Speaker 01

  Definitely.

• 3:57Steven Bartlett?

  I think this is one of the biggest mistakes businesses make. When they pitch, when they, when they speak on stage, when they post on social media. I think they have a, they believe that the listener wants big numbers and to how many views they got for their clients. Or, you know, and it just doesn't seem to be consistent with reality.

• 4:16Speaker 01

  No, it's not. I mean, so what you're doing when you're going into about your mother is you're connecting emotionally. So people are.

• 4:23Speaker 01

  You know, wanting, they're on your side immediately and you're making them feel good, you're making them feel things emotionally. The kind of framework that I use for business storytelling is that, is that, is that, you know, essentially, people's brains process reality in the same way. And that's the, you know, so they're the hero of their story. You're not the hero standing on the stage. The company that's selling to you isn't the hero. They're the hero of their own story. They are, you know, they've got goals they're trying to pursue. We'll have, you know, that which are the plots of our lives.

• 4:54Steven Bartlett?

  The audience.

• 4:55Speaker 01

  Yeah, the audience, the person you're selling to. And then there's a brilliant story analyst called Christopher Booker, who wrote this amazing book called The Seven Basic Plots. And he writes about archetypal characters in storytelling that he calls light figures. And so the light figure is, the example he uses are the three ghosts in A Christmas Carol, the Charles Dickens Scrooge story. So Scrooge is the hero of that story. But the three ghosts come in to show him Christmas past, Christmas present, Christmas future. They help him get what he needs, which is to become a better, more selfless, more generous, more loving, giving person. So that they are going to, they arrive in his story to kind of show him the way to help him get what he needs. And so that,

• 5:37Speaker 01

  that's what I argue, that's the appropriate position for most companies and organizations that need is not to be the hero, because your audience feels like they're the hero. You're the light figure. You're there to help them get what they want. So when you go straight in with here's all my awards, here's what this person said about me, here's some statistics and stuff, you're not a light figure, you're presenting as the hero. What people really want to know is how can you help me get what I want? And that's, that's the story that you have to tell.

• 6:03Steven Bartlett?

  What kind of example can you give me to really make that, make me understand that in a real practical sense? Is there a brand you've seen do this really well? Is there an example of a?

• 6:14Steven Bartlett?

  I mean, my brain went to Nike for some reason.

• 6:16Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, that's, Nike is a really interesting example. So, so obviously, one of the things that Nike has done recently is it's done that ad campaign around Colin Kaepernick, which is controversial, but did, I think, I think they're selling up to like 6% like after that, that ad campaign. And that's a really good example of an organization who is behaving as a light figure. So that Colin Kaepernick campaign has nothing to do with shoes. There's, you know, what they're not doing is going, our shoes will make you run 8% faster. We've got these sprung soles. We've got these amazing laces that won't trip you up or whatever. You know, their stats list is not in there. It's purely, they're telling a story.

• 7:00Speaker 01

  They've figured out that their client base are mostly believing, you know, this set of beliefs around the world. And, and those are goals, you know, people who, you know, the, the target audience that they're, they're appealing to want to achieve this kind of racial social justice and it's important to them. So, so what Nike are basically saying is, you know, we are light figures in this story. You know, we are, we are on the side of the Colin Kaepernick's of the people who are kneeling. You know, we believe that black lives matter. And, and so they're presenting as a light figure. And, and if you think about it rationally, it's kind of crazy. Like, why would a shoe company have this political thing? But it's because of the storytelling, because, because they're presenting as a light figure

• 7:45Speaker 01

  who, who was engaged in the kind of, you know, this particular mission in the world. And, you know, in, in order to kind of, to, to, to kind of join the mission, you, you buy the Nike shoes and, and it, and it worked, you know, it works really well. I mean, one of the archetypal examples that I talk about, that I love is, there was an ad that was broadcast, I think it was in the 60s by Volkswagen. And it was the first kind of modern ad, advert, it was the first, it was the first advert that you would look at and recognize as the kind of advertising that we do today. So before this Volkswagen ad. You know, all ads were just stats lists. Here's this amazing, you know, tire and you know,

• 8:28Speaker 01

  this will get you naught to sixty and whatever. And then this Volkswagen did this amazing ad where it just, it was black and white because it was still in the days of black and white. And they had, it just showed this guy, it was all snowing, there's a big blizzard outside. And this guy gets in his car, he turns, it's like, it's like, you know, just before dawn, turns on his ignition, drives his car through the blizzard, through the blizzard, through the blizzard, opens these huge shed doors, and then he had this big engine start up and outdrives his snowplow. And it's, how does the guy who drives the snowplow get to the snowplow? And it's just Volkswagen. And that's it. Really simple, really effective story. And it's showing Volkswagen as this light figure. We are helping the hero achieve what he wants. And, you know, I don't

• 9:10Speaker 01

  believe that the Volkswagen was particularly good at driving through blizzards. I don't believe that. And they certainly weren't making any factual claim in the sense that we are better than Land Rover and whatever, whatever, whatever, doing this because of this stat. It was as simple as that. And it revolutionized marketing. It changed everything because they'd figured out that kind of light figure form of storytelling.

• 9:32Steven Bartlett?

  And are they saying that the Volkswagen, Volkswagen enables you to be the hero that

• 9:38Speaker 01

  Exactly, yeah.

• 9:39Steven Bartlett?

  And Nike are saying that the Nike shoe, associating it with Colin Kaepernick, enables you to be the social activist hero.

• 9:48Speaker 01

  Hero, exactly, yeah.

• 9:49Steven Bartlett?

  Like Colin Kaepernick was.

• 9:50Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly. Yeah, yeah.

• 9:53Steven Bartlett?

  Fascinating. I'm just going to change a few things about my, a few of my companies, I think, basis of that. Yeah, I think, I think we, I think in the course of business, we all forget that emotion is the most important thing. I'm thinking about all the newsletters that my companies have been writing. I've got various companies and the newsletters they write and the videos we make and how, and how sometimes we. We think that facts and figures and information is what the viewer is looking for in their lives. But the most compelling way to draw them in to whatever we're doing, whether it's a newsletter or a tweet or whatever, is by putting emotion first and really thinking about what the emotion of the content is.

• 10:30Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, exactly. And with the Nike example, I mean, we live in, since the global financial crisis, we live in heightened political times. And so, you know, and people are always tribal. And so, you know, one of the big things that the successful kind of persuaders do is to make those tribal appeals. And, you know, sometimes it works with Colin Kaepernick, like with the Gillette razor campaign, it didn't work because you're kind of essentially attacking your target audience. So that was, you know, less successful. I think there was a terrible Pepsi ad with Kendall Jenner.

• 11:02Steven Bartlett?

  Oh gosh, I was thinking about that.

• 11:03Speaker 01

  Where they were kind of basically, yeah, where it was just making this, yeah.

• 11:08Steven Bartlett?

  Well, it put a super rich, beautiful model, white woman as the hero against social injustice.

• 11:16Speaker 01

  And drinking this sugary drink is going to help. Yeah, you know, so.

• 11:19Steven Bartlett?

  It's just all off, isn't it?

• 11:20Speaker 01

  Yeah. So I think organisations are sensing that partly how we can be a light figure these days is by presenting as people who are assisting in these political goals that have become very important to people, especially young people. And some people are getting it right, some people are getting it wrong.

• 11:40Steven Bartlett?

  There's a real science to it though, isn't there?

• 11:42Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 11:42Steven Bartlett?

  The more we've spoken, I've realised how there is a science to it when you understand the roles and also the audience, the roles of the characters in your content or your piece. And also where the, it's really about where the audience sees themselves, as you say.

• 11:56Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 11:57Steven Bartlett?

  And how they feel represented.