Or are you caught “messaging” your audiences? Hurling facts and attributes and features at them, hoping the ad shields aren’t up?

 

Great stories connect us as humans, inspire us to act, and help us grow.

Stories transform products into brands. Candidates into leaders. Apathy into action. 

Yet we’re continuously amazed at how few client briefs really get it. The trend feels like it’s getting worse — as if the more techy marketing becomes, the more marketers lose the plot. 

In spite of the mounds of hard data correlating effective storytelling to better results — whether for a political candidate, a dish soap or a cereal — very few marketers actually have a playbook to repeatedly generate great stories to build their brands. 

And that’s a little scary when you think about the march of AI, making it more and more difficult to know what’s real or fake, and making it easier to get lost in the data.

We believe that Modern Storytelling has never been a more urgent capability for marketers to build. Sure, build that dynamic content machine and predictive analytics layer for your audience segments. But if you don’t have a clear, compelling, HUMAN INTEREST story about why your product or service matters, about why it’s different from others, the techy stuff won’t unlock the ROI you’re hoping for.  

In a recent conversation with Mark Addicks, my former manager at General Mills and now friend and neighbor, we spoke about timeless stories that create an unimaginably outsized impact for causes, people and brands. (Thank you for all the inspiration as always Mark!) 

• Saving oil-encrusted animals helped propel Dawn dish soap to another point of market share growth last year. Sure, plenty of the brand’s spend is against classic side-by-side cleaning demonstrations. But according to Pathmatics, the brand spent over $10 million showing birds cleaned of oil by Dawn in the last 12 months. So yeah, it should work on your dishes too!
• Cheerios’ historic bank of heartwarming family stories is still powering that brand. Mark’s favorite is “Adoption”; mine is “Breakfast in Bed”. Compare those to oat and gluten claim-driven ads that hundreds of other brands could run, and you see the importance of stories that communicate a true brand point of difference. 
• The Farmer’s Dog has created a super premium category of “human-grade fresh dog food.” Think about how easy that is to repeat to a friend – e.g., “yeah, it’s basically human food for your dog, and they ship.” The category spends more than $1.6bn annually in advertising alone, and yet The Farmer’s Dog is growing with less than a 4% share of spend. More evidence that true differentiation that is easily word-of-mouthable is still the most effective way to grow a brand. 

My new favorite “brand” stories are from Airbnb. Each tells a highly-relatable human story while striking a clear contrast with their foe: the hotel stay. Pretty smart for a category leader!  A Google search indicates these stories are contributing to some pretty impressive growth: 2023 topline +19.2% vs. the prior year, and net income up to $4.8bn, or +152%. 

My two recent favorites:

• Three female friends decide to go on a girls’ weekend away. The three who stayed at a hotel were swarmed by kids at the pool. And getting away from the kids was sort of the whole point. Yet the 3 who stayed at a nice Airbnb had their own pool all to themselves. The animation style is an especially nice storytelling device here too. 
• The one about the family not having to go to bed at the same time — because you wouldn’t leave your kids alone in a hotel room, but you would tuck them into their own bedroom at an Airbnb and then go downstairs to party (insert your own vision of “party” there!). 

Haberman has helped tell the stories of pioneers making a difference in the world for three decades now. What we observe is that while most marketers agree on the importance of storytelling, they don’t really know how to get there. Without a reliable process or proven track record, they then default to the short term, one-size-fits-all ad formula. 

Our a-ha is that the methods to inspire, brief and create those stories are broken. It’s built for a campaign-scale, top-down, and unable-to-iterate 1900’s marketing machine. 

(Meanwhile, the world’s leading marketers are probably running 20 or 200 live tests as you read this).  

As deep believers in the power of great storytelling, we’re honing new methods to create powerful, brand-building stories. We see storylearning as the new capability that differentiates brands that spend money on ads, from brands that see real growth from their marketing investment. 

Storylearning as a capability has five distinct characteristics, all related to how teams work: 

1. Hypotheses drive lots of small tests. It’s notably different than a few powerful client and agency types deciding things and then spending tens of millions of dollars hoping they’re right. And just like in proving or disproving any hypothesis, multiple experiments are required! Any one may “pass” or “fail.” But one data point does not make a trend.
2. Media (paid/owned/earned) is at the front of the strategy bus instead of the back. It’s the new and primary source of true consumer insight, and can generate millions of inputs every day if used smartly. What stories are resonating in real life with real people?
3. Creative and media teams work together, not in silos. It’s pretty clear that a story built for Hulu is different than a story built for TikTok. And that one platform might be better than another to test, versus scale. Yet we still have creative teams making things and throwing it over to a media team to get it out there.
4. Learning pace, agility and cost structure are core marketer KPIs. How quickly are we learning about the priority variables that we know can unlock the next phase of growth? How can we shrink the time and dollars it takes to make “good enough” content for testing, so we’re learning faster and for less money?
5. Finance, sales and marketing are all aligned around the leading indicators required for scale investments. Great stories generate feedback pretty quickly. Unless you are awash in cash, prove something works before you bet the farm. Yes, some of it still takes time, but the data says long term branding effects become visible after just six months. 

Over the coming months we’ll share modern storytelling learnings that generate great results. We’ll bring our clients into the dialogue where they’re okay with that. And share our own lessons as modern storytellers constantly trying to modernize ourselves. 

We hope you’ll share your perspective and chatting further. Let’s make it a story we build together.