Authentic Stories For The Social Age

Stories are all around us, yet, for many years organisations have tried to tell stories created by “spin doctors” with the aim of controlling the message and painting a rose-tinted version of the truth. And while newspapers, magazines and TVs controlled the information flows that approach worked brilliantly.

But the internet has changed everything.

The rise of public discussion forums, blogs and social media platforms have given the public the power to shout as loud as large corporations. One has to look no further than the “United breaks guitars” PR disaster of 2009 that knocked $180 million off the airlines share price (a fall of about 10%) to see the effect that one man, a guitar and a social media profile can have. 

The incident may have happened some 15 years ago, but the video is still on YouTube and has now amassed over 19 million views and spawned a Harvard Business School case study.

This example provided a stark warning that no longer do the spin doctors and advertising agencies control the narrative – its an organisation’s customers that are now in charge, and the narrative they convey is brutally authentic.

Even more recently, mobile phone video footage of a passenger being injured while being forcibly removed from an overbooked flight caused another PR disaster for the airline. 

These two instances show how the internet has shifted the balance of power in the media landscape.

“The most powerful people in a society are the myth makers”

Allan Bloom, Author of "The Closing of the American Mind"

Once upon a time…

Myths and legends have played a critical role in defining organisational culture, who “we” are and how we should behave. They have inspired people to war and to peace, to sacrifice themselves for the greater good and encouraged them to live their lives in line with society’s “norms”.

They also play a key part in what we like and what we buy.

Stories present our values in easy to understand terms – and hold warnings for those that would go against them. Robin Hood, the virtuous villain that robs from the rich to give to the poor and repressed, is surely a warning to any organisation to treat their people with respect and love.

While features, benefits and data talk to the brain, stories talk to the heart – they allow the listener to empathise with the story’s heroes and villains and relate the plot to their own situations.

Now there are a range of ways that you can write any story, but as human beings we are wired for story and there are a number of story arcs that can be applied that place the customer, the product or service and the company in different places.

Your organisation could portray itself as the mighty hero, using its latest product to rescue a damsel in distress. Or you could portray your service as the mighty hero, riding in to save the day just as the everyone feared all is lost.

Such egotistical stories may make executives feel good about their own success but they cause people to shut down as they are seen as boring self-congratulatory. 

It is often better to take  a step into the background and place your organisation as a helpful, but fairly minor character providing a helpful tool to aid the hers quest. Much like the Lady in the Lake furnished King Arthur with Excalibur, you could portray your customer as the hero, wielding your mighty product to overcome unfathomable odds.

During my time working in public relations, one of our most powerful tools was the customer success story or testimonial. Essentially this involved interviewing a willing customer and asking a series of questions about their work and how the client’s product or service had improved things for the customer. These stories can be incredibly powerful and were well received by trade magazines and readers alike.

While this latter approach is more empowering, it can still lack the authenticity needed to resonate in today’s digital world.

The authentic story

Stories about struggle and loss build empathy in the audience and allow the listener to feel the teller’s humanity. However, stories of how troubles were overcome can inspire others to overcome the barriers to their own success.

While being able to tell your organisation’s story is of course important, customers are inundated by marketing messages and have become adept at filtering them out no matter which channels you use. Too often brand content had a habit of becoming overly polished and rather than being received as truly authentic and believable, is received with the same lack of trust as advertisements – especially if they didn’t appear as native to the medium in which they were appearing – or worse yet were advertisements masquerading as “native” content.

For stories to be an effective way to inspire the listener, the storyteller has to be trusted or else the story will fall on deaf ears and numbed hearts.

Some years ago, I had the good fortune to meet and befriend Alexander Mackenzie a truly inspirational storyteller who has pioneered the use of the arts in business. During a recent conversation he told me how ‘in the old days’ he worked with Anita Roddick, founder of the Body Shop, to help find people willing to share her passion for natural beauty products that weren’t tested on animals in her stores. One of the key criteria of that search was that the storytellers had to share her passion for ethical products because “information not passed through the heart is dangerous” –  a phrase that struck him to the core due to the inherent authenticity in the statement and still lives with him to this day. 

A crisis of trust

The biggest fallacy about the digital revolution is that it allows marketers to scale and to personalise, and that these things really matter. Let me assure you right now they don’t matter to the customer.

This has got to come as a body blow to chief marketing officers that, according to a survey by Gartner, spend almost 30% of their budget on marketing technology!

Now I’m not saying that digital is bad, far from it! People expect the transparency and immediacy the digital revolution has enabled. Recommendation engines are of course helpful, but not if they get in the way of discovery. Too much automation at the wrong time simply gets in the way and perpetuates the belief that organisations don’t care and can’t be trusted.

According to the Edelman Trust Barometer, consumer trust in businesses fell a massive 10% in 2018 – dropping to its lowest point in the past decade to just 48% of the general population in the US saying they trusted businesses.

And this stat is even scarier to chief marketing officers. More than half the population in the US don’t trust businesses!

Concerns about data security have of course played a part here, but insincere and inauthentic advertising and branding have also contributed. Even corporate social responsibility (CSR) efforts are viewed with distrust – are organisations just trying to divert attention and whitewash over undisclosed issues?

 To build trust an organisation needs authenticity – they need to know “what sort of company they are” and communicate this through the telling of personal stories of success, failure and how they got to where you are now.

As Mark Schaefer so wonderfully says in his book Marketing Rebellion, your culture is your marketing, your employees brands are your company brand. Most importantly he says that marketing isn’t your story – marketing is your customer’s story.

He also highlights research by McKinsey that shows “two-thirds of the touch points during the evaluation phase of a purchase involve human-driven marketing activities like internet reviews, social media conversations, and word-of-mouth recommendations from friends and family.”

The real story in the digital world

So how are brands overcoming the challenge of the trust crisis. Well a not-so short post on here can’t cover every example, but there are a few common traits among those brands that remain so far unscathed.

A relentless pursuit of authenticity and ownership of the story and making sure that it’s not excessively self-promotional or grandiose is critical – stories need to be real and gritty and show the purpose behind the organisation.

One approach is to leverage leaders and employees own personal brands – content that is written or recorded from an individual’s perspective and shared on their own social channels tends to be perceived as more authentic than content pushed out through a brand’s cookie cutter content factory. This starts from the top, the likes of Richard Branson and Elon Musk both create and publish real, authentic content – and sometimes that gets them in trouble. Social media influencers or key opinion leaders can also be used in a similar manner to discuss real topics.

What matters to the customer is the ability to feel a connection to them, the issues they talk about and their organisations.

And the same is true throughout the organisation – any time there is an opportunity for authentic human to human interaction or authentic content creation is an opportunity to build trust.

The Six Influence Flows, The Business of Influence by Philip Sheldrake

Of course, the above approaches ignore the most powerful of the information flows – not those that go from brand to customer, but those that go from customer to customer. Finding ways to empower customers to share their experiences has been a crucial part of many brands successes, especially if real moments of delight and human to human connection can be built into the customer experience.

If your brand wants to become more human and build more human connections, why not schedule a call today?