Strivenn Thinking
Dissecting The Strategy of Great Storytelling
By Strivenn
It can sometimes be hard to believe when you see some B2B marketing materials, but B2B customers buy emotionally and only justify rationally. While just 5% of people remember a fact, over 60% of people will remember and be moved by a story.
Now usually customer stories focus around solving “pain points” which while compelling, don’t normally cause me to fight back the tears. That isn’t the case with an example I want to dissect today which is a truly phenomenal piece of storytelling by life sciences company Charles River Laboratories.
I was introduced to “Evie’s Story” during a talk by Gina Mullane, Corporate Senior Vice President and Chief Marketing Officer of Charles River Laboratories at the SAMPS meeting in Gothenburg and was completely blown away.
Even watching this again, the last thing Evie says almost brings me to tears.
While Charles River has an excellent reputation (and having visited the site in Boston I can see why) but Gina felt customers weren’t really connecting with the brand. And that’s a problem if you want to grow – research published in HBR has shown that customers that are fully connected are 52% more valuable than those that are just highly satisfied.
So Gina led a storytelling project to pivot the focus of the organisation and in doing so not only helped tell some amazing employee stories and really invigorate employee engagement, she also managed to tell some truly emotional stories about the people their employees help.
Evie’s story is so emotive, because its so authentic and pure. The story is mostly told by Evie and its just so beautifully simple.
Now there is a longer version of the story available at https://www.criver.com/everystep/ but I really like the short version embedded above because it so clearly exemplifies Freytag’s Pyramid.
Freytag’s Pyramid is a simple storytelling structure that has worked for thousands of years and can be traced back to Aristotle. Shakespeare mastered this structure and many adverts – especially those shown during the Super Bowl – use the format.
What I find most striking is that Evie’s story is told using just a few sentences clearly representing each part of the structure.
Act 1 – Exposition
“What did your doctor’s tell your mum and dad?”
“That I was going to die.”
Act 2 – Complication
“When you see children with the disease, you look at radiographs and you can’t see a skeleton.”
Act 3 – Climax
“It takes time to come up with a new medicine. You know it’s an old adage but patients are waiting”
Act 4- Reversal
“It takes little warriors that are going to say, you know i’m going to be the first one to take this drug, and we’re going to see if it works”
Act 5- Denouement
“Does it get better?”
“Yeah”
“Is it worth it?”
“Yeah. Nothing makes me scared”
It is a remarkable story and one I would have loved to be involved with the telling of. This short post is really a just a tribute to one of the most moving 100 seconds of video I have ever seen.
