American Airlines, Customer Service Ninjas, and the Power of a True Brand Story

The new American Airlines rebranding has received a lot of attention lately, much of it disproving the old adage that there’s no such thing as bad press.  In addition to their new logo – which I, in apparently contrarian mode, happen to like – there is new advertising, which is, to be generous, less than breakthrough (for a pithier appraisal, see Robert Passikoff’s commentary in Forbes).

The airlines press release proclaims “The ads, featuring both customers and employees, illustrate the important linkage between the knowledge American employees possess and how that knowledge aligns with the reasons people fly.”

Good thought, but the run-of-the-mill, introductory ad at least is self-congratulatory and company focused rather than being convincingly customer-centric.

Using Real Humans, But Missing their Real Humanity

While American’s new made up story did nothing to get me to look at them in a new way, an encounter with their true story did.  Last night, while scrambling to use American Advantage Miles to take a spring break vacation, a service rep, who asked to be identified only as Thomas F., not only went the extra mile, but seemed willing to make a round-the-world trip to get us what we needed.  He spent a generous amount of time on the phone, persisting despite the inherent challenge of our late booking, limited availability, our desire not to pay the exorbinant fees tacked on if flying their “partner” airlines,  and our need to get kids back into school on a timely basis.  This, mind you, was after my wife and I (OK, really just my wife) had spent countless hours online trying to work it out before ever calling.

To our surprise, American not only let us deal with a real human being, but an absolutely awesome one.  About 30 minutes into the adventure, when I could tell that every dead end only made Mr. F. more determined to see us through, I (the inveterate customer-service complainer) actually asked “How do you just keep going?”  His reply:  “At this point, it becomes a mission with me.”

If your Employees are On A Mission, Let the World Know

This unusally positive experience made me wonder why American had to get so grandiose in their brand positioning and the subsequent campaign. Why could they not tell their own true stories and connect human-to-human rather than corporation-to-public?

The answer, I think, is that big brands and their big agencies are still more comfortable with “story selling” than true story telling.  American and the big brand world at large would do well to strip away the self-importance, pretense and even the big production values to simply let their brand truth shine through.

A 3-Step Plan to Get from “Story Selling” to Powerful Brand Storytelling

1)  Listen to your customers. Really open up your ears. Brands typically pay for a lot of focus groups, surveys or even one-on-one interviews, but few manage to really hear and understand the feedback. Allow your researchers to tell you what’s really being said, not just what the organization has predetermined it wants to hear.  Then tailor your customer experience to that before you ever start worrying about logos or ads.

2)  Listen to your own people.  Apply the above to your own employees.  Continually. And provide them with both the invitation and the means to keep telling  you what’s really happening on the front lines. This will improve both your operations and communciations.

3)  Tell their story in human terms, not corporate or even ad speak.
“Change is in the air,” and “There’s something new in the air,” accompanied by corporate fantasy images of customers and employees looking longingly, lovingly up at airplanes, is generic advertising at best.  If you’re really hearing what employees and customers are saying, you’ll find a true brand voice, a convincing, human voice and a compelling, believable message.

New American Airlines Commercial:

My well-tabbed copy of “Tell the Truth” shows that there’s much to discuss between these covers

A few years ago, comedian/social commentator Stephen Colbert coined the exceptionally apt phrase “truthiness” to describe the political/commercial/cultural corruption of the entire concept of telling the truth in America,  lampooning the growing preference given to opinion and feeling over fact.

In their relatively new – and, I believe, important – book “Tell the Truth:  Honesty is Your Most Powerful Marketing Tool,”  Sue Unerman and Jonathan Salem Baskin take on the topic of truth and its absolute importance to marketing, offering this fairly optimistic conclusion:   “More and more marketers are turning away from easily constructed spin and digging deep in to the truth of their brands. We believe that in five years we’ll look back on the art of spin as an anachronism.”

While I can’t agree with their conclusion, I encourage everyone to read their often enlightening book (that light emanating from a number of good interview-based case histories), because I do agree with the statement that immediately follows it: “The truth is the future of successful advertising.”  In fact, I would expand that to read “Truth is the future of advertising – and the lack of it will be end of advertising.”

Signs of the End:  Surveys Predict the Adpocalypse
If you track the various trust-related surveys, you know that the trend is advertising trust is down.  Way down.  You can see it in Nielsen’s Global Trust in Advertising and Brand Messages, and in Edelman’s Brand Trust Barometer.  The only way to change that direction is to build trust; and the only way to do that is to start by telling, and showing, the truth.  Unless we do that, start looking for advertising trust in the single digits – and also start looking for a new job.

Highlights of “Tell the Truth”
I’m glad to say that there are two many meaty issues raised by this book to be adequately condensed into a manageable review, but even a look at the table of contents will give you a good overview of their observations and recommendations:

The Case for Truth

Content

1. Acknowledge Reality
2. Deliver Real Change to Services and Company Structure
3. Take Consumers on the Brand Truth Journey with You
4. Enlist Third-Party Advocates

Context

1. Be close
2. Find a Truth Turning Point
3. Use Point-of-Action Media
4. Leverage Routine

 Note:   I was provided a copy of this book by the publisher after I commented, in another copyklatsch post, on an abstract of it. I have no financial or other material interest in the book.

RECOMMENDED ADDITIONAL READING 
Review of “Tell the Truth:  Honesty is Your Most Powerful Marketing Tool”
Branding Magazine

How simplicity lets your brand truth speak for itself.

Siegel+Gale, a leading branding agency and creator of one of my favorite surveys, the  Global Brand Simplicity Index, recently tweeted a request for definitions of simplicity. A few samples:

Magnus Kähler ‏‪@kahler Simplicity is not about being simplistic. It’s about a smart & clear entry point into a rich, multifaceted idea/concept.
claudiu florea ‏‪@claudinho Simplicity is: thoughtful reduction, focus on the meaningful
Dan Bryant ‏‪@DanBryantPR  Simplicity is the absence of hyperbole and conjecture – a rare thing in the comms world!

Good thoughts – but not quite the essence of it.  My definition?

“Simplicity is self-evidence, with all but the truth stripped away.”
Why is that important?  Work it backwards.  Brands are built on and sustained by trust.  Trust emanates from truth.  The truth of brand promises is that which is self-evident in consumers’ experiences with a brand.   The nature of a brand’s true benefits can best be observed in those experiential moments – can most clearly be self-evident – if all extraneous “brand dressing” is stripped away. In short: simplicity.

Identify and Communicate the Simple Truth About Your Brand
At Creative on Call, we see our mission as helping clients identify and communicate the simple truth about their brands.   What can you strip away from your brand positioning, brand communications, brand experiences that isn’t absolutely essential to the core truth you offer?

Suggested reading:
3 Ways Simplicity Pays (highlights from the Global Brand Simplicity Index)
Tell the Truth:  Why Honesty is your Most Powerful Marketing Tool

How will we communicate, and maintain, brand trust in a world of intelligent and autonomous devices?

You have to admire the folks at Altimeter Research. They seem to like asking big questions and then getting the world to join them in narrowing in on answers (not a bad model for all of us).

This summer they raised a series of questions, one of which, regarding the nature of The Dynamic Customer Journey, I took on in a previous post.  Now I’d like to address the last question in the series, about the nature of living, and doing business, in an ever more Sentient World (to use their term for the unending expansion of intelligent devices).   Still with me?  Good, because it actually matters to the future of your brand marketing efforts.

Altimeter lays out their premise in fairly optimistic terms:   “As more and more inanimate objects start to develop data and intelligence as they connect to each other, a network of autonomous interactions will emerge. In the future, our devices will be able to manage, analyze, report, predict, forecast, and more — while humans experience their days more intelligently and efficiently.”

Can We Develop Trust Human-to-Machine?  Can We Market that Trust?
As they envision a technotopia in which untold benefits accrue to humans in a device-driven world, one question needs to be asked:  How will machines get us to trust them?  And how will marketers be able to communicate, and maintain, a trustworthy brand experience?

The Institute of Cognitive Sciences and Technologies frames the issue this way:  “Complex social phenomena are strictly associated with trust, which is a key factor to understand how cooperation, economic exchanges and communications develop in society. But how about artificial objects? Can we still talk about trust? At ISTC the Trust, Theory and Technology Group (T3) has shown the answer is more complex than expected.”  More complex, indeed.  And while the ISTC is about the work of finding a way to measure the trustworthiness of machines “able to solve problems like and better than humans,” we can begin to look at how intelligent devices are received in the here and now to help guide our near-future efforts.

Selling Artificial IQ Requires A Higher Brand EQ
In Britain, the National Health Service (NHS) is in the process of substituting an intelligent in-home monitoring device for many duties previously borne by physicians, at great expense to the NHS.   Only 5000 users are currently in trial with the “telehealth” system, but so far the acceptance of the device has been promising, as have the results:  a 20% reduction of emergency admissions, 14% fewer days in the hospital – and users are 45% less likely to die than non-users.

Obviously, the NHS will do well to promote the statistical benefits of using telehealth – but they will also need to observe the emotions surrounding it, as begin to emerge in this Daily Mail article on the subject:

“June, from York, credits telehealth with restoring her independence. She is a widow and suffers from diabetes and a heart condition. Early last year, she began to suffer problems with water retention and was eventually admitted to hospital with heart failure. After returning home from hospital she was offered a telehealth system. ‘I kept getting a very fast heartbeat and was nervous about doing anything,’ she says. ‘But I took my blood pressure every time I wanted to leave the house as well as daily checks. If my oxygen levels went down they called me up immediately and checked I was OK. ‘After a couple of weeks I felt much more confident about going out. I learnt to manage the condition myself.’

Confidence.  Independence. And, as one other user noted, freedom from endless waits at NHS facilities.  By clarifying and communicating solid emotional benefits that proceed from the rationally understood product features, the NHS – or any of us in a similar situation – should be able to build the trust that pure technological performance may not.

Do you have any personal or professional experience with intelligent products and, if so, how did that experience impact your sense of trust in the “Sentient World?”

HOW TO CREATE CONTENT THAT WILL BUILD BRAND TRUST RATHER THAN DESTROY IT

I recently wrote an article for Branding Magazine about the potential for letting the ever-more-hungry Content Beast devour your brand credibility.  It’s a problem that affects “real” journalism (see the piece in The New York Times about recent high-profile cases of plagarism)  as well as brand journalism. How do you keep the beast fed without cannibalizing your own work?  Where exactly are the lines separating curation, citation and plagiarism? And when does repurposing devolve into self-defeating redundancy?  All of these concerns can undercut the reception and perception of any brand’s content, potentially turning what should be trust-building communications into occasions for questioning your brand credibility.

I hope you’ll read the article, but I also thought  (at the risk of redundant repurposing) that I’d share the article’s conclusion here:

3 Qualities of Trust-building Brand Content

1.  Content needs to be true – in the largest sense.
Brand advertising “pushes” limited messages in front of audiences via paid media, and tends to be selectively truthful (which is not in the least to suggest advertising needs be untrue).  On the other hand, content marketing looks to “pull” consumers toward brands by speaking to their larger lives, and therefore must be more holistically truthful, addressing not only a brand’s most positive benefits but, in fact, the totality of the consumer lives which a brand seeks to serve.  In short, brand content needs to deal with both the good and the bad, acknowledging which needs it can and cannot meet and in so doing create trust through transparency, openness and, above all, helpfulness over the long haul.

2.  Content needs to be thoroughly original.
To say that your content is original has to be more than just saying “it’s not plagiarized.”   The real question is, Does your content offer original insights, fresh viewpoints, and a new alchemy of ideas?  Does it elicit an  emphatic “Yes!” moment, if just to the extent of “Yes! THAT’S how the *$@$ing little widget works!”  A service as simple as Copyscape can confirm if content is plagiarized; ensuring  that it is original in the best sense requires much more of an investment.

3.  Brand content must be of the highest quality.
Quality connotes credibility.  Is your white paper well researched and delivered with a distinct brand voice?  Are your videos well produced, with good lighting, sound, supporting title work and professional transitions?  In other words, is it self-evident that you’ve invested enough in the content for the your readers or viewers to feel it is true and worthy of their attention?  Style can’t replace substance, but a disregard for style may well convince your intended audience to disregard your communications.

Related reading:
Journalists Dancing on the Edge of Truth
All Brands Are Publishers, Learn How to Be A Good One
Tell The Truth: Honesty is Your Most Powerful Marketing Tool

BRANDS NEED TO OFFER CONTENT BEYOND CLAIMS FOR BRAND POSITIONING TO RING TRUE

The ad column in The New York Times last Friday was headlined “Paring Down Marketing Messages to a Few Simple Basics,” and offered this overview:

“SIMPLY put, a lot of what Madison Avenue says these days is simply put.  “Simply,” “simple” and “simplicity” — along with like-minded thoughts that include “easy,” “honest” and “clear” — have become marketing buzzwords in response to three related trends: how busy life today seems, the growing complexity of technology and the increasingly complicated economic picture. That has encouraged advertisers to woo consumers with promises to provide solutions that are meant as simple but not simplistic.”

What follows are several examples, essentially of fairly traditional lip service to simplicity, from brands that offer little in the way of simplifying substance or news. Ivory Soap (“Keep it pure, clean and simple.”).  California Milk Processor Board (“Real. Simple. Got Milk?”).  And the Simply Juices line from Coca-Cola, where the name supposedly says it all (but in an altogether undifferentiated way from any other 100% juice line).

My favorite misplaced example offered is Real Simple magazine, the forest-killing monthly that, fattened with ad pages, seems to be telling us that all we need to reach simple nirvana is more stuff (preferably from its own licensed lines of products available at major retailers).

SIMPLICITY DOES PAY OFF IN BRANDING
I am actually quite interested in the subject of simplicity, in marketing and otherwise, having long subscribed to the philosophy of “simple is good,” so I searched the article eagerly for new facts, studies, evidence of how and why simplicity is making real in roads.  But where was the mention of Seigel+Gale’s  intriguing “Simplicity Index,” which for several years has brought some statistical rigor to the subject and philosophy upon which that firm bases its entire business? And where were the mentions of marketers reaching out to actively help consumers simplify their lives via instructive content marketing?

And I wish that Stuart Elliot had at least touched on the inherent problem of a core lack of truth or significance in so many of these traditional assertion-not-substance campaigns?  He might have at least mentioned that “simplicity” is one of those unregulated claims – like “all natural” (which was featured on the opposite page in an article about a new class action suit against General Mills for false advertising) – which, while appealing to consumers also runs the risk of incurring their wrath if found to be untrue or not compelling in its minimal truthfulness. (Interestingly, I think what Simply Juices wants to do with their name is side-step the whole “natural” brouhaha, and I would argue with Mr. Elliot that their campaign isn’t part of the simplicity versus complexity but positions them as natural without saying so. Unfortunately, this side-stepping hasn’t saved the brand from its own class-action lawsuit headaches.)

As Seigel+Gale’s index shows, simplicity, if actually delivered, can be a major brand-building benefit (and a boost to shareholder value; take a look at the numbers in the “Simplicity Portfolio” contained within the annual index report).  Likewise, the mandate for truthfulness in a media age controlled by consumers, online and off, can be turned to significant marketing advantage, as illustrated in Jonathan Baskin’s new book “Tell the Truth:  Honesty is Your Most Powerful Marketing Tool.” But as those and other observers note, that advantage arises out of demonstrating simplicity and delivering on it as a brand experience – not simply claiming it as a positioning, or incorporating it into a theme line or brand name.

While I wish that Mr. Elliot had dug a little deeper into the subject, I more so fault the marketers and, most of all, their very traditional agencies, which are stuck in their apparently still-profitable rut of speaking at consumers rather than with them, of asserting rather than demonstrating, of interrupting their lives with paid messages rather than enhancing their lives with the information, education and entertainment they need and want.  In short, traditional agencies are still making image-based claims without bringing them alive with content (or even self-evident truth) – and in this age, that simply won’t do.

I listen to a lot of podcasts, if only as a way to redeem all the chopped up bits of time I seem to have in my car. For business learning I tend to favor the unpolished enthusiasm of ‘casts such as the relatively new Mastering Social Business by Kelly Noble and Paul Serwin.  But I also listen to more established voices, including that of Mitch Joel and his Six Pixels of Separation. He and his guests typically have lot to offer, once you get past the self-congratulatory plugging of upcoming books or the hubristic backslapping of bright guys buying their own press.

Is Your Brand All About the Truth?
Speaking of books and hubris, a recent Six Pixels guest, Jonathan Baskin (prolific author, columnist, marketing consultant) caught my ear with this whopper of a comment:

“I hate the word content…  We brand marketing folks don’t create content… we share truth.”

Wow.  Brand marketers share truth (and content marketers, presumably, share something less). Now, don’t get me wrong. I’m with Baskin in the apparent premise of his new book (which I have yet to read), Tell the Truth: Honesty is Your Most Powerful Marketing Tool.  In fact, the elevator speech for Creative on Call has, for sometime, been that we are a “…creative services company that helps marketers identify and communicate the simple truth about brands…”  And I still quaintly but firmly believe that building marketing programs on a foundation of rational and emotional truth is the best (perhaps only) way to build brand trust.

“My Brand is the Way and The Truth and The Lifestyle. No one comes to the Market Except by Me.”  What’s missing for me in all this is a sense of perspective, even humility – and I don’t mean from Baskin, I mean from the advertising and marketing industry as a whole. Marketers wanting to traffic in the truth will do well to remember a few key points:

1.  Brand evangelism is just an expression.   In selling sodas and hawking hotels, we may be pushing a lifestyle, but we’re not promoting a path to cosmic consciousness or even worldly wholeness.  We’re selling stuff.
2.  We are sales people, not preachers.  And like good sales people, we may be great listeners, entertainers, educators… but we cannot believably pretend to be  apostles of the Truth, with a capital T.  People don’t buy it (Neilsen reports that less than half of all people trust paid advertising, the lifeblood of brand marketers, and that confidence level is steadily declining year after year).
3.  There’s nothing wrong with selling stuff.  There’s a tendency toward denial, especially among my creative kin, about the fact that all of our efforts, our time, our creativity is being channeled into selling.  But why?  It’s not a four letter word (OK, creative people might use it more freely if it was).  By being honest about what we’re doing, we can engage more comfortably, and believably, with consumers, and encourage them to engage with us.  Earning media might, of course, call for content marketing, to add a little pull to the paid media push (the same Neilsen report notes very high levels of trust in earned media).

It would also require creative folks like me to embrace the fact that we’re creating ads, not art. After all, what’s wrong with that?  We’re former English and Art majors lucky enough to have stumbled into a lucrative profession.  Enjoy it for what it is, drop the pretense, and get on with business! (This is not to say, however, that one need not be artful in the approach to creating ads… it’s still human-to-human communication, at least if you want it to work).

I hope Mr. Baskin is successful in convincing hoards of brand marketers to take up the banner of truth in advertising; if it becomes more than self-congratulatory corporate speak, marketers and their consumers should both profit.

Conventional wisdom holds that Greg Smith, the apparently principled ex-Goldman Sachs exec whose recent resignation was accompanied by a now-famous New York Times Op-Ed piece, is never going to find work in the investment industry again.  So what? This guy should switch to being a financial branding consultant, as his Op-Ed diatribe is a virtual branding manifesto on how to kill brand trust in the financial service sector (or any other sector, for that matter).

HOW NOT TO BUILD BRAND TRUST, BY GREG SMITH

1. Screw the customer
2. Destroy your employees’ belief in the brand
3. Repeat #1… again… and again

NUMBER ONE:  SCREW THE CUSTOMER, OR… WHAT’S THE OPPOSITE OF CUSTOMER-CENTRIC?

Smith goes on at some length in his Op-Ed about just how anti-customer-centric his former employer has become, explaining the keys to success in the firm:

“What are three quick ways to become a leader [at Goldman Sachs]? a) Execute on the firm’s “axes,” which is Goldman-speak for persuading your clients to invest in the stocks or other products that we are trying to get rid of because they are not seen as having a lot of potential profit. b) “Hunt Elephants.” In English: get your clients — some of whom are sophisticated, and some of whom aren’t — to trade whatever will bring the biggest profit to Goldman. Call me old-fashioned, but I don’t like selling my clients a product that is wrong for them. c) Find yourself sitting in a seat where your job is to trade any illiquid, opaque product with a three-letter acronym.”

So much for how to create brand loyalty by putting the customer first.

NUMBER TWO:  DESTROY YOUR EMPLOYEES’ BELIEF IN THE BRAND

As any decent branding consultant will tell you, it’s impossible to deliver on brand promises if your employees don’t believe them.   And yet, despite all the money spent on employee branding and engagement, creating true believers remains a huge challenge for many, if not most, marketers.  Even from inside firms that are, to use Smith’s word, less “toxic” than Goldman, I frequently hear employees grumble about the disconnect between corporate promises made from on high and what’s actually delivered “at street level,” to customers or, for that matter, to employees.  Smith encapsulated his experience this way: “I am sad to say that I look around today and see virtually no trace of the culture that made me love working for this firm for many years.  I no longer have the pride, or belief.”

NUMBER THREE:  REPEAT NUMBER ONE AGAIN… AND AGAIN… AND AGAIN

Smith goes on to mention “meetings where not one minute is spent asking questions about how we can help clients,” the routine denigration of clients with monikers like “Muppets,” and “how callously people talk about ripping their clients off.”  He makes a core truth perfectly clear:  once you start focusing first on your own firm’s success, it’s not long until the customer is the last thing on your mind.

MAKE THE CUSTOMER FIRST IF YOU WANT YOUR BRAND TO LAST

But Smith is not entirely the naysayer – he does conclude with what is perhaps the most basic truth about how to create the brand trust that produces brand loyalty and, ultimately, long-term success:  “Make the client the focal point of your business…”

Greg, I wish you well in your new career in finance…  as a financial branding consultant.

Is your employee branding as good for employees as it is for the brand?

It’s a hot topic that goes by many monikers: employment branding, internal branding, corporate citizenship strategy, employee engagement. From a marketing perspective (and I won’t even get into the HR benefits here), it’s the logical – and necessary – extension of external branding, the organizational means by which positive brand experiences are created and core brand promises are kept. It recognizes that inculcating employees with brand values, and nurturing them as true brand believers, is the center of any sincere effort to be customer-centric. But can employee branding create too much employee belief, too much trust? A article in the Iowa Law Review answers a resounding, and potentially troubling, “Yes.”

HAS IN-HOUSE COUNSEL CLEARED YOUR INTERNAL BRANDING?
The article is “Managing Identity: Buying in to the Brand at Work,” by Marion Crain, a Wiley B. Rutledge Professor of Law and Director, Center for the Interdisciplinary Study of Work & Social Capital, Washington University School of Law (and I thought corporate titles could be a little over done).

For a lawyer, she gives a pretty good overview of the power of employment branding, complete with case histories and at considerable length. Her main point is that internal branding (unlike its external counterpart) is not subject to regulation, even though it can have serious consequences for employees, particularly when it encourages them to over-invest in company stock:

“The more effective the branding program and the more powerful the appeal of the brand, the more completely workers will embrace it and make investments in the firm that transcend the wage bargain. Internal marketing thus plays a significant role in promoting workers’ psychological bond with the firm. Furthermore, many workers invest more than their hearts and bodies in the firm—they invest their savings. A surprisingly high percentage of employees hold disproportionate amounts of company stock in undiversified 401(k) retirement accounts…”

Crain goes on to suggest that regulation is in order – not exactly what most business leaders want to hear.

A SIMPLE FIX FOR EMPLOYMENT BRANDING – THE SIMPLE TRUTH.
I mention this not to be alarmist, but because I believe there is a simple fix to this, whether or not regulation ever comes, and one that would help accomplish both the HR goals of attract/motivate/retain and the marketing goal of bringing brand promises alive. It’s called the truth. Just as we encourage our clients to identify and communicate the simple truth about their brands for consumer consumption, we would counsel the same for positioning and communicating brands to employees. In fact, we see consumer and employment branding as necessarily being of a piece, requiring:

•   An accurate observation and clear definition of the brand essence – one that rings true with all audiences
•   A use of factually and emotional honest communications
•  A consistency of voice across all audiences, starting with a Theme line that speaks equally well to all constituencies (sorry, just can’t bring my self to say “stakeholders”) as it encapsulates the core brand promise

The classic “G.E. We bring good things to life.” (which I had the privilege of working on) is one good example that pops to mind, at once promising good things to consumers and a sense of doing good for its employees. Likewise, the theme I created for Zurich Life, “The way life should be.” easily bridged brand constituencies (interestingly, music was a key element employed in communicating the brand voice, personality and message to all audiences for both clients… so consider yourself fairly warned that, should you hire Creative on Call, you may be subjected to hearing me sing during presentations).

Can you think of any other examples of campaigns – perhaps that you have worked on – which are or have been equally well, and consistently, applied across all audiences, including employees?

Why is “the power of story” such a hot topic these days?  Largely because, in our over-marketed world, many feel that the straightforward sell, sell, sell, no matter how well targeted, is simply worn out, is increasingly ineffectual in convincing and converting ever-more sophisticated (or at least overexposed) consumers.

STORIES GET PROSPECTS TO SELL THEMSELVES ON YOUR BRAND
Instead of selling the prospects, brand storytelling – at least when it gets to the self-evident truth of a product or service – gets the prospect to engage, imagine, and ultimately sell them selves.  (Of course, our perspective at Creative on Call is that all successful branding and marketing depends on identifying and communicating the simple truth about a brand, whether you’re creating an elaborate story-telling campaign or writing your next corporate brochure.)

A couple of very different forces in the popular story-telling culture  –  Peter Guber, the Hollywood power broker, and Ira Glass, the NPR maestro of telling real stories – share their perspectives on the art of a story well-told:

And now, for something completely different, Ira Glass, creator of “This American Life.”  This is the first in a series of four short videos which are talking about what goes in to pure storytelling for TV and radio, but which are also instructive for anyone wanting to inject the power of story into brand communications.