Why We Respond to Stories

Do you know the feeling of “but that’s what I’ve been saying all along, why did it take you guys so long to get it”?

I bet Jeremy Hsu, who wrote an article for the Scientific American on “Why We Love a Good Yarn” in 2008, feels that way. Judging from recent business book titles – such as Tell to Win and The Dragonfly Effect – my google alerts on “storytelling”, and Twitter’s #storytelling hash tag, you could almost get the impression that the power of storytelling is a brand-new, recently discovered miracle. Though really, it has been around for a while.

While I may have to let up on the storytelling-obsessed posts soon, I think it’s worth spending a few minutes on Hsu’s article. He, unlike most others, dives a little deeper into why it is that we all respond so positively to stories.

He argues that storytelling is a universal human trait that has always served as a way to practice, form, and strengthen social relationships between people. We, as human beings, have learned how to interact with each other, how to show empathy and interpret emotions, through stories. In fact, Hsu says, scientists are beginning to agree that

“Stories have such a powerful and universal appeal that the neurological roots of both telling tales and enjoying them are probably tied to crucial parts of our social cognition.”

However, Hsu doesn’t get much further into the details of these cognitive aspects of storytelling. If you want to continue to explore the subject I recommend turning to Austrian-born Monika Fludernik, who is a professor of English literature and culture at the Albert Ludwigs University of Freiburg, Germany. Her research is academic (and perhaps only for nerds). In 1996, she wrote Towards a Natural Narratology wherein she precisely approaches narratology, storytelling, as cognition. She reasons that stories are meaningful because listeners will connect the stories they hear to life experiences:

“Unlike the traditional models of narratology, narrativity […] is here constituted by what I call experientiality, namely the quasi-mimetic evocation of ‘real life experience’.” (Fludernik, 1996).

In essence, Fludernik supports the view that Hsu is highlighting: Storytelling is tightly connected to human cognition and the way in which we think about the world.

The practically applicable conclusion from Hsu’s writing is, of course, this:

“[S]tories have a unique power to persuade and motivate, because they appeal to our emotions and capacity for empathy.”

It is no coincidence that marketers, advertisers, managers, and so many others have success with using storytelling in their communication – even if they are just beginning to discover this. It will continue to be true that we as people are preconditioned to respond to storytelling, to feel persuaded, motivated, and to change.

Seven Deadly Sins of Business Storytelling

OpenForum just posted another excerpt from Aaker and Smith’s The Dragonfly Effect.

They highlight, and rightly so, that while business storytelling often has a different purpose than a story told at a dinner party (or a story in Hollywood movie, or in a children’s book, or in a ballet, or…) the same storytelling principles apply in a business context.

The key is, really, that if you can crack the code and understand how these principles work, you’ll have a very effective marketing tool.

The seven sins (I slightly omitted OpenForum’s version):

  1. Telling a story chronologically: There needs to be more of a tension in a good story, rather than “first this happened, then this, then this, then this…”.
  2. Only telling: Show your audience and make the story come alive to your audience.
  3. Jargon: Refrain from using words only you understand.
  4. Pulse-free stories: Personalize the story, and tell stories about people.
  5. Fabrication: Don’t make something up; you’ll lose credibility.
  6. Bulletproof: Include conflict and vulnerability in your story, and you’ll gain authenticity.
  7. Proprietary: Don’t put ownership on corporate stories. Let them live and get shared.

I especially appreciate Aaker and Smith’s encouragement to follow the example of Apple, Nike, and Ebay and create corporate story banks, where stories that support the organization’s work can be stored and shared.

While Apple, Nike and Ebay may be frontrunners in the field, I personally just spent the better part of a year gathering and sharing personal stories for a social enterprise that works in Cambodia and Laos. Some of these stories can be seen on the DDD blog, for example here and here.

Big, commercial corporations can of course have good stories to tell, but in my experience the potential for good stories rise significantly when dealing with an impact generating organization. Sharing the personal stories of beneficiaries is a great way to connect to donors, funders and partners, and they leave a long-lasting impression.

Storytelling and the Dragonfly Effect

Can storytelling foster change in others and push them to take action?

Yes, and therefore you should be treating stories as assets, says Jennifer Aaker, the General Atlantic Professor of Marketing at Stanford University’s Graduate School of Business. Strong stories become infectious.

The Dragonfly Effect

The most recent issue of the McKinsey Quarterly features a case study excerpted from Jennifer Aaker and Andy Smith’s The Dragonfly Effect – a book on how to use social media to drive social change. The case study investigates the power of storytelling and is followed by an interesting Q&A with the authors. (The full article can be downloaded from shareslide.net).

Aaker and Smith’s framework consists of four different components – one for each of the dragonfly’s wings: 1) Focus – set one clear, concrete goal; 2) Grab attention – make someone look; 3) Engage – foster personal connection; and 4) Take action, enable and empower others.

Allegedly, Aaker and Smith believe that storytelling plays a role in establishing the third of the components: engagement. However, in my view, storytelling plays a significant role in establishing at least three of the four components. We’ll take a look at the case study they discuss and try to support this claim.

About Story

First, Aaker says about storytelling:

“Good stories have three components: a strong beginning, a strong end, and a point of tension. [A] good story takes Y, the middle part of the story, and creates tension or conflict where the reader or the audience is drawn into the story, what’s going to happen next.”

Naturally, every story has a beginning, middle, and end (thank you, Aristotle), and almost always there will be conflict or tension in the middle.

However, Aaker fails to point out that it is not the middle of the story that should grab the reader’s attention, but rather the beginning. Imagine someone read the first 150 pages of a novel or watch the first 50 minutes of a movie before conflict is introduced… It is unrealistic that anyone would keep going for that long, unless there is a hook that effectively grabs the reader’s attention in the very beginning of the story.

A Case Study

With this clarification, let’s look at the case study, recounted below:

Social-media engagement:
A case study from The Dragonfly Effect

This case study is adapted from Jennifer Aaker and Andy Smith’s The Dragonfly Effect (Jossey- Bass, September 2010).

Scott Harrison was at the top of his world. The 28-year-old New York–based nightclub and fashion promoter excelled at bringing models and hedge- fund kings together and selling them $500 bottles of vodka. He had money and power. Yet his lifestyle brought something else: emptiness. Harrison felt spiritually bankrupt.

So he walked away, volunteering to serve on a floating hospital offering free medical care in the world’s poorest nations. Serving as the ship’s photo- journalist, Harrison was quickly immersed in a very different world. Thousands would flock to the ship looking for solutions to debilitating prob- lems: enormous tumors, cleft lips and palates, flesh eaten by bacteria from waterborne diseases. Harrison’s camera lens brought into focus astonishing poverty and pain, and he began documenting the struggles of these people and their courage.

After eight months, he moved back to New York, but not to his former life. Aware that many of the diseases and medical problems he witnessed stemmed from inadequate access to clean drinking water, he decided to do something about it. In 2006, he founded charity: water, a nonprofit designed to bring clean and safe drinking water to people in developing nations.

Harrison launched the organization on his 31st birthday by asking friends to donate $31 instead of giving him a gift. It was a success—the birthday gen- erated $15,000 and helped build charity: water’s first few wells in Uganda. In the three years that followed, Harrison’s simple birthday wish snowballed into donations that today total more than $20 million, translating into almost 3,000 water projects spanning everything from hand-dug wells and deep wells to protection for springs to rainwater harvesting. The organization has now provided clean water to more than 1.4 million people spanning 17 coun- tries. Its success can be explained through four design principles for gener- ating engagement with a brand through social media.

Aaker and Smith argue that in this example, storytelling is used as a way to establish a personal connection between charity: water and the organization’s audience. This indeed seems to be the case: the personal stories Harrison documented and shared engaged his readers and viewers on an emotional level. The telling of personal stories established engagement.

Additionally, it can also be argued that the storytelling at play in this example is what grabbed the attention of Harrison’s audience. Notice the lead-in to the case study itself:

“Scott Harrison was at the top of his world. The 28-year-old New York–based nightclub and fashion promoter excelled at bringing models and hedge- fund kings together and selling them $500 bottles of vodka. He had money and power. Yet his lifestyle brought something else: emptiness. Harrison felt spiritually bankrupt.”

This short intro also serves as Harrison’s version of what Aaker calls the “Who am I and how did I get started story”. It is key that an intriguing conflict is introduced in the first few sentences: On top of the world, but still unhappy… Most readers will get a “tell me more” sense, and thus their attention has successfully been grabbed.

On the question of whether storytelling has an effect when it comes to enabling action in others, Aaker and Smith touch upon this as well when they write:

“The organization [charity: water] promoted compelling stories that forced people to think about what it would be like to live without access to clean water.”

It is the ability to compel to a point of identification that makes storytelling a strong tool for pushing others to take action. Communicating through storytelling leaves a very strong, long-lasting impression on the audience, and therefore they are more likely to act – which also seems to be the case in this example, where Harrison’s first fundraising campaign brought in $15,000.

Storytelling is an Effective Tool

In this way, we’ve shown that storytelling is not only an effective tool when it comes to engaging an audience, but that you can in fact use storytelling as a way to first grab the attention of your audience, second engage your audience, third make your audience act.

I think Aaker is right when she says that treating stories as assets is still a rather unrealized idea. But storytelling is indeed very powerful and can be put to use in so many different contexts.