Five ways the purpose-told story builds brands and sales

For more than two decades, Robert McKee has been Hollywood’s go-to guy on structuring story in movies. More recently, he started offering his storytelling expertise to the corporate world via Storynomics, a seminar he has run only in the northern hemisphere so far.

As a former creative director and writer/director with screenwriting aspirations, I have completed McKee’s acclaimed Story and Genre three-day seminars in the past. I found each a creative revelation, offering deep insights and profound knowledge; you know you are in the presence of a giant intellect, a man who has been described as “a force of nature”.

So when I attended McKee’s one-day Storynomics seminar in the US recently, along with a hundred marketing and communications professionals from around the world, I was hoping for more of the same. But McKee has no formal background in marketing, so I did wonder: how would his purist aesthetic mesh with the corporate commercial imperative?

He started by deftly articulating the familiar communication challenges confronting brands in 2016: burgeoning audiences becoming increasingly unreachable through their enthusiastic uptake of ad-free online subscriber TV and music services (and ad-blockers). Then he declared that “interruption-based bragging-and-promising advertising” was in terminal decline. Online ads also came under fire.

Screenwriting guru Robert McKee

In McKee’s view, all of these are “shop-worn” models that are counter-productive because mostly they just annoy viewers. Especially Gen Z and Millennials. He says brands must add interest and value, so that the stories customers tell about the brand become more influential than the story the brand tells about itself.

“Few people really understand the correct application of story in the corporate context”

Story is a buzz-word in business, but according to McKee few people really understand the meaning and correct application of story in the corporate context. So in Storynomics he spells out how and why the “purpose-told story” is the single most effective means of persuasion in business. A blunt pragmatist, McKee says businesses must deal in reality. They do financially of course but when it comes to communication, too often it’s a different… story.

Storynomics is full of McKee’s sardonic wit, leonine wisdom and invaluable practical advice.

Here are five of his keys to developing story for business that resonated most with me:

• Understand what story is, by first defining what it isn’t. It’s not a list of facts, numbers or a chronology because these are all merely a cataloguing of human behaviour. It’s far more interesting and engaging to “storify” such details. The human mind is easily bored by the inductive logic of the usual forms of business presentation, but responds strongly to the causal logic of story. Ideas and emotions change minds, not facts, figures and window dressing. McKee terms this “seduction versus coercion”. Stories aren’t just films or novels; even a single picture can tell a story because the imagination fills in the events around it.

• Tell the truth and make it compelling. Brand myths, legends and journeys are all fanciful rhetoric, says McKee. As such they have no place in a brand story, if it is to be realistic and engaging. Facts are not the truth, they are simply a listing of what happened. Truth is human, it’s why what happened, happened. Data is complicated, but it’s not complex because it all ramifies on one level. Yet life is never lived on one level. The truth is, life is often a struggle on multiple levels: personal, social, financial, professional and so on. Human experience is therefore a series of peaks and troughs and this must always be reflected in story to make it effective.

• All story values are binary. There is no real appreciation of strength without showing weakness, no joy without sorrow, and so on. Effective, entertaining stories express these human contrasts. The story value that most strongly resonates with audiences is fairness/unfairness (or justice/injustice). The story must always start on a negative and end on a positive. A narrative that oscillates between these two emotional extremes engages the audience: they keep watching to see how the story will play out.

• Don’t interrupt, entertain. This is McKee’s cornerstone dictum for corporate and brand communication. All entertaining stories must first evoke curiosity by taking place in a very specific world, and start with a hook of interest based on a setback – something that throws a character’s life out of balance. The character’s struggle to restore balance in their life creates empathy. McKee makes a very clear distinction between sympathy (being likeable) and empathy (being ‘like me’, thinking If I was her, I’d want that goal too). 

• Be singular and specific in defining who you are telling your story to. Targeting a multi-tiered audience inevitably broadens the focus of the story, making it universal. But McKee asserts that this is actually counter-productive, because in being universal the story becomes trivial. Paradoxically, the more singular and specific your target, the more universal the story’s appeal. Why? Because all viewers, regardless of their demographic, identify most strongly with the human qualities and personal challenges of a single hero. Who, by the way, should always represent the customer. Not the company.

As always, McKee was challenging, insightful and most of all inspiring. Storynomics has an impressive array of case histories measured in dramatic sales increases where McKee’s story methods have been applied.

3 great McKee-isms…

1. “The conscious mind is PR for the subconscious mind, where all the real decisions are made.”
2. “No matter our talent, we all know in the midnight of our souls that 90 percent of what we do is less than our best.”
3. “The law of diminishing returns is true of everything in life except sex, which seems endlessly repeatable with effect.”

Endorsements by previous Storynomics attendees have come from Mercedes-Benz, Kraft, Pepsico and many others, including several ad agency creative people. McKee expects to publish his Storynomics book late in 2016 and I reckon it’ll be a must-read for all marketers and corporate communicators.

Julian Smith is a writer/director specialising in story-based persuasive communication, at filmcommunication.com

topics communications filmcommunication julian smith Marketing Robert McKee Storynomics storytelling

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Comments: 2

Marius 7 Jul 16

Hi Julian,

Thanks for sharing this. I’m actually reading Story at the moment, and far from being about formulaic writing (which I expected), it offers significant insights into the universal nature of storytelling.

I suppose you touch on it briefly, but I’m curious, how did he see stories being told in practice by brands? Did he envision them as told from beginning to end in story-friendly media such as TV spots/video content, or did he take more of a transmedia approach, in which each channel would focus on a certain aspect of a brand’s story universe/narrative? Or perhaps he thought of it more as background story to inspire and guide various strategies and tactics?

Or none of the above:-)?

Cheers,
Marius

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Julian Smith 18 Jul 16

Hey Marius, thanks for your comment and apologies for not responding sooner, I must have missed the comment alert email from Mumbrella, so I have just seen it.

It’s great that you’re reading Story, I’d encourage anyone in communication, particularly creatives, to read it. McKee’s Storynomics book when it comes out later in 2016 will be a similar revelation for Marketers.

McKee’s medium is film and in the Storynomics seminar he confined his teaching to film, but the principles of course apply in other media, mainly print and audio. McKee sees story as a single dynamic process, so all his story examples were told front-to-back in one complete form. There was no mention of spreading story elements across different channels.

He screened over a dozen short-form films, about half of which were TV ads. One was the 2010 US Old Spice campaign, “Smell like a man, man” cited as an example of strong unexpected storytelling and smart because it was pitched at women. He also played some US ads for Adobe Marketing Cloud, targeting Marketing Managers… well worth going to Youtube and searching them, there are about 5 or 6 spots, all brilliant. His through-line for all examples was “they give the audience what they expect, but not in the way that they expect”. An example of a short-form film longer than an ad that he played was “Unsung heroes of science” which you can find on Youtube; another one I like is Droga5’s “Made the Johnsonville way” in which employees’ crazy ideas for TV ads are brought to life.

Hope this helps,
Cheers~

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