Every good marketer and every good brand steward know the importance of bringing together three key elements—meaningful brands, compelling products and inspired storytelling. We bring these three things together to create memorable experiences that drive consumer engagement. While the value of brands can be quantified and sale of products can be tracked, how do we measure what “inspired storytelling” is and how do we determine its effectiveness? Particularly now. There has been a spate of new “stories” being put out all the time in the COVID era with people and brands getting more and more creative, willing to be more experimental in the kinds of storytelling that is disseminated.
Eventually, someone is going to ask the question (because someone always wants to measure cost versus return) about the return on investment of all of these stories. Did we drive business and consumer engagement, or did we merely fill dead air? Are people consuming our content because it is meaningful or because it is there? Which dollar and which effort was “effective”? In many ways, these are the very question that have plagued marketers for years when asked to justify their advertising budgets.
As we are going to be faced to do more with fewer dollars, the tenor of these questions will continue to tip towards understanding which dollar got which sale. But this is a short-sighted approach to storytelling and, if we aren’t careful, will create potential short-term wins while creating longer term disengagement with the very consumers upon whom we are reliant. Long term disengagement will be the curse of any return to business as we know.
Before we can start to even debate a return on investment (ROI) to storytelling, it becomes important to understand that story-telling is a multi-faceted discipline that needs to flex and adapt depending on the brand, the consumer and the current social context within which we are trying to influence behavior. For the sake of argument, lets characterize the idea of storytelling as centering around one of three styles each with its own objective:
· Entertain
· Educate
· Elicit
One cannot calculate ROI without first understanding, and more importantly appreciating, the primary objective and only then assigning the appropriate key performance indicator (KPI).
The first style of storytelling may seem to be the most obvious and the “fuzziest”, but it serves as the foundation for every other kind of story. It’s hard not to imagine that the first stories told around the fire were meant to entertain and pass the long nights when television and the internet were not even a spark in someone’s imagination. The printing press, a true innovation in its day, codified stories and turned them from ever changing oral traditions to fixed narratives that were passed on from generation to generation. Authors like William Thackeray and his serialized novel Vanity Fair capitalized on the average person’s desire to be entertained as a way of pulling oneself out of the everyday doldrums. While there is without a doubt allegorical themes underlying Thackeray’s novel, most of the British reading public consumed it like a soap opera, eagerly awaiting the next chapter to learn what the main character had gotten up to since the last encounter.
Despite its objective as entertainment, this first type of storytelling is meaningful in its ability to create a world and experience within which the reader can immerse themselves. An emotional connection is created that, when managed properly, can lead to its own level on of financial success and quantitative measurement. But at its heart, this level of storytelling is foundational and needs to be measured as such. The modern-day equivalent would be something like our Superbowl Commercials that are anticipated, judged and talked about for weeks after they first appear. It would be impossible to justify a $5.6M spend if one were to try and assign a direct correlative value based on products sold or leads generated, but the emotional connection and the ability to create a branded entertainment experience helps set the ground for the next two styles of storytelling, and enables them to be more effective against their own objective.
The second style of storytelling is more didactic in origin, although often cloaked within a guise of entertainment. Aesop’s Fables or Grimm’s Fairy Tales are perfect examples of this style of storytelling. More so than arguably Thackeray’s novel, these stories start with a specific aim to teach a specific lesson and, depending on the intended audience, the level of metaphor is either more or less subtle. Even the youngest child can understand the meaning behind the story of the boy who cried wolf—tell a fib too often and you run the risk of losing everything, including potentially your own life.
While entertaining in a way, the success of this kind of story is whether the message has been internalized and effects measurable change. Have fewer sheep been lost due to a reduction in lies told? A lot of packaged goods advertising is based on this model. By showing consumers that one product is better than another on a tested premise, often couched within an entertaining scenario, advertisers are hoping that their story provokes a level of intellectual consideration. Yes, this particular brand of detergent provides moments of familial harmony and exploration, but only because it cleans dirt better than its competitor. It is imminently possible to quantitatively measure the success of this kind of storytelling through tracking research—one can actually measure the number of people who believe the premise being provided. And while the indirect correlation is to purchase, what really should be measured is consideration—is a consumer more likely to purchase a product because the “education” they received predisposed them in that direction?
Lastly, there are the stories that are designed to elicit specific behavior. JD Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy is a perfect example of this kind of story. While entertaining and educational, Vance’s memoir is intended (among other things) to raise questions about the current status of welfare programs and the unintended consequences these programs have of keeping down the very people they are meant to help. Vance is, in essence, asking us to question our own beliefs on the subject and challenge what we think we know. He hopes to elicit intellectual curiosity and eventually policy change.
Years back, advertising that explicitly used this kind of storytelling were said to be “call to action” advertisements—there was something within the story (often times a kind or price promotion) that was intended to prompt immediate action. “Call now!” these ads would shout, and consumers would. This was the start to the home shopping networks that have become so popular.
Today, influencers and social media have brought this kind of storytelling to the forefront. It is possible to directly measure the correlation between a story being heard and a product being sold since everything is connected digitally. Of all the styles of storytelling, it’s this third type that board members like the most because of the seemingly easy and direct way of measuring a return on advertising spend. So, it’s no surprise that brands are being pressured to shift advertising dollars predominantly, or sometimes exclusively, to this kind of storytelling. Marketers are being told, “if you can measure the effectiveness of each dollar sold, then just spend more dollars in this area and reap greater reward!”
There are two problems with this mode of thought. First, without an emotional connection or an understanding of what a brand stands for, the ability to drive any kind of loyalty and engender any kind of brand advocacy is impossible. We have all fell victims to ads that look good on Instagram only to be disappointed by the product that arrives. We realize that product without quality and without a premise that we can attach ourselves to is disposable product. And disposable product is, in the end, low in value. Building decades of stories allows for an emotional connection to go from awareness to consideration to purchase in a way that leads to word of mouth recommendation. Any student of marketing will tell you that word of mouth marketing is the most productive.
But the second problem with focusing on only telling stories that are measurable in end results is that end results are forever variable. Our ability to measure success is based on current consumer behavior and technological interface and both of these are highly susceptible to change. Brands have a seeming love for Instagram because of its metrics, its ability to tie to shopping and the consumer data that the link to Facebook provides. However, privacy laws and consumer willingness to live their lives as open books will change. Even our ability to gauge Instagram “engagement” is disappearing. And if all we do is think about storytelling with measurable elicited behavior, we will lose the ability to entertain and educate.
It’s important to understand the tension between these forms of storytelling and to become more diligent in understanding the objective behind each story told and thus the appropriate way to measure “success”. We need to value the importance of entertaining but know that awareness and engagement can’t alone drive sales. We need to value the importance of education but know that education can only spur on consideration. And we need to value the direct impact that call to action storytelling can have on the bottom line if a consumer cares about the brand. But what we truly need to value is how all the stories told by meaningful brands, supported by compelling consumer centric products, can lead to the kind of memorable experiences that create value both above and below the line. The same is true in the coming post COVID world, perhaps even more so, as it was before.
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/how-do-you-measure-effectiveness-story-talbot-logan/