The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett - Moment 101 - This 1 Skill Will Transform Your Life: Will Storr

Episode Date: March 17, 2023

Why do you connect with certain adverts or businesses? Is it because of their impressive facts or statistics, it’s more likely that you had an emotional connection that is hard for you to even describe rationally. In this moment Will Storr discusses how humans are storytelling animals, the very language of our brains are stories and they are the way we process the world around us. That’s why it doesn’t matter if you are a Fortune 500 company or talking to a new person, if you aren’t communicating with stories you aren’t communicating. Listen to the full episode here - https://g2ul0.app.link/cubZsa7Cdyb The conversation cards waitlist is now open, join now - http://bit.ly/3l7dhKG Will - https://willstorr.com/ https://twitter.com/wstorr?ref_src=twsrc%5Egoogle%7Ctwcamp%5Eserp%7Ctwgr%5Eauthor Watch the episodes on YouTube - https://www.youtube.com/c/TheDiaryOfACEO/videos

Quick one, just wanted to say a big thank you to three people very quickly. First people I want to say thank you to is all of you that listen to the show. Never in my wildest dreams is all I can say. Never in my wildest dreams did I think I'd start a podcast in my kitchen and that it would expand all over the world as it has done. And we've now opened our first studio in America, thanks to my very helpful team led by Jack on the production side of things. So thank you to Jack and the team for building out the new American studio.

And thirdly to Amazon Music who, when they heard that we were expanding to the United States, and I'd be recording a lot more over in the States, they put a massive billboard in Times Square for the show. So thank you so much, Amazon Music. Thank you to our team. And thank you to all of you that listened to this show. Let's continue. In the Diary of a CEO, we have hundreds of questions that have been left by our guests and we've put them on these cards. And on these cards, you have the question that's been left in the Diary of a CEO, the name of the person who wrote the question. And if you turn it over, there's a QR code. If you scan that code, you can see which guest answered the question and watch

the video of them answering it. Every time I've done this podcast and every time we've asked the kind of questions we ask here, I feel a tremendous sense of affinity to the guest. And our aim with these cards is that you can create that sense of connection through vulnerability at home with the people you love the most. And I have some good news for you. As of today, you can add your name to the waiting list to be the first in line to get your own set of conversation cards at theconversationcards.com. That is theconversationcards.com. On that point of storytelling,

you mentioned storytelling there in our narrative, your book in 2019 was about storytelling. I, having worked in marketing, was very compelled to read this book for the, probably, you know, we talked before we started recording that a lot of people will see a book about, with the word storytelling on the front of it and think that they can use it from a marketing capacity or in a business sense. What have you learnt about how people can tell great stories in the context of business and marketing? Yeah, well, so quite a lot.

I teach business storytelling at Section 4, which is an American ed tech organization. So I do a course there in the science of storytelling for business. And, you know, we are storytelling animals we we think in story we we you know narrative is basically you know how we experience ourselves and and life and so as i say in that course if you're not communicating with story as a marketeer you know you're not communicating you know logic and facts and data and statistics that's not the language of the brain the language of the brain's beginning middle and end a character overcoming That's not the language of the brain. The language of the brain is beginning, middle and end, a character overcoming obstacles.

I think a lot of the stuff we've been talking about is important, especially the idea that people think with their feelings. You know, it's feelings first, story second, the story justifies the feelings. And so if you want to tell persuasive stories, you need to first understand exactly who you're communicating with. And you need to understand how they feel about the world, how they feel about themselves, how they feel about, you know, justice and what their values are. And so that means understanding them kind of tribally. What groups do they belong to? Who are their heroes? Who are their villains?

What motivates them? What demotivates them so so before you can sort of write the story you need to figure out how they feel about the world so a bad story then would be one that was because you know I thought about this a lot in my previous business was um very successful in storytelling so my first company social chain it's you know grown to be a very big business maybe a thousand employees worldwide we were started out as a marketing agency, never had a sales team because we focused on telling stories. Those stories were told on social media and on stage by me. So when I would go up on stage and talk about our agency to try and win business from Apple or Coca-Cola, whoever it was, I would actually start by talking about my relationship

with my mother. And that would be the first sentences out of my mouth when I walked on stage. If there was a thousand people or 15,000 people there, it would be about my mother. And through that story about my mother and my upbringing and my battles and all those things, eventually you'd learn about our business and what we do and about the great work we do.

But that was the preface of it. And that meant we never needed a sales team. I've always believed that if I'd walked on stage and started with a case study, I would have had to have a sales team and social team knocking on doors. And I think this is one of the biggest mistakes businesses make.

When they pitch, when they speak on stage, when they post on social media, I think they have a, they believe that the listener wants big numbers and to hear how many views they got for their clients. And it just doesn't seem to be consistent with reality. No, it's not. I mean, so what you're doing

when you're going through with your mother is you're connecting emotionally. So people are, you know, wanting, they're on your side immediately and you're making them feel good you're making them feel things emotionally um the the kind of framework that i use for business storytelling is that is that is that you know essentially people's brains process reality um in the same way and that's the uh you know so they're the hero of their story you're not the hero standing on the stage the company that that's selling to you isn't the so they're the hero of their story. You're not the hero standing on the stage. The company that's selling to you isn't the hero.

They're the hero of their own story. They are, you know, they've got goals they're trying to pursue. We will have, you know, which are the plots of our lives. The audience. Yeah, the audience, the person you're selling to. And then there's a brilliant story analyst called Christopher Booker who wrote this amazing book

called The Seven Basic Plots. And he writes about archetypal characters in storytelling that he calls light figures. And so the light figure is the example he uses of the three ghosts in A Christmas Carol, the Charles Dickens Scrooge story. So Scrooge is the hero of that story. But the three ghosts come in to show him Christmas past, Christmas present, Christmas future. They help him get what he needs, which is to become a better, more selfless, more generous, more loving, giving person. So they arrive in his story to kind of show him the way to help him get what he needs. And so that's what I argue. That's the appropriate position for most companies and organizations and leaders is not to be the hero because your audience feels like they're the hero. You're the light figure. You're there to help them get what they want.

So when you go straight in with, here's all my awards, here's what this person said about me, here's some statistics and stuff. You're not a light figure. You're presenting as the hero. What people really want to know is how can you help me get what I want? And that's the story that you have to tell. What kind of example can you give me to really make that, make me understand that in a real practical sense? Is there a brand you've seen do this really well? Is there an example of a, I mean, my brain went to Nike for some reason. Yeah. Well, that's, oh, Nike is a really interesting example. So, so obviously one of the things that Nike has done recently is it's done that ad campaign around Colin Kaepernick, which is controversial, but did them, I think they've sold up to like 6% after that ad campaign.

And that's a really good example of an organization who is behaving as a light figure. So that Colin Kaepernick campaign has nothing to do with shoes. There's, you know, what they're not doing is going, our shoes will make you run 8% faster. We've got these sprung soles. We've got these amazing laces

that won't trip you up or whatever. You know, their stats list is not in there. It's purely, they're telling a story. They figured out that their client base are mostly believing, you know, this set of beliefs around the world. And those are goals. People who, the target audience that they're appealing to want to achieve this kind of racial social justice and it's important to them. So, so what Nike are basically saying is, you know, we are light figures in this story. We, you know, we, we are, we, we are on the side of the Colin Kaepernicks of the people who are kneeling. You know, we believe that black lives matter. And, and so they're presenting as a light figure. And if you think about it rationally, it's kind of crazy. Like why would a shoe company

have this political thing? But it's because of the storytelling, because, because they're presenting as a light figure who were, who was engaged in the kind of you know this particular mission the world and you know in in order to kind of to to to kind of join the mission you you buy the nike shoes and and it and it worked you know it works really well i mean uh one of the archetypal examples that I talk about that I love is there was an ad that was broadcast, I think it was in the 60s by Volkswagen. And it was the first kind of modern advert. It was the first advert that you would look at and recognize as the kind of advertising that we do today. So before this Volkswagen ad, you know know all ads were just stats lists here's this amazing you know tire and you know this will get you naught to 60 and whatever um and then this

volkswagen did this amazing ad where um it just it was black and white because it was still in the days of black and white and they had um it just showed this guy it was all snowing it's a big blizzard outside and this guy gets in his car he he turns, it's like, you know, just before dawn. Turns on his ignition, drives his car through the blizzard, blizzard, blizzard, blizzard. Opens these huge shed doors. And then you hear this big engine start up and out drives his snowplow. And it's, how does the guy who drives the snowplow get to the snowplow? And it's just Volkswagen.

And that's a really simple, really effective story. And it's showing Volkswagen as this light figure. a really simple really effective story and it's showing volkswagen as this light figure we are helping the hero achieve what he wants and you know i don't believe that the volkswagen was particularly good at driving through blizzards i don't believe that and they certainly weren't making any factual claim in the sense that we are better than land rover and whatever whatever whatever doing this because of this stat that it was as simple as that and it revolutionized marketing. It changed everything because they'd figured out

that kind of light figure form of storytelling. And in that, are they saying that the Volkswagen enables you to be the hero that moves the store? Exactly, yeah. And Nike are saying that the Nike shoe, associating it with Colin Kaepernick, enables you to be the social activist hero. Hero, exactly.

Like Colin Kaepernick was. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, yeah. Fascinating. I'm just going to change a few things about a few of my companies, I think, on the basis of that. Yeah, I think in the course of business, we all forget that emotion is the most important thing.

I'm thinking about all the newsletters that my companies have been writing. I've got various companies and the newsletters they write and the videos we make and how, and how sometimes we, we think that facts and figures and information is what the viewer is looking for in their lives. But the most compelling way to draw them in to whatever we're doing, whether it's a newsletter or a tweet or whatever, is by putting emotion first and really thinking about what the emotion of the content is. Yeah, yeah, exactly.

And with the Nike example, I mean, we live in, since the global financial crisis, we live in heightened political times. And so, you know, and people are always tribal. And so, you know, one of the big things that the successful kind of persuaders do is to make those tribal appeals. And, you know, sometimes it works with Colin Kaepernick, like with the Gillette Razor campaign, it didn't work because you're kind of essentially attacking your target audience. So that was, you know, less successful. I think there was a terrible Pepsi ad with Kendall Jenner where they were kind of basically, yeah, where we were just making this.

Well, it put a super rich, beautiful model, white woman as the hero against social injustice. And drinking a sugary drink is going to help. Yeah, you know, so. It's just all off. Yeah, so I think organizations are sensing that partly how we can be a light figure these days is by presenting as people who are assisting in these political goals that have become very important to people, especially young people. And some people are getting it right. Some people are getting it wrong. There's a real science to it, though, isn't there? Yeah.

The more we've spoken, I've realized how there is a science to it when you understand the the roles and also the audience the roles of the characters in your content or your piece and also where the it's really about where the audience sees themselves yeah you say yeah and how they feel represented