The power of storytellingAn interview by Caroline Florence from Insight Narrator, with Martin Lee

Martin Lee: Branding SpecialistMartin Lee is the co-founder of independent research consultancy Acacia Avenue. Whilst at Acacia Avenue, Martin has managed a diverse set of clients and categories that includes finance (Barclays and Barclaycard, Legal & General and Sainsbury’s Bank); retail (Sainsbury’s, Morrisons and The Entertainer); gaming (The National Lottery and Ladbrokes); e-commerce (eBay and PayPal) and travel (Carnival UK, Tourism Australia and Visit Scotland).

Before moving to agency life, he worked in retail marketing, both at WHSmith, as a buyer and marketing manager, and then latterly at Waterstones, where he was marketing director.

This background means that in his work at Acacia Avenue, he is especially able to assist clients in taking insight and turning it into strategic and commercial recommendations, whilst ensuring that customers’ interests are always uppermost.

One of Martin’s abiding concerns is the way that brands communicate through language, and this interest has led him to join the management team of 26, a not for profit organisation that is committed to improving the quality of writing and self-expression in business.

My philosophy. How my opinions were formed.I was always one of those kids with a head in a book. I feel that I have lived my life partly vicariously through books. I was then lucky enough to earn a living out of it for 20 years. I have also, quite rarely, enjoyed public speaking. When I was working in Waterstones I would often have to get up and give presentations. It is amazing how often when I was learning how to communicate effectively that I would stumble across the revelation that using vulnerability could help you to get the audience on your side and make them more receptive to the things you wanted to share. As opposed to adopting a detached persona. This is the idea of speaking from inside your own point of view, rather than a position of detachment, I realised that this was a successful thing to do and this made my attempts at communication work.

In parallel I have always loved storytelling and it became clear to me about 2008 or 2009 that there was just enough interest bubbling up in storytelling professionally in the brand and marketing arena, and then more recently in research. I thought I’ve got loads to say about this, it is central to who I am. In the last year or two I have realised that there is lots of permission and opportunity to join the dots. My point of view is that stories are astoundingly simple things and I do believe they are the way we most easily learn about the world.

Formal doesn’t click. Thoughts on reports, white papers and case studies.As a rule, formal writing very rarely hooks me. I don’t know why, I just said that as an almost instinctive reaction back, but I do think it is because when you read formal presentations, they are normally written to a template This template obviously observes some form of protocol, but I have never been taught what that protocol actually is. If you read a research document that has been written on behalf of a public sector body following up a piece of research it rarely sings. I don’t blame the research company for that; but it feels to me that there is a technique of report writing that is being used. It dots the I’s and crosses the T’s without engaging the emotion. It doesn’t connect with me as a person. It will be an articulation of a scenario and a set of observations around that scenario plus a digest of things that we did and outcomes - but it feels distant. It feels like the writing of it or the communication of it is quite distancing. Without feeling that you have been connected with, or your emotions have been engaged with.

I think that is quite deliberate. I think it is partly a desire to maintain objectivity. There is a desired objectivity because classically if you are a government department and you are writing a white paper or something of that sort; it is perceived to be a virtue that it looks empirical, credible, objective and scientific. Maybe it is a virtue and maybe it is a defensive way of writing because it is harder to chip away at it with accusations of subjectivity, clear bias or anything of that sort. But you end up not wanting to read it. So what need is being served? If the audience it is aimed at don’t want to read it, whose interest is it ultimately in? And I suppose I would push it a bit further and say that there is, in

Page 2

Page 3

my own personal view, no real objectivity or empirical distance in any case. Everything brings with it a certain set of frames, value judgements, opinion and human insights, which have somehow not been allowed to be reflected in the writing, for reasons which seem to me to be more about risk aversion than a desire to communicate.

Desire to communicate. Learnings from journalism and fiction.On the other hand when you read fiction or journalism or you read articles there is a clear desire to get a point across. It’s interesting – I spent most of my career in books and when you speak to publishers and editors they often say that it is really bizarre when you ask an author ‘what is your book about’ and they say something like ’a man goes on a journey, blah, blah, blah... When you say ‘no, but what is it about’ they haven’t actually got an answer for what is the purpose of the book.

I suppose the bits of writing that most connect with me are the ones where you just know intuitively that the writer knows what they are writing. Not just they know their topic but they know why they are writing. There is a desire, a reason, to communicate. They know what it is that they desire to communicate and so there is coherence. But you also feel like you are connecting with the writer. And you more typically get that outside of formal reports.

Storytelling is a different beast.Universal understanding.Stories help us understand our place in the world and how the world works. I think that is the role of fairy tales, which is to understand some of the enduring human principles. I was listening to a four year old talk the other day about putting a crown on his head. Someone said ‘why have you put that crown on your head Arthur?’ and he said’ because I want to be the one to talk now’. He has obviously learnt something about how the world works through stories and ideas of hierarchy and power and symbols of power.

Storytelling is unashamedly structured around a kind of artifice. So you have to have a protagonist, you have to have an antagonist and you have to have an opening scenario where the two are at loggerheads with each other. Then you have to have a set of events, the plot, that naturally arises out of the opening scenario. Then the events propel the story forward to a conclusion. The resolution, whether it is a happy ending or a cathartic tragic ending, there is always some element of transformation –so you end up somewhere different from where you started.

Conflict is central. How to find the conflict at the heart of any brief.When I receive a brief I automatically look for the point of conflict. I realised when you see that section ‘Background’ there is always a description to an opening scenario of a story in there. The brand is normally up against it. A new aggressive competitor or the economy. Or we have been the architects of our own downfall so we are at war with ourselves. So you look for that piece of grit – the scenario of conflict in the heart of the brief. Then your project design is in the service of that story. I find that you are obviously trying to answer a brief and provide recommendations to make a difference to their business. But I also found that there is a selfish element to the way I go about doing my job which is I want my projects to entertain me. On the basis that if I am entertained by it, they will be. If I find it engaging, they will.

The client has come to us with the first page of the story and they are saying to us ‘write the rest’. So everything you do comes from there – your sample becomes your cast of characters for example. You are explicitly using a subjectively created cast of characters to create a plot. If you decide your focus group has a sample of six people and you have artificially constructed that sample, connived with your client, to throw them into a room, catalyse a conversation and see what happens, your job then is to make some sense of it. So you are then imposing order onto some event. So what we do is absolutely a story in the classic sense. We just need to make it as vivid and as propulsive as we can and to make the flow of it feel as if there is some sense of inevitable logic to it and that takes it to a recommendation – that is the stuff of stories.

Page 4

When is a story not a story? The reality v the fad.The example I use in our videos is by John Le Carre. The cat sat on the mat is not a story, but the cat that sat on the dog’s mat is a story. The mat in that quote is a scarce resource. When the cat is sitting on its own mat the reason why there is no conflict there is because there is no scarcity. When they both want to sit on the dog’s mat it is turned into a scarce resource and so a fight ensues. So the whole structure of the drama follows on from that. What often happens with things that have become faddish is that they get misused. The problem with storytelling in advertising, for example, is that they don’t really obey the very simple rules of what a story is. It is disappointing when people use the word story too loosely.

For example, the latest TSB launch ad, where the conflict in the story – which was that they were bought by Lloyds and the whole financial crisis – is airbrushed over with just the phrase ‘and then there was a storm. But now the storm is over and TSB is the same thing it always was’. Well that is not a story – it spent 2 minutes setting up the protagonist but

there is no antagonist and no real plot. So the resolution hasn’t been earned. So we don’t connect.

An anecdote is not the same as a story. An anecdote can be really funny and brilliantly told, but the difference is that an anecdote is the telling of an event but the event itself doesn’t have to connect to a before or after, it exists in a moment. An anecdote doesn’t have to involve transformation, but a story does. A lot of communication uses story when they actually mean anecdote. So I suppose it’s the miss-use of the phrase.

What is in it for us? The benefits.The audience feel it emotionally as people. When something gets past your job title and it connects with you as a person, it has a much more vivid impact on you. You are much more likely to then fight for the conclusions because you have felt it. Our job is to make our audience passionate about the inevitable conclusions and recommendations from our project. If they feel it vividly I think they will want to fight for it within their own business. They will believe it more.

We as a team are spending more of our time thinking about stories, and more consciously creating methodologies that will offer a springboard into a plot under a wider narrative arc. The more we do this the more we are finding we are being more useful. So the more that we actively embrace storytelling and actually trying to increase the level of artifice around it, the more potent we become.

Bringing to life. The power of great writing.There is nothing that is so amazing here. Video has a role to play, of course. But sometimes conversations that are really interesting to watch first hand are not that fantastic in the video. So I think a lot of it is in the writing. When you set up a storytelling project in an overt fashion, when the proposal is written that way and you have already been given the licence and permission to try innovative methodologies, you make the writing job a lot easier. It is bound to be interesting stuff. I think one of the things you try to do is to change the focal lens. So if you think about movies as a form of storytelling one of their great tricks is zooming in and zooming out.. Our version of that is not having a monotonous pace as you write your story. So you establish the landscape – and semiotics is brilliant for that as it covers the wider frame of culture – or the category that you are looking at, before zooming into the brand.

I think the thing that we are great fans of here is metaphor. You are simply dragging in a word out of its normal context and putting it in to a new one to create new meaning. We are forever dragging in analogies from other categories or projects too. We are not afraid to mine our own personal experiences and will tell personal anecdotes. Sometimes you use individual people to tell a story on behalf of the wider group.

We are happy to make things deliberately subjective in the telling. All of that is around making it feel something you can connect with on an emotional level.

Page 5

Getting it right. Top 3 hints & tips.

Start with the brief. Ignore the data in the brief – still read it and absorb it - but don’t be misled by it. A lot of briefs look terrifyingly complex so just try and cut past that and go straight to understanding the conflict in the brief. Then go on an imaginary journey with the brief – where could this take you? What can you imagine the arc of this project to be? It isn’t about second guessing the answer or writing the content before you have done the research, but it is about feeling the potential excitement of the story unfolding.

Use your analysis to create a plot. Plots are a sequence of events that naturally flow from one another. So a fantastic friend to you as a storyteller is your guide. It is a framework for a potential story. What you are trying to do is to make it easy for the story to emerge and to tell itself. So some of that is about little methodological tricks, some of it is about the situation you have created or forced. So you force some kind of conflict that you can explore.

The final tip – which is easy to say but harder to do - is to have the confidence to believe that the audience really wants to hear the story. It is much safer and more comfortable to sit behind a veneer of professionalism because storytelling involves the risk of making a connection to another person. When you try to bridge that gap and establish that connection you risk rejection. It does involve risk and vulnerability. Unless you are prepared to make that particular leap then ultimately the rest of it is just messing around with the latest tricks and methods.

@AcaciaAvenue www.linkedin.com/company/acacia-avenue

www.acacia-avenue.com

T: 020 7014 9500 353 City Road, London EC1V 1LR