What’s in a story?

So much has been thought, written, and talked about when it comes to storytelling in the academic and business worlds. It is a science as much as it is an art, and it is certainly something that brands need to master in order to foster emotional resonance and connection.

At the 10th anniversary edition of Walnut and the Human Understanding Lab’s Brainy Bar, a line-up of expert storytellers took to the stage to give their two cents on a topic that continues to fascinate (and in some cases elude) both the research and the marketing industry. Read on to see how we unpicked this crucial concept.

Crash course in storytelling

Brainy Bar founder and host, Dr Cristina de Balanzo, kicked off the night with a love letter to storytelling. We know that storytelling predates language and is universal (if still unique) across societies and cultures. But Cristina went so far as to argue that no matter the length or medium, telling stories is the “sine qua non” of human connection – it’s fundamental (for those of us who skipped Latin at school).

This was evidenced at this year’s Cannes festival, with prominent figures like Disney’s Dana Walden and the award-winning producer and screenwriter Shonda Rhimes waxing lyrical on the persistent power of human storytelling.

From making sense of the world with drawings on cave walls to shaping our ethical framework with religious texts like the Bible or the Quran, telling stories is a timeless exercise in empathy, connection, and culture-making. And it’s not easy – there’s very little room for error when all you have to make an impression is a billboard your audience can very easily ignore by the side of the motorway. But why do we love and crave stories so strongly? Cristina considered 5 key points:

1. Stories connect us with each other; they are a catalyst for empathy.
2. Stories are play and practice – we’re entertained while we learn.
3. Stories shape our minds and behaviours and promote social cohesion.
4. We force stories even where they don’t exist to gauge meaning.
5. Dreams are stories – we’re constantly dreaming, whether asleep or awake.

Storytelling is deeply intertwined with creativity – you can’t have one without the other. But for stories to be effective, they require certain conditions. Yes, storytelling is a currency of attention, but it requires dual processing. In other words, narratives need to make people think and feel to truly land.

Walking us through the recent highlights of storytelling found in the advertising industry, Cristina was clear on one thing: brands are built on storytelling.

Live and let live

Next, we welcomed Professor of Neuroscience at UCL Dr Guido Orgs to the stage. With a background in dance, Guido drew our attention to a slightly different type of storytelling, discussing the effectiveness of live experiences.

Guido launched straight in, playing a clip of the New Zealand rugby team performing the haka. His point? Out of all the performing arts, dance has historically and traditionally relied the most on the live experience context. Like we see in the haka clip, a key aspect of dance that we pick up on is synchrony. This is important because experiments have shown that the more synchronous a performance, the more engaging for the audience. Synchrony can depend on prior knowledge, i.e., a dancer with extensive experience of contemporary dance engages more with a contemporary dance performance than someone in the audience who is coming to it for the first time.

But the power lies in the fact that engagement isn’t necessarily linked with understanding a narrative. Going back to the haka, there isn’t a narrative in the dance that we can ascertain, instead, intentions and feelings are conveyed through movement and sound. Why is this important? If shared knowledge enhances interpretation of an ambiguous stimuli, this is something that brands should aim to tap into.

Guido went on to make it clear that live, socially shared experiences are more engaging and memorable than solitary or mediated ones. Take Abba Voyage as an example. Despite the fact that the performance centres virtual “ABBAtars”, it is still a powerful shared experience. You pay for your tickets, you sing and dance around with thousands of other people, and you listen to a live 10-piece instrumental band. Now in its third year, Abba Voyage is still immensely popular, with 99% of tickets sold almost every night.

Having shared his studies into movement, Guido left us with a resounding conclusion: when it comes to storytelling, brands should prioritise live, interactive, or socially shared experiences to maximise emotional impact and memorability.

Once upon a time in adland…

Author and advertising thought leader, Paul Feldwick, showcased yet another approach to our topic. He sought to practice what he preached by telling us the story of one of the earliest iterations of an advertising campaign on record. Namely, the story of Force cereal and Sunny Jim.

Force was the first commercially successful wheat flake breakfast cereal. The key to its success? In 1901, Minnie Maud Hanf, a freelance jingle writer, was commissioned to create an ad for the brand. She invented Jimmy Dumps, a morose character who on tasting Force cereal transforms into Sunny Jim. While it may seem trite to us now, this figure caught the public imagination like no other. People started sending in their own jingles to expand the story of Sunny Jim, they even bought merch. And it didn’t stop there. Sunny Jim tapped into art and culture, with humorous poems, plays, and stories written about the character.

Despite the mainstream belief that Sunny Jim was generally a flop that never contributed to sales of the cereal, Paul did some research and found that the opposite was true. Charting the rise and fall of Force, it’s clear that the point at which the brand started failing can be traced back to the point at which it hired a professional advertising agency which changed the story of Sunny Jim beyond recognition. The success of the Sunny Jim campaign was due to its emotional, whimsical storytelling, meaning that the subsequent rationalisation and professionalisation of the character rejected its entertainment-led roots and, in doing so, failed to captivate audiences in the same way.

In closing, Paul got us thinking about the overarching moral of this story. He posed that a good story should have an infinite number of morals because a good story is one from which many different conclusions can be drawn, and one that different people interpret in different ways.

The moral of the story

There’s no end to the impact that storytelling has on our world. Each tackling a highly complex topic from slightly different angles, our speakers were all agreed about the positive effect that telling a good story can have on audiences.

As we learnt on the night, there’s more than one moral to every story. So, if you’d like to unpack this narrative further for your brand specifically, get in touch with Dr Cristina de Balanzo.