Do you know the key difference between story and narrative?
Story is the block of marble. Narrative reveals the statue hidden inside.
This article will show brands and individuals how to streamline your story into a powerful narrative that earns the attention of customers.
A story is made with good intentions, but clutter and confusion will lead it into the noise. Narrative chisels, sculpts and polishes the story so it can breathe and release its heart and soul.
This earns meaningful attention, resonates emotionally with customers and spreads the three magic words: word-of-mouth.
In one study, 80% of customers wanted to engage with brand narratives but 85% of them could not recall a good brand narrative.
The opportunity is there to seize control of your narrative and earn attention.
In this article I will address 7 major storytelling problems and offer 7 practical solutions, so you can design a more powerful narrative to engage your customers and earn the attention of new ones.
“2023 Will Empower Customer Choice”
As the landscape becomes more immersive, we will witness the death of brand storytelling and the birth of narrative design.
Narrative Design is a title used in the games industry for specialist writers who have a mastery of scriptwriting, as well as the technical skills to deliver narrative across expansive and immersive environments.
But why is this important for you?
Because the traditional media landscape is changing to an immersive one. With the relentless rise of Unreal Engine (owned by Epic Games, the company behind Fortnite), the metaverse, XR, immersive audio, virtual production, Web 3.0 and more, you will need a streamlined narrative designed to accomplish your marketing goals within a fast-changing environment.
One of the biggest changes is that immersion will rely on interactivity and customer-choice. This means your customer will be exposed to your company or story through non-linear narratives.
In the game world, these are stories that don’t play out in a linear fashion, like it does in a movie for example, but instead allow the customer to decide how they wish to interact with your narrative, where they want to do it and what time of day.
These changes may look manageable to those well-prepared but will be significant for others who are used to traditional storytelling methods. In some ways it may feel like entering a jet-stream without a pilot.
Not to worry, I will now reveal some of the narrative design techniques you can use to navigate through the pitfalls of storytelling and pilot yourself to a successful landing.
7 Reasons Why Your Story Fails & 7 Ways to Fix It
1. Your Story is Cluttered.
Your story is more like a wild garden.
Too many storylines, characters, themes, agendas and competing ideas. All of this is labelled ‘content’ and is spread out across all the marketing channels available.
Customers receive different versions of your story at various touch-points and are left confused and cold.
Clutter means you’re hoarding, holding on to things you think are precious but could do with removing.
One tell-tale sign is if you find it difficult to communicate your core message or you’re not even sure what your brand or company is really about.
In the book Corporate Culture and Performance, Harvard professors James L. Heskett and John P. Kotter discovered that companies who de-cluttered and successfully communicated their value and purpose––could secure 750 times greater profit than those that communicated ineffectively.
Clutter is one of the most common problems facing brand stories, but to some degree, our own lives too.
Take a look at the endless bricks on your calendar, the apps tiling your phone screen, or the hours lost on Netflix scrolling past thumbnails with your eyes glazed. If your story is cluttered too, it will never stand out.
The Solution
You need to clear the clutter from the garden and let rain reach the roots.
The first thing a narrative designer would do is to remove what is not story.
Leo Tolstoy summed this up beautifully:
“Truth, like gold, is to be obtained not by its growth, but by washing away from it all that is not gold.”
But how do you know what to remove isn’t precious?
It comes from researching the story you have and identifying the most powerful theme.
Be aware of confusing theme with message. Message is your sales and value proposition that marketing agencies or strategists may help you develop. I’m talking about theme.
For example Apple’s recurrent theme is thoughtful design. Stranger Things’ and Lord of the Rings’ is friendship. The North Face’s theme is adventure.
Theme resonates with customers and identifying it early will help you locate the most powerful narrative in your story.
Now the next job for a narrative designer is to remove all unnecessary story stands, characters or ideas that do not belong i.e. ‘all that is not gold’. Don’t worry, your good ideas have strong roots and will survive the cut. One or two may even be incorporated into the main narrative or used as a sub-narrative, and this is where the gaming industry helps as a structural example.
Typically narrative-driven games have main quests supported by side quests. The best games focus attention on the main quest but offer equally rewarding side quests, which crucially offer players a new perspective on the main quest. Think of them as separate rivers running to the same sea.
Distilling your story into a clear narrative will not only make your story stand out and earn attention, but it will de-clutter your own life and give you a crystal-clear understanding of your own company like never before.
2. Your Story is Inauthentic
“Don’t bend; don’t water it down...don’t edit your own soul according to the fashion...follow your most intense obsessions mercilessly.”
- Franz Kafka
88 percent of consumers say that authenticity is a critical factor when choosing which brands they like and want to engage with (Stackla, 2021).
It is all too clear when stories and brands are following a trend or produce campaigns based on a momentary insights. Although these can provide short-term boosts, they follow fashion often shoe-horning the narrative into every media channel going, rather than tailoring them to fit each one.
These stories are externally motivated which is what we call in the industry: outside-in. This means the story is reactive to external forces: media, fashion, fads, excessive data or multiple stakeholders.
They respond to stimuli rather than grow organically, and subsequently their stories lack heart and emotional resonance. They will often use templates, gimmicks or poorly imitate other successful narratives, rather than focusing on working inside-out.
The Solution
Put yourself in the shoes of a narrative designer.
A narrative designer will identify this problem as being an outside-in story versus an inside-out one.
Inside-out means the story is developed outward from the core. Look at Arcane the critically-acclaimed expansion of the League of Legends franchise into a grounded, narrative-driven Netflix series.
Great narrative design will first locate the beating heart of the story. This might be the theme we identified during the de-cluttering process. Or it could be something else you found unexpectedly during streamlining.
Now you have found the heart of your story, you can establish narrative authenticity.
From here a narrative designer will use their arsenal of storytelling tools to explore backstory, lore, world and characters and go about expanding them layer-by-layer. They will ensure the heart of your story is present at every touchpoint to your brand.
Now you have a narrative built on solid foundations, which feels authentic and emotionally triggers your customers.
3. Your stories lack depth
We’ve talked about extracting gold from your existing story, but what if you are a new company with a brand new product or story to tell?
Or what if you’ve been around a while and want to re-imagine your story entirely?
The first thing you will need is narrative depth. This is the scope and scale of your story. You may think that prestige brands or longstanding companies automatically have depth due to their history, but the truth is that many of their stories fail too.
How many famous brand’s videos do you skip or watch to the end on YouTube? How many half-finished big-budget movies are in your recently watched list? How many books do you return to the shelf after skimming a page? These are signs that a story lacks depth.
However, don’t confuse depth for weighty themes. Depth can come from humour, improvisation or drama. It comes in all shapes and sizes but we know it when we see it and we feel a lack of connection to a narative, when it’s not there.
The Solution
Assuming the role of a narrative designer, you will explore and expand your existing IP or create a new one, if you don’t currently have one.
IP means intellectual property. For example Disney has a huge IP and is always developing it––sometimes by purchasing others such as Star Wars or Marvel, which in turn continually expand their own.
The first thing a narrative designer will do to build depth in your story is to write and expand the lore.
But what is lore?
“The Silmarillion” - J.R.R. Tolkien’s infamous appendix of lore for The Lord of The Rings which inspired Amazon’s Rings of Power.
Lore is the body of knowledge surrounding your brand or story. It is called the “story bible” in the games, film and TV industry.
Lore will develop origin, world, characters, rules, themes and backstory. It’s worth mentioning that lore is best kept off the screen where it acts as an invisible force, like gravity, to ground your story.
The narrative designer will then expand your IP organically following the inside-out rule. Since IP represents the narrative value of your brand, this organic approach will create a higher brand value over a longer term and thereby establish trust.
According to a survey, in the United States, 46 percent of consumers would pay more to buy from brands they trust.
Explore your story deeper, design it more thoughtfully and your narrative will gain profound depth.
4. Your Story is Fragmented
Imagine a huge ship with lots of little skiffs sailing beside it, all flying different coloured banners.
The big ship is your main narrative, the skiffs are the dozens of sub-narratives, and the banners represent the theme of your story. As you can see the fleet is in disarray and lacks unity.
Why is your story fragmented?
People try to tell too many stories at the same time and end up confusing the customer. For example the narrative of an audio series is different to the brand’s social media narrative. Their virtual production background has nothing in common with their hero commercial and so on.
A fragmented story is one of the most common pitfalls of modern storytelling. It results in your narrative being enjoyed piecemeal by customers who never see the whole picture.
THE Solution
A narrative designer will unify the story around a goal.
First it is important not to confuse fragmentation with clutter. Here’s the key difference:
Clutter is the tangled tree which is fixed by pruning so it can receive sunlight and rain and then bloom.
Fragmentation is a forest of trees with no path between them.
A narrative designer connects the paths that are important and removes those that are not.
How do you connect your story fragments?
Narrative design will explore your story, characters, IP and lore to identify the most powerful goal.
Now you can set this goal as the primary objective of your narrative, the feature of your world or the central motivation behind your hero. Goal-setting is a propulsive and unifying technique that sets direction of travel, so all boats head in the same direction flying the same flag.
5. You Haven’t Built a World
The world is the main place where you choose to unfold your narrative.
How many brand stories truly suspend your disbelief when interacting with their worlds?
You remember the ones who create immersive worlds, such as the other-worldly feeling of entering an Apple store, watching a Samsung ad, or running on a Peloton. However most companies fail to build authentic and immersive worlds true to the heart of their story.
If you think of the brands mentioned above, you can instantly visualise their worlds. This is the same for BMW, Corona beer and Canon, who all have distinct and identifiable worlds.
It is no surprise that all of the brands mentioned above are in Interbrand’s top 100 best brands.
Peloton uses immersive visuals, audio and products
But everyday we see stories that have little to no world-building or imitate what we’ve seen before.
As we move to immersive storytelling with brands creating virtual productions and their own metaverses, lacklustre world-building will fail to suspend the customer’s disbelief and the magic will disappear.
THE Solution
Fortunately world-building is one of the premier skills of a narrative designer. This comes as no surprise given that games are defined by the authenticity, scale and immersiveness of their worlds.
Games go one step further by using their worlds for environmental storytelling, such as using objects, audio, and backdrops to reveal crucial information.
Environmental storytelling in the ‘Last of Us’, using the world to reveal narrative - Naughty Dog Games
How do you know when your world building is successful?
When you think of the world of a story like Stranger Things, you imagine 80’s horror such as Stephen King novels, and the cult sci-fi films of Steven Spielberg. Whether you watch the Stranger Things series or step into one of their live experiences, you know what world to expect.
Fortunately world-building is a tenet of good narrative design. A first step involves exploring your lore, backstory, origin, values and characters, while you slowly compile a look-book. Sometimes this can begin as a mood board or simple sketches that begin painting the picture of your world.
Your research might involve exploring curated image galleries, pinteterst, artstation, or even following the work of artists across social media and being aware of their stories and looking out for related artists.
Artsation is a great resource for cutting-edge world-building across all industries
A pro-tip: a good narrative designer also notices the real world narrative about them before imagining how to enhance it through design. So going to big visual arts events (like Signal), trying local exhibitions or picking up an architectural magazine, can all help open your eyes to new worlds within your reach.
Once you have built an authentic world, rest assured your customer will be fully immersed––whenever and wherever they experience your narrative.
The bonus of an original and immersive world is that it will help your narrative stay consistent for customers across all of your story’s touchpoints. Something to bear in mind as we enter the age of immersive storytelling.
6. Your Characters Are Flat
Flat characters are one, or at best, two-dimensional. These types of characters are built on stereotypes from the outside-in and aren’t grown organically from the inside-out.
They do not have an original voice and their dialogue is often predictable because we’ve seen these characters time and again.
Another issue is picking the wrong hero.
If your story has a protagonist, they will often be the entry-point for your customer. But the wrong protagonist––lacking depth and credibility––will result in the customer not empathising or relating to them or your brand.
If a hero or a group of characters are integral to your story, then it is paramount to flesh them out using narrative tools.
THE Solution
A narrative designer will make your characters three-dimensional by identifying their motivations.
Characters are built on motivations, both internal and external. When these are at odds, there is strong internal conflict.
In The Godfather, Michael Corleone wants to pursue a corporate career outside the family Mafia business, but inside he wrestles with the desire to make his Mafia-boss father proud.
Expert narrative designers typically use character matrixes to determine a number of key features, such as: internal and external motivations, goals, role in the story, personality, backstory, voice, habits, mirrors and character conflicts.
But there is one more thing that is often overlooked which could be crucial to fleshing out your characters: the Shadow.
Narrative designers develop this enigmatic feature, which is often kept off the page, and is symbolic of the secretive desires or repressed feelings of the character.
A good example is from the critically and commercially acclaimed film, Top Gun: Maverick
The hero has the external goal of wanting to remain being a mercurial pilot in an increasingly bureacratic world. His interior conflict comes from the responsibility of becoming a surrogate father.
The shadow––his suppressed desire––is found in his spiritual relationship with his dead co-pilot, Goose. To the point he often mumbles, “Speak to me, Goose...” when flying through the clouds or in tense situations.
This is the kind of first-class character development you find, albeit rarely, in the best shows, games and films.
If you can apply these skills to flesh out your own characters, they will become three-dimensional, believable and relatable characters that stand the test of time.
7. Where’s the Mystery?
Is your story boring and predictable?
Great narratives are built on the wonder of mystery. This is not just for entertainment, great brands use it too.
Think about the secrecy surrounding Apple’s innovation department and product launches. And let’s not forget Coca Cola’s secret formula.
Most stories plough ahead without threading in a sense of mystery. We’ve all seen thousands of stories and they’ve become all too predictable. This explains the dozens of half-watched shows in your watchlist or the hundreds of customers bouncing from your website.
Without mystery there is no anticipation: the hallmark of great storytelling.
Anticipation is the “and then what?” moment. Without anticipation people turn off to find something that will whet their appetite.
Even stories that have factored in mystery fail because they incorrectly think mystery is only about plot. It’s also about decisions and expectations. For example, if a character is given a big dilemma, or a world is built upon an inherent mystery, you build suspense.
Mystery, suspense and anticipation are missing from the majority of today’s narratives but is something you can easily fix.
The Solution
A great narrative designer will mine your lore, backstory, characters, strategy, world and anything related to you and your brand to find the underlying mystery.
Taking this approach, you may find mystery where you least expect it, for example in your corporate culture (such as Apple).
Mystery could be the way you write copy on your website, re-structure your visual content or add countdowns to your product launches.
The coming age of immersion is ripe for mystery because it is visual and interactive and your customers will demand to be thrilled. Weaving mystery into your narrative will ensure it stands out from your competitors, while keeping your customers on the edge of their seats.
IN Conclusion
These are some of the main storytelling pitfalls that might be affecting your brand narrative from reaching your customer. But now you have seven solutions in your hand.
You can undertake them yourself, weave them into your marketing plan, or engage a specialist narrative designer or immersive storytelling company to fix them for you.
The takeaway is to think of your story as being alive. Just like we do in our own lives—your story should continually evolve and expand into new and exciting areas.
Be mindful that with expansion comes clutter and fragmentation. Again, just apply some of the narrative design techniques here, to ensure you chisel away anything that is not story.
Turning story into narrative is an ongoing process but one with an incredible, life-changing reward: word-of-mouth.
I sincerely believe that the greatest form of marketing in this current age of content saturation is word-of-mouth. Personal recommendations from friends or family, or credible customer reviews, will cut-through the noise and establish a path of trust between company and customer.
A UK study found that if a customer likes a brand story, 55 per cent of them are more likely to buy the product in the future, 44 per cent will share the story and 15 percent will buy the product immediately.
If your narrative is streamlined, concise and immersive it will ring as clear as a bell in your customer’s heads, they will tell everyone they know about how good your narrative is, and they will buy into your brand.
Mono Ghose is an award-winning narrative designer, filmmaker & founder of Mavericks Storm Entertainment (a leading narrative design consultancy & immersive storytelling studio based in London, UK).