Storytelling Still Sells In A World Of Measurement

In the early 1900s a popular wrinkled mascot named Sunny Jim with a red tailcoat, white trousers and a hat with his name on it fronted a brand called Force Cereal. Created by American jingle writer Minnie Maud Hanff an initially morose character named Jimmy Dumps would transform into the bubbly Sunny Jim upon eating cereal.

By early 1904 Edward Ellsworth’s Force Food Company was producing 360,000 packets of the product every day. Eventually it began to decline in the US with the company facing bankruptcy (although it continued to have success in the UK - 12.5 million boxes of the product were sold in 1930 and Brits continued to buy it into the late 20th Century).

Despite this, 'Anatomy of A Humbug' author and advertising veteran Paul Feldwick argues that the success of Sunny Jim was written off too early.

“The problem wasn’t with Sunny Jim himself. The advertising was actually quite effective. The real issue was who wanted Sunny Jim to fail and why? Some advertising professionals like Ernest Elmo Calkins looked down on Sunny Jim because the campaign was created by amateurs and entertainers, not by serious “professional” ad people,” Feldwick explains while speaking at Walnut Unlimited’s Brainy Bar ‘The Science Of Storytelling’ event.

He believes that mostly male advertising professionals of the time had wanted to distance themselves from ancient, storytelling, carnival-like sales tactics featuring jokes and singing in favour of selling messages with no frivolity.

However, Feldwick argues that such storytelling can make storytelling more effective. “The old-fashioned medieval peddler found that you could sell more if you went around the house singing a song or telling a joke,” he explains.

And while there are many more modern ways of delivering messages than cave paintings, epic poems, and carefully woven tapestries, Walnut Unlimited's director Dr Cristina de Balanzo and University College London's“ professor of cognitive neuroscience Dr Guido Orgs also concurred that advertisers still have a lot to learn from artists, dancers, and market day hawkers of the past.

Stories that stick tap into cultural truths

Balanzo highlights that stories, whether they are historical tales or religious texts such as the Bible or Qur'an have the power to "change ethical frameworks".

Discussing Hemingway's famously hard-hitting micro-story 'For sale: baby shoes, never worn', Balanzo highlights that the sticking power of stories lies in their ability to hit people emotionally. It is easy for people to not only deduce what might have occurred but to empathise on some level because it speaks to a collective understanding of loss.

Applying this to advertising, Balanzo suggests the example of Pampers ads that highlight the power of nappies to help parents gain a peaceful night's sleep.

"Storytelling is a currency of attention, but for the stories to be effective, they require certain conditions. The conditions will be that we don't just view entertainment but that it can make people think and feel".

Keep it live

The best stories are designed with participation in mind, according to Dr Guido Orgs, who was previously a dancer.

"Historically and traditionally, out of all the performing arts, dance is the one that has relied the most on the live performance context," he explains.

Citing the example of the All Blacks, he describes the purpose of the hakka as more than entertainment - "The purpose is not to entertain like ballet or opera, it's to intimidate your opponent so it has a very different function," he says.

He explains an experiment conducted by his team watched a specially choreographed video by Matthias Stirling, which did not contain music. It used smartwatches and live feedback to track the dancers and the audience.

The results showed that engagement increased with how synchronous the movements of the audience are.

Meanwhile, additional data from the fMRI scanner looking at how similar the brain activity is revealed that the audience with more experience of dance showed the most synchronous activity because they were able to simulate what they see with their body and knowledge of dance. Equally, the scans of those who had the most knowledge of dance were most similar to the choreographer (even without prior knowledge of the performance). For Orgs, this highlights the impact and power of non-verbal communication regardless of narrative.

"Movement communicates content, mediums, and intentions non-verbally. Engagement is not necessarily linked to understanding the narrative. There is no meaning in the Hakka in the way that there is in a tale about a princess who gets captured. It's all more abstract, but its intentions and feelings get conveyed very well through dance and music," he explains.

The art is the experience

Balanzo also adds that paintings such as Goya's Pinturas Negras (and the many expressionist paintings that followed his era) were created to tell stories about the atrocities of the time.

"When they encounter the paintings, the audience participates in the meaning as they make sense of the aesthetic experience," she explains.

She connects the importance of resonating with experience with Dove's Real Beauty platform. "It's a brand that has been able to create stories for 20 years that have this emotional resonance about making women feel better."

She adds that while the question of whether to be disruptive or continue old narrative threads can only be answered by testing, the real power of stories lies in their ability to connect with us.

"They are catalysts of empathy. That's why it is important that we take into account how people are living and experiencing the world around them. Stories are play and practise. We are entertained and we learn. Stories shape our minds and behaviours," she adds.

In essence, like the drummer or the painter in the cave, advertisers are telling a story that brings people together, elevates or distinguishes them, and gets them to believe and act.

No serious numbers deck or flashy suit should convince the industry to forget how primal the art of selling actually is.