CHAPTER 03

BRAVE NEW WORLDS

Moving from Storytelling to Storyscaping

If you read the Introduction, you’ll remember how we shared our belief that storytelling (creating ads) is only about one-third of the recipe today. It’s in the other two-thirds (creating worlds) where the real customer connection happens through shared experiences. In other words, to increase results, we must focus on creating a world where immersive experiences connect people with brands. As part of creating the right world, the old way of marketing (creating ads) becomes just part of the system for sustainability, brand loyalty, and possibly even survival. We cannot have one without the other, so it is far less effective with only one-third and not the other two thirds.

Your College Years Were Not a Total Waste. In other current marketing books and blogs, you may be getting the message that it’s a new world, that the past doesn’t matter, that you should leave behind everything you used to do. During agency pitches, you may be getting the message that digital is here, social media is the way and everything else is dead. On news channel interviews, you may be witnessing some bickering between the new school calling the old school a dinosaur who has fallen and the old school retorting about longevity and wisdom while they shrug off their opponent as a passing fad. Well, we do not subscribe to the belief that it’s an either/or scenario. We feel it would be unwise to forget everything you once knew. What you understand from your past ways of creating, planning, and placing your brands, your products and your services is still very valid. If and when you use the old ways, they come into play after you’ve created your world, and you are ready to tell people how to find your connection points into that world. We encourage you to realize that the battle of new media versus old media does not really matter; winning or losing that battle of definition will not affect real change or bring results. What matters is your willingness and ability to broaden your mind and evolve. Most people who pick up this book will already be sitting on one or the other side of the old media/new media wall; it seems few people are in the middle. We think that is a real problem. Instead of trying to define which school of thought you subscribe to, shift into the act of creating a world and just watch; you may be amazed to find that battle dissolving before your eyes because it will become very apparent that there is room for both new and old media, new and old ways. As we said before, it’s an evolution more than a revolution. The hard part is figuring out which old tools to keep, which to discard, and which new ones to add to your trusty tool belt. We can’t give you a specific answer on that because it’s different for everyone. What we will do is show you a foolproof way to arrive at an answer for yourself.

We have all worked the old way of telling a story with just the written word and know there is a definite craft to that. We’ve also worked the angle of adding moving pictures to take story to an even more interesting place, and there is a craft to that as well. Now, with fast advances and vast benefits in digital technology and media fragmentation, many companies are having trouble bridging the gap between old and new. Our belief is that shifts in consumer behavior and expectations pose the single biggest threat and in doing so also provide the biggest opportunity for business today. The world is changing fast; take advantage of it. Imagine owning a travel agency, record store, bookstore, video rental, independent insurance agency, car dealership, even restaurant; how has your business changed over the past five years? Many have failed while some have flourished. Ask yourself something about the winners and survivors. Did changing their positioning (story) alone help, or did they win by changing their business, or both? This is where business is truly suffering and names we didn’t expect to fall have crumbled. To significantly reduce this challenge, we at SapientNitro have learned that it’s a matter of shifting focus away from your competition and focusing deep on what your customers’ future expectations and behaviors may look like. A big communication idea alone can treat the symptoms of irrelevancy in the short term, but unless you at least meet consumer expectations for experience, you will eventually lose out to someone who does. Advertising is important, yes, but today you must move beyond sole reliance on its ability to drive your business. Spend your time crafting a brand world that includes communications and beyond, where all facets of the business are connected and working in tandem. We say, “Create the right world, and success will follow.” When your world is well defined, cooperatively created, and connected systematically, then the results are impressive!

At the highest level, we have touched on the role story plays in helping us make sense of the world. We have highlighted the power of experience as a way to create personal stories for people. Now we are going to explore the concept of Experience Space (world) versus media plan as our canvas in an effort to show you can start to see how we will build connections. We believe we need to start by poking a ton of holes in the advertising industry’s media centric view of the world. We believe this myopia is what gets in the way of agencies and advertisers creating worlds. Even the premise of bought, owned, and earned media—although smarter and more inclusive—is still somewhat broken because it falls short of reality. See, the last time we checked, we found that a consumer’s world consists of more than media alone, and you sure as hell can’t expect to go into a media planning database, punch in a few data points, and have it spit out a map of the world around that consumer, including influences, behaviors, and preferences—it is still all focused on media consumption and reach, two important data points if you want to push a message one way, but hardly what you fully need to create a connected experience. Having an experience with your brand is the connection that consumers desire and expect. So, we have to reinvent connections planning to give it to them.

Worlds by Design. We’ve been showing you how stories are the threads people use to make sense of the world we live in. Naturally, a story that glides across physical and virtual space and is connected through emotional space is sure to make even greater sense of (and connection to) everything. This is what we call the Experience Space, and it effectively defines a world. To fully describe a world is much more thought provoking: Worlds are more powerful than words. Worlds contain stories that people want to be part of. Worlds are created through a Story System; they cannot be developed through a mere story line or media plan. Worlds are composed of multiple interesting spaces where people enjoy interacting with brands. Worlds provide opportunities for people to connect with brands in immersive and cooperative ways. Worlds have intraconnectivity and regenerating energy and live for action. Worlds are guided, and worlds are free flowing. Worlds are where we draw a real connection between communications and commerce. Worlds are, well, worlds are where brands and consumer coexist.

To better understand this world we speak of, consider it the Experience Space, the canvas upon which brands and people get to connect, engage, and play. You design this Experience Space to intentionally cut across physical space and virtual space, and you connect it through emotional space. Let’s explore this. Say you’re sitting in a chair in your office, with a desk, a computer, and all the typical office stuff. You’re holding onto and reading this book. That describes one dimension—the physical space. Simultaneously, there’s a monologue going on in your head, “I gotta make sure I send that proposal off to Janet so she can review it and get it over to Quentin; we really need to close that deal. . . . Andre’s birthday is tomorrow. . . . I hope the weather holds out for our road trip this weekend . . .” All this while you’re online checking the status of your home owner’s insurance policy, reading an e-mail from your boss, and scanning closing prices on the Dow. This is the dimension known as the virtual space. We concurrently live in physical space and in our own minds. Our ability to bounce in and out of these different dimensions defines the always-on environment we all live and work in today. This is why you can no longer get away from having both a great product and a great story and why you need to create shared stories through the power of immersive experiences within your brand world. Utilize both the power of story and the necessity of experience to differentiate your brand. Remember everything we do must account for the overlap of the physical, virtual, and always-present emotional space—be it online, offline, or in work mode. Those are ideas of the past.

Widen Your Experience Space. One of the things we discovered here is a capability we had never been exposed to in the traditional agency space. We never even knew this existed. The hidden treasures we discovered evolved from some investments Sapient’s founders had made back in our tech consulting days. Jerry and Stuart believed that clients would spend tons of effort building systems that people would never adopt or would simply not get the most value from. These guys believed strongly that great design was a huge business advantage, with creative directors constantly evaluating advertising, as if it’s the air we breathe. Often we observe work that is rather entertaining, clever, and funny or that really draws on the emotional space. But rarely do those works explain the role of the brand or the role of the product effectively. We see work that is pretty interesting or compelling, but it’s simply conveying a linear narrative. Even those ads that we love for their entertaining and memorable aspects, we don’t often recall the associated brand so, in the end, how do those entertaining ads connect to everything else that company does? What is the point if we can’t deliver that experience at the store? Zoom out your experience lens. Search for new possibilities to connect with more than one dimension. The former process of finding the highest reach and frequency and placing a linear ad buy no longer cuts it. Connection points exist in many, many more areas than just through your media; they are everywhere! Remember, this relates all communication and what you communicate through your actions, which determines people’s perception of you. Each one of your communications can be considered a connection point! Do you think the employees of your company have (and share) a perception of your brand? Of course they do! And since they have the most personal and most frequent engagement with it, why not start internally? How do your employees view you? How in line are your human resources policies? How is the turnover rate? Do employees believe in and act from your company Purpose, or are they out blowing the whistle on your weak points? Start tying your internal actions to the external image you wish to portray!

Easier Entry to Market. Fact: Technology has dissolved many former barriers around launching a brand. Over the past decade, the real estate and physical assets a business needed to acquire to get its brand to market ranged from between considerable and huge, and now it has worked its way down to home based. Before the new millennium, who discussed start-up businesses? Historically, big companies launched new brands, and even with those powerful driving engines, few survived. Small businesses could make a go if they capped themselves by geography. Their costs to produce, warehouse, advertise, and ship to perspective customers beyond that local range was simply too prohibitive. The barrier known as economies of scale, whereby a smaller business strapped for the ability to produce large enough quantities to compete with the big guys, is less of a threat these days because they have more outlets for funding and more partners who help bear the load. Technology has shrunk overhead by millions of dollars and offered considerable savings appreciated by all business sizes. Freed-up resources and increased speed to market helped us all.

The road of an entrepreneur was once a lonely one—but no more. Entrepreneurs are more connected than ever, sharing deep-dive plans and experiences of success and failure. Start-up networking events have become worth their weight in gold, gaining direct conversation and answers at the conception stage of the new business life yet to be developed. There are even networking groups who focus on learning from the mistakes of others or who rehash and resuscitate solid start-up ideas that originally failed. Plentiful are the categories of networking groups meeting in local homes or across the globe, all steeped in a very important and new overall theme: transparency. Transparency is becoming a consistent and comfortable theme. There seems to be a new focus on helping your brothers and sisters, and in doing so, the realization that everybody wins. Examine the word community—comm (common and/or communication) + unity. No coincidence here. Networking is uniting entrepreneurs in their common goals and communication around those goals. It is easy to do this now with the choices in contact platforms bringing human connection face to face with built-in video cameras, offered in many cases at no cost. Perhaps we recognize this in the technology industry because so many of these entrepreneurs are accustomed to building on other people’s ideas. Maybe unifying energy is subtly rippling out from the teams in India, the country that brought Yoga (which means union) to the rest of the world. These ripples may be worth paying attention to as we continue to restructure the way we approach marketing and even run our businesses. Maybe after tucking our daily Wall Street Journal safely into the recycle bin, we should visit our local New Age bookstore, where we can gain a brief, meaningful lesson on the underlying energy of oneness, cooperation, and community. Peruse the pages of A New Earth, by German author Eckhart Tolle.1 After all, there must be some credence to his message if Oprah invested not just by inviting him as a show guest but by producing a full-on webinar series2 where readers could be assisted with absorbing his message of cooperation and oneness through supplemental workbooks, additional exercises, resources, and tips for spiritual awakening. This webcast called, “Oprah and Eckhart’s A New Earth” began as part of her bookclub, where they offered one class per chapter. The series is still available at: http://www.oprah.com/oprahsbookclub/A-New-Earth-Are-You-Ready-to-be-Awakened. Greater transparency and authentic cooperation both lend a hand to easier entry to market.

On the other side of this coin, the challenge is that low barriers of entry also create breeding grounds for increased competition. This is not good or bad; it just changes how you look at (manage) it. Increased competition requires us to tone up our story—continually tailoring messaging to be clear-cut and sharply effective in order to cut through the masses and part the waters.

Experience standards have also risen, and consumers want to feel as if they are in your story. They need to experience brands and even the businesses behind those brands more kinesthetically. Brand engrossment is the goal, and the old ways of full-court press and big pushes just don’t work to engross. These customers who are attracted during a big push are less likely to still be using that product in the years to come. Instead, become the wise, fine-tuned athlete who trains with strategy, focus, and dedication, confidently knowing that the slower burn leads to best overall results. The donor-fund projects that focus on a short-term, fast sale target actually lead attention away from the slower burn of satisfying customers—where they could be enjoying ongoing engagement, usage, and the incredible engine of positive word of mouth. May we recommend and insert a story to help? Reread the story of the tortoise and the hare, remembering “slow and steady wins the race.”

That’s Some Kind of Fragment You Got There. Everyone’s been talking about how media fragmentation is what is creating challenges in the communication space, but they’re all wrong. Our argument is that it’s actually experience fragmentation. It’s the fact that marketing is no longer linear, and it’s certainly not predictable. Go back to the early 1980s, when there was a script and it evolved, but only slightly. Take prime-time TV, for instance. We could rely on audiences being creatures of habit. We could predict, with Nielsen’s help, that most nights, most members of the family would be sitting on the couch in front of the TV eating dinner and watching their collective favorite network series. Similarly, in the world of radio, we relied on broadcasting our ads during commute times to and from work. There was a linear experience of reaching a specific audience on certain days at certain times. This is how most communications strategy and media buys were designed. You could actually choose one medium that made the most sense for that audience or product and place it at a specific period of time, and everything could be created with a beginning, middle, and end and actually end with a full stop.

There are a finite number of eyeballs and hours. People have only so much leisure time, and the concern has been focused on how the more time they spend on the Internet, the increasingly less time they’ll watch TV, the increasingly less time they’ll read the paper, and the increasingly less time they’ll listen to the radio. What has actually happened is the amount of TV time that people are spending hasn’t really changed. But there’s been a dramatic change in time that people spend on the Internet or mobile devices. Newspapers—screwed, but not solely because of readership declines, but because of revenue streams—have evaporated virtually overnight. Why? Because the thing that made the most money for a newspaper was the classifieds, and eBay, Craigslist, and the fact that you can get everything online has made the classified section irrelevant. It had less to do with consumption; the readership issue was an older problem. What has really gotten hammered are publications that are broad and not highly curated, because now we do our own curating. Consumers jump around and get whatever we want. Therefore, you can’t have linear stories; you need nonlinear Story Systems.

People Are Walking, Breathing Filters. What’s interesting when you start to look at that whole world is that we are simply consuming more stuff. No media is really stealing share away from another media, with the exception of print. We’ve somehow found more time, which is bizarre, but it’s true and it’s because of our evolved multitasking. Everyone is working while eating breakfast, lunch, and dinner. People are watching TV while surfing, shopping, or status-izing on their notebook, tablet, or smartphone. What happens now is we are having all these connected experiences and we’re moving in and out of each of them all of the time. Can someone figure out how to make sense of or connect them? There’s much more to learn about this whole other world around what they call transmedia storytelling or non linear narratives, where each bit of interaction plays a role in the overall story. Call it what you want; for us it’s a Story System.

One of the more common questions we hear is, “How do you break through the clutter?” In most cases, the common answer offers something about needing a better story and needing to be more strategic with media choices and of course that you need to zig when everyone else zags. But, not everyone agrees with these popular concepts. A handful of big-time successful global companies talk about it differently. They believe there is no clutter and that we as consumers are not overwhelmed. They believe we are actually in control of what we do and do not pay attention to. That connects back to our “Spidey sense.” We are now very sophisticated machines that filter stuff out. We only home in on the information we care about. Instead of it being about getting your message seen through the clutter, this philosophy states the importance of getting consumers to let you in and getting them to care. This goes back to the idea of being Purpose driven, rather than just “producing and selling another blue teddy bear,” as Dame Vivienne Westwood puts it. Consumers filter you by asking themselves in a nanosecond, “Why should I let you be part of my world?” That’s the question that consumers are asking. And the louder (story-yelling) you try to break through the clutter, the more likely it is they will ignore you, because you’re just another “nox” in a sea of obnoxious. It’s paradoxical. No one actually wants to see ads, yet there are ads that we actually seek out and pass to other people asking, “Did you see this?”

The Brand as Content Creator. Today’s consumer is not only a purveyor of voluminous content but also capable of absorbing and, indeed, desirous of more, fresh content all the time. This puts the brand in the unique position of being a constant supplier of editorial content. Owing to the now necessary Twitter accounts, Pinterest boards, Facebook pages, and Instagram feeds, brands have a new responsibility of creating editorial content to keep their followers engaged. The essence of the brand used to be defined through design and product offering and now has expanded to include the brand’s ability to curate and create content—and deliver it almost daily.

Blending the Power of Two. In the previous chapter, we highlighted the power of experience by reliving your first kiss. We also introduced the importance of experience-based differentiators to help lift your brand. Both are great tools; both have a shelf life. The aha! of Storyscaping is that it takes these two tools and combines their power. A differentiated product or offering or service is typically easy to copy. Your department store offers valet parking, and in two weeks, every other department store can have valet parking. The fact that you did it first, and that differentiated your experience, will give you some advantage, but that advantage is fleeting. Instead, create opportunities to say something about your brand. That’s more sustainable because you can reinforce it with other behaviors that support your ethos and Purpose. If you’re doing something just because everyone else is, that’s where it will fall short.

More brands exist now than ever. The superhighway lanes that lead consumers to these brands continue to sophisticate, articulate, and re-create access galore. There is a sea of options for search engines—one brand so powerful and popular it became the category verb, now living as a listing in the dictionary, and it continues to direct the world’s population toward their desired answers and to all other brands: the power of Google-generated search, an entirely transformational category of marketing. The Internet, with its spawned digital ancillaries, is the world’s largest art gallery. This gallery is filled to the brim—no centimeter unhung—with constantly changing canvases for storytelling. Reviewed more often than The Rolling Stones and as cluttered as Times Square, the challenge continues to be the ability of uncovering engaging content.

The solution here is a more strategic application of stories as a means to make sense of the complexity. Remember the idea that stories help us make sense of the world around us. In a world that continues to grow more complex, we could use a better story. The days of disruption as a tactic are in the dust. Not every channel can deliver the levels of engagement we desire. Try to drop the concept of “two clicks and they’re out” and open up, being okay with the concept that it makes good sense to designate some channels as signposts or roundabouts that effectively transfer the consumer to the most engaging content and the transactional engine. Face it, this is no longer a linear process; we don’t know what time they will arrive at the art gallery or which canvas will capture their engagement. Therefore, it is imperative that all your touch points serve a purpose in the Story System.

Does Technology Inspire the Story, or Does the Story Inspire Technology? Sometimes it feels as if new technologies are the driving force in the director’s chair for most every transformational scene in our business history. What do you come up with when you ask yourself the pivotal question, “Does the story drive technology, or does technology drive the story?” Although easier to prove than the age-old question “Which came first, the chicken or the egg,” this seemingly simple question is an important one to ponder when you’re developing your business strategy. Take James Cameron, for example, he had written Avatar more than 15 years before he made the movie.3 The script remained in a drawer for that long simply because he knew technology did not exist yet to deliver the story through film in a credible and compelling way. In that case, he waited until it did, whereas in other cases, he had ponied up and invented new technologies and techniques to get the right effect.4 In those cases his vision for the story inspired the tech. The swing camera was one such technology. The head rig he used to record facial expressions was also one of his solutions. Conversely, there are a number of examples in which a new technology he was made aware of inspired a new vision for a story, picture the liquid monster in Abyss.

To drive this point home let’s delve deeper into Cameron’s work; let’s talk movies! Remember how, in their day, the following movies were considered the absolute in cutting edge: Terminator (I and II), Aliens, Titanic, and of course, who could forget Avatar? James Cameron is the filmmaker who championed these blockbusters and who some might say stands in a league of his own (a league he created from his sci-fi technology generators). Cameron is a storyteller first, but he’s also a systems thinker, a creative technologist, and inventor to boot. These connected capabilities have propelled his reputation for stunning visual effects, created through technology so advanced that it was not previously conceptualized, let alone constructed.

To re-create and tell his version of the 1912 sinking of the Titanic story in a way where audiences felt a part of it—using realistic visual effects—it took imagination and effort of titanic proportions. Cameron had a special studio built in Mexico that featured a 17-million-gallon water tank and 775-foot replica of the Titanic.5 Authenticity in this story called for Cameron himself to deep-sea dive 2.5 miles below the surface of the North Atlantic waters, where he could see the actual remains of Titanic, not just to get a little peek to pique his inspiration. No. The 1997 Titanic filming required him to make 12 submersible dives to the wreck itself, two and a half miles down in the North Atlantic. Years later, Cameron went back for more. In all, he made 33 dives to Titanic, logging more hours on that ship than Captain Smith himself.6 In preparation for his 2001 expedition to the Titanic wreck, Cameron developed revolutionary fiber-spooling mini Remotely Operated Vehicles (ROVs)—tethered underwater robots that allow the vehicle’s operator to remain in a safe environment while the ROV captured findings in the fragile environment. His team’s historic exploration of Titanic’s interior was the subject of his 3-D IMAX film, Ghosts of the Abyss. This is an example of how this story drove this technology. These robots that captured the authentic footage to bring Titanic to life are story driven. Fast-forward to 2009, the release of Avatar introduced audiences to more unprecedented technology, known as performance capture.7 Cameron works from the understanding that even science fiction—although based on fantasy—has to be built on a foundation of reality. This premise was carried throughout the filmmaking process—into the assisting minds and hands that created Avatar. The creature design team scoured books of animal biology, animal anatomy, and even texture books offering the aesthetic feel of everything from the back of a tortoise to the area on a Horn Bill that lies between its beak and its bill to the feel of a poison dart frog.8 This team used nature’s resourcefulness and imagination to fuel their creations, which is why the creatures in the film feel real. Cameron understands that audiences don’t have to believe that it’s 100 percent photo real or that these creatures actually exist. What he has to prove is that they are emotional creatures. Emotion—the element in stories that makes an audience connect—still applies and must appear through any given technology employed.9 These imagined, yet realistic and emotional creatures, brought to life through performance capture are story driven. Two huge films, two different stories, two unique approaches, each with their own unique special effects, all where technology was secondary to the story and heart of the movie. After all was said and done with all of his industry-transforming films—the newest in computer-generated software manufactured marvels of visual wonders, the Academy donned their awards, and the Globes were gripped and redisplayed—Cameron stood by the story under it all.

Storyscaping is more than a philosophy; it is a methodology and approach that you can apply to your business today. We further define Storyscaping as a landscape of emotional and transactional experiences, where each connection inspires engagement with another, so the brand becomes part of the consumer’s story. When you use the Storyscaping model, it will enable you to evolve your craft in a way that makes it easier to connect to the physical, virtual, and emotional Experience Space that surrounds the customer. We will help you move beyond making ads and into creating worlds where your story can become their story through shared experiences.

In your own life, you’ve witnessed and experienced and can now fully realize the universal power of digital technology. Just add some of the power of tech to leverage and deepen the immersive experiences people can have with your brand. Get them involved in your story, and at the same time, they will be creating their own story and sharing it. Open up now, and set your sights on creating a brand world. Visualize this world as the Experience Space where you connect with the right people, for the right reason, in the right way, and in the right time. Within your world, imagine connection points where people can have an immersive experience with your brand. Imagine these connection points are strategically designed in a way that enables people to create their own stories as they jump into your world and become part of your brand.

In summary, a brand must have a story that matters. By “matters,” we mean a story that is founded on a real Purpose and values that are shared with consumers. To have a story that matters, a brand must not only speak authentically, but be and behave authentically. And to become part of their customer’s worlds and personal stories, a brand needs to create memorable experiences for them that are effective across all shared interactions. To accomplish this, you must delve deep into your customer’s world, uncover ways to become part of it, avoid the distraction of competitors, and learn to tell your story through experience, not just words and pictures. That’s it. And you’re wondering, how ever can we do this? Storyscaping is the secret, and the next section of this book is dedicated to showing you how.