The emotional demands of Storyselling

Whether you invite your consumers to solve social issues like Pepsi, or encourage them to film their impressions of your brand like Red Bull, or extend the value offering of your brand like Heineken, the overarching perceptual drive of co-creating content with the audience is simple: Stories we co-create, are stories we embrace; we won’t stop talking about it; and we would choose it over anything else’.

SCOTT Donaton of Universal McCann was quoted at the MIPCOM Content Market in Cannes a couple of years ago to have said “Brands are going to have to change their processes and do something marketers don’t like to do and don’t do easily, they have to change the skill sets of the people they hire, they have to change the time frames they work on. They have to change the way they allocate and think about budgets. They have to change their definition of creativity.”

In other words, successful brands need an Orange mind.

It is the very consciousness that informed the emergence of the Orange Academy and the philosophy that envelopes the content of our curriculum. The very idea of “Creativity” as a copyrighted, sellable resource begs for redefinition in the context of consumer engagement today.  Why? Because everything has changed and the new face of today’s brand communication sits in a universal context that demands its “shared values” are not just between marketer, agency, media Producers and broadcasters but principally with the consumers. Not as docile audiences, but as co-creators and initiators of the brand story. What used to be in essence a ‘monologue’ must of necessity today be understood as a ‘dialogue’ with the brand more as listeners than as the speakers.

The context needs to be understood – because the reality of the consumer as we know them are changing.  Digital content creation, content marketing, digital distribution, and real-time engagements are setting new orders, many of which we cannot comprehensively predict where they are leading to, however closely we try to midwife the process. Social media has created a multi-level complex system of real-time engagements that does not need the prying intrusion of any ‘authorial’ storyteller or Creative Director to run; they run on the preferences of the user and there are complementary devices that accelerate their popularity.

Social media has flipped the game. Social media has shifted the positioning of the audience; the audience used to be at the end of the communication line where everything is decided for them. The internet has given the audience an ever-increasing power to be their own ‘Creative Directors’ and ‘storytellers’; roles which they have also embraced voraciously. The audiences have been elevated, and now, they pull the strings. A look at the terms and registers of some social media helps us to contextualize the psychological impact of this ‘elevation’ – Twitter makes every user a ‘Leader’ that now has to be ‘followed’, Facebook makes them a celebrity with thousands of ‘Fans’ whose mere inconsequential comments or post can be ‘Liked’ and ‘Shared’ in places they have never been to; YouTube allows them to be movie directors with higher number of ‘Views’ than some films have been able to get at the cinema. A level of importance has been attached to the personality of the audience in a way that is unprecedented.

While it is correct to still say that ‘Content is King’, in today’s digital media world, the audience is in fact the Kingmaker. Creating a shared value with the audience in mind is the model for the ‘millennial’ generation. The internet is currently flooded with different web services that encourage users to contribute, co-create, rate, collaborate, and distribute digital layouts, artworks, audio or video contents online.

The PEPSI REFRESH PROJECT pulled their multi-decade, multi-million-dollar Superbowl opening ad and traded it in for a $20 million social media initiative which is about getting the global community to nominate initiatives that need funding in local communities. In doing this, Pepsi switched the conversation from one that is authored by them, to a conversation about what matters to the consumer – They effectively crowd-sourced their global CSR and engaged fans in the process by getting Users to upload their videos or project profile, and gather votes to win funding going from $5,000 to $250,000 a few times every month. The result was a remarkable increase in the willingness of the audiences to interact and engage with their brand:  from the beginning of the project in 2009, there have been over 12,000 proposed projects that have motivated and received over 76 million votes from the American public. The project has also earned more than 3 billion audience impressions (across social media platforms and the project website) that have positively enhanced the Pepsi Brand.

Red Bull, the energy drink company, had a slightly different approach to this. Instead of trying to feed the audiences with stories of what their brand can offer, Red Bull takes the back seat and allows the audience share their own stories of what Red Bull can do for them. Red Bull set up a digital video service (Red Bull TV) that features highly energetic, exciting programming covering areas such as sports, music and lifestyle entertainment, which are created by and about the audiences.

Red Bull could put together a series of expensive ads telling the audience how great their brand is, but the effect of that would be little compared to giving the audience a platform to show the impacts of Red Bull on their daily life. Every video on Red Bull TV is a testament to what the Red Bull brand stands for – adventure, energy, escapades, fun, excitement, etc. and who else is better to say that than the audience themselves. The Red Bull TV is creating consumer engagement for the brand through sportsmanship, heroisms and ideals, viral videos depicting feats of athleticism and bravery – evoking the rush people seek from drinking the product, brand recognition through logo saturation, attainment of widespread brand recognition and loyalty first among a core demographic, then carefully building a credible bridge to achieve it in another.

Another varying example, which is nonetheless a great idea, is Heineken’s Nightclub of the Future. The brand brought 120 club goers living in the 12 trendiest cities of the World to work together as a source of inspiration and a springboard for ideation for a team of designers, which was equally crowd-sourced from the four global design capitals of Tokyo, Milan, Sao Paulo and New York through a design contest hosted on Facebook. The project was to help in understanding the needs of clubbers and co-creating a visionary nightclub concept to enhance the nightlife experience. Over the course of three weeks, platforms were created for a cross pollination of experiences, ideas, and solutions to identified needs between the designers and the club goers across the World. The result of that was Heineken’s Pop-up Concept Club which travelled around the world allowing clubbers to have a taste of the new co-created nightlife experience, but more than that, it has led to a sales increase of Heineken of up to 40%, increased Heineken’s on-premise visibility in premium club venues, the design got over 250,000 views on Coolhunting.com, more than three million views on Vice TV, more than 21,000 views of open design exploration movies, and over 70,000 views on other online platforms. Visitors rated the Heineken Concept Club a nine out of 10 and the experience was described as “a surprising and innovative action” of Heineken.

Here in Lagos La Casera’s Apple Story encouraged consumers to share their experiences around La Casera, and the winning story was finally incorporated into the brand’s commercial. I am not sure if the insights from that campaign has been made available to the public. MTN’s Project Fame also have aspects of the show where audiences are invited to record an audition of themselves to be uploaded online, and eventual winners from a voting exercise is invited to join the house.

The latitude to which user-generated contents can go is as far as the imagination can allow, and we are continually greeted with strikingly ingenious approaches that rightly position brand-connection with consumers. Whether you invite your consumers to solve social issues like Pepsi, or encourage them to film their impressions of your brand like Red Bull, or extend the value offering of your brand like Heineken, the overarching perceptual drive of co-creating content with the audience is simple: Stories we co-create, are stories we embrace; we won’t stop talking about it; and we would choose it over anything else’. That continues to be the consciousness of the logic and magic of brand stories that Orange Academy  promotes. A redefining of “Creativity” with a storyselling model that embraces audience ‘involvement’ and ‘connection’. 

One of the often-cited characteristics of “digital natives” – this generation of 18-35year old consumer- is that they are extremely connected in an asynchronous manner, which allows the loop of their engagements to go on for a very long time, and be far reaching. For this demography, storytelling is a facilitator of  engagement because it helps develop deeper relationships. That is why the Orange mind is educated to rigorously and strategically think about what kind of branded content is created (or co-created), by who and for whom? How is their engagement managed? Where in the converged landscape of connected media is it distributed and when, and how is the success of the different parts and their sum measured?

To be clear, the fundamental principles of marketing has not changed. What has changed and will keep changing are approaches and the behavioral patterns of the consumers. A strong narrative is an essential part of story-selling and from the very outset the purpose, cultural context, and relevance of the story must be well defined. The viewing experience of the audience is being fed by cable TV and the cinema as much as it is by brand communication contents and the expectation of satisfaction that they get in one is easily transferred to the other.

At Orange Academy we believe strongly in the possibilities that line the path where compelling stories are created from the little connections and emotional details of every day living that matter to consumers wherever they are. A strong narrative is now indisputably an essential part of any brand story and that storytelling MUST admit unlimited experiencial touch-points in the lives of the audiences themselves while positioning the brand’s values in a cultural context and relevance.

• Odugbemi, fta. Rpa, storyteller and content creator, is the provost of the Orange Academy