The Cypress Group Blog

Marketing, Like Literature and Cinema, Needs a Story

02 Dec 2010 Leave a Comment

by jene1011 in Marketing Communications, Positioning, Public Relations Tags: marketing communications, Robert McKee

This is a guest post by Katherine Hengel, a San Francisco-based freelance writer.

A commanding man of more than 70 years, Robert McKee has scorching, unapologetic ideas about everything – especially storytelling. When McKee speaks, writers listen; he is, without question, the Godfather of stories.

For decades now, McKee has delivered and perfected a four-day Story Seminar in which he rips the heart out of more than 100 well-known films and novels. McKee reveals the essence of these stories, the part that blasts through the page or screen and lodges right into the audience members’ hearts and minds.

Naturally, screenwriters and novelists (self included) can’t get enough. But we’re not the only ones. Business owners and marketing professionals are drinking the McKee Kool-Aid, too. These professionals scribbled down notes just as furiously as I did at McKee’s Story Seminar last month in Los Angeles.

So why do strategic thinkers and business minds care what a crotchety, old Detroit native thinks about story structure and act development? Why will they sit in a stuffy hotel conference room for ten hours a day, four days in a row, learning about storytelling? Because they know that good marketing, like literature or cinema, has to tell a good story.

The power of storytelling in marketing is not a new idea (see this abstract from a 2005 Marketing Review article entitled, “No Tale, No Sale”). But that doesn’t mean injecting story into business communications is a breeze. As McKee tells seminar attendees, “Stories don’t tell themselves. You didn’t really think it was going to be easy, did you?”

He’s right. It’s not easy. Not in marketing or screenwriting or anything else. Finding a story – a true story compelling enough to affect a buyer’s actions – requires strong thinking and an extreme commitment to quality. To fully appreciate the work involved in storytelling, spend four days with McKee. In the meantime, here are some hallmarks for business owners trying to tell good stories:

-Say something that matters. What’s on the line? What’s at risk? If there’s nothing on the line, there’s no story. No one cares if your product is say, engineered with quality. But if that quality saves children’s lives, then you have the start of a story.

-Your audience is smarter than you. The audience knows when you’re not telling the story right, even when you don’t. Give them the information they need when they need it. If there is something your potential client needs to know right away, tell them right away. Get it out in the first act, so to speak. If you don’t, you’ll lose their trust.

-Say something true. More than anything else, a good story adds up. There is no air of falsity or element that seems disingenuous. If something sounds fishy, it is. In your marketing efforts, you’re not doing yourself or your audience any favors by “just leaving in” anything insincere or cliché.

Of course, no analogy is perfect. But the link between storytelling and marketing communications is incredibly strong. An understanding of this interconnectedness is, in my opinion, The Cypress Group’s most valuable deliverable. Like McKee, the principles at The Cypress Group can find the heart of a business, the part powerful enough to resonate with audiences. And that’s the way it should be. Like all cursed scribes, marketing professionals – the good ones anyway – need to tell good stories.