Storyscaping: Stop Creating Ads, Start Creating Worlds

by Gaston Legorburu

“Pick two,” he requested. “You can have your office done fast and good, but it won’t be cheap. Or, we can do it fast and cheap, but it won’t be good.”

we plug in value, story, and experience. Unlike the previous “rule” where two elements were reductive to the third, this logic amplifies the third.

If you provide a great experience (product) and have a great story (brand), you should be able to merit

When you aim for experiential storytelling, it’s easier to turn that into exponential storytelling.

There is more power in starting your story from a little concept that we call the Organizing Idea, an idea that is an active expression meant to inspire experiences, not a brand statement.

Power of Experience. We remember and retain stories about ourselves much more vividly than we remember stories about others,

We must all look for ways to create opportunities for consumers to have “first kisses” with our brands, rather than just telling them about our brand. This is story making versus storytelling; there’s a big difference.

We are all constantly writing, rewriting, editing, and conspiring about the story of ourselves. It’s the one story. It’s the one thing that you’re tuned into all the time. You’re never tuned out of your story,

When people read a book, watch a movie, or hear a story, regardless of medium or format, it is imperative that they see themselves in the story. It doesn’t matter if they see their aspirations or even see their flaws or their demons; they just need to see some aspect of themselves in the story.

The smart ones understand that creating great experiences can often offer you the competitive edge you are looking for.

But a business can also start becoming irrelevant when the product or the experience around the product or service becomes irrelevant.

Pay attention to consumer tech evolution if you want to predict consumer behavior. If you’re just in the business of making ads, you’re more like Blockbuster, just trying to wrangle more people into that store on the corner. You lose the plot. You lose your place. You lose your relevance. You lose your business.

Technology Is an Enabling Tool.

In the conventional world the storytellers are entrusted with crafting communications, and the product or operations folks are charged with developing the products and systems. We believe those barriers need to be demolished.

And although experiences are the opportunity, they cannot exist in isolation. To create brand value and meaningful relationships, experiences cannot afford to be isolated; they need to be part of the brand story line, but more than that, they need to be part of a Story System. Therefore, our focus should be on more than just the power of story, and more than the power of experience: You need to begin creating worlds.

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.

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.

You design this Experience Space to intentionally cut across physical space and virtual space, and you connect it through emotional space.

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.

Brand Purpose also serves as a guiding principal for the Organizing Idea. The Organizing Idea is key to making Storyscaping powerful. It connects the Story System, enabling a world of engagement and experience that every brand desires for heightened success, all of which will be explored in the following chapters.

A statement of Purpose, cause, or belief is an internal platform that answers the question of why you exist. It’s great when that Purpose serves some form of good for people and even better when it inspires emotional connections that are told through your brand narrative and brand experiences.

What you offer as a product or service should be a real consequence of your Purpose (why) and how you create and deliver it. This is also demonstrated as the act and share behaviors of operating with a Purpose. Remember? “Think, act, and share” from your Purpose.

As such, we need to always think of products and services as enablers for an experience. They must remain connected throughout the Experience Space bound to all other channels, such as digital interactions and social conversations.

“Transparency, inside and out. Too much focus is on what is being said by a brand versus what a brand/company actually does—brands need authenticity,” Dame Vivienne Westwood, fashion designer and activist, smartly stated.

The job of the Organizing Idea is to organize experiences that relate to how your product or service is positioned. This ensures relevance and connection to the functional consumer needs that it solves, therefore bringing to life the shared experiences that enable participation in the brand story.

General Eric Shinseki, former U.S. Army Chief of Staff, stated, “If you don’t like change, you’re going to like irrelevance even less.”

We are looking for “a revelation about human behavior or an emotion that can be leveraged to connect a brand” or “a new usable perspective on the relationship between a brand and its existing or intended consumers.

Although we recognize that, in reality, consumer emotion (as explored in our consumer insight pillar) and this pillar of understanding needs and behavior are inextricably linked, we separate them purely from a logical viewpoint so that you can see how a brand can be connected on an emotional level. That’s what brand storytelling tries to do, which is different than when a brand tries to interact with something. Part of brand interaction is giving consumers a benefit that solves some sort of need. Since that need could be emotional, realize that you cannot separate emotional and functional need in perfect terms because they are connected. We look at these pillars specifically and individually in their two dimensions in an effort to enable deeper understanding and ensure Organizing Ideas and Story Systems, which are better informed.

When we talk about understanding those needs it’s not just knowing what the need is, it’s about knowing why that need exists and understanding that it is connected to many other elements and dimensions of a person’s life. It’s also about recognizing that sometimes that need isn’t conscious—it could be biological. And, as we discussed in the section on product/service positioning, utility needs may even have strong unconscious habitual characteristics (in which case we would study the influences of the habit, the context, the perceived outcomes, etc. rather than just the habitual behavior and functional need). By studying needs and behaviors through meaningful research, we also identify the interconnection with the realms of self-identity, culture, brand value, and Brand Purpose—the realms of the symbolic.

Remember, we are trying to understand the relationship between attitudes, perceptions, beliefs in the world, and the material world—not solely the variables between one defined segment and another.

Our aim is simply to understand deeply and find meaning in behavior through analysis of small slivers of everyday life. It’s about people, places, and things. We deploy data gathering tools like sensors into the world for such research projects. These data gathering tools are anchored to people, places, and things.

So imagine, the desire to know your mother is doing well can be solved by a sensor on her teapot. Why? Because you feel comforted when the teapot is making tea every day—that means she is up and at ’em and doing well.

THE ORGANIZING IDEA Inspiring Experiences That Change Behavior and Drive Transactions

It organizes the connections between your consumer and your story in a way that builds emotional association and inspires behavior.

Having a true and meaningful connection to your Brand Purpose is integral; your Organizing Idea becomes part of how you bring that Purpose to life. Without a connection to the Brand Purpose, your Organizing Idea is nothing more than another random idea.

As expressed in Chapter 6, the positioning of your product or service is an equally important pillar. You’ll need a very clear perspective on what you offer, why you’re offering it, and how you are going to deliver it; otherwise, the behaviors that you’re seeking to create from Storyscaping will be less effective. The Organizing Idea serves to guide the type of experiences that are created and how those experiences are connected through a Story System.

The previous chapters on consumer insight prove how important it is to understand the emotional desires of consumers. The Organizing Idea fuels that emotional territory.

We should explore at the widest level while taking the following into consideration: cultural insight, category insight, competitive insight, and the deepest level, insight into consumer emotion. Finally, you gained a clearly defined view of how a consumer interacts with people, places, and things. Often illustrated as a consumer journey, knowing and following these interactions is foundational to understanding what and where behaviors exist.

We define an Organizing Idea as “an active statement that defines what the brand must do to change consumer behavior. It inspires the type of experiences that are created through the Storyscape.”

Here are some initial questions to ask yourself as you try to develop your Organizing Idea: – Does it organize? Does it clearly give you a premise to organize how consumers will connect with the story? – Does it help define the role of the channels you will use? – When you hear it, do you feel like it activates behavior? You’re looking to stimulate an experience for consumers and these experiences require a behavior. – Is the Organizing Idea, along with the associated projected experiences, delivering on the Brand Purpose? That is, does it align with and activate your brand’s belief? You should be able to draw a very clear logical connection between what the Brand Purpose

is and what the Organizing Idea is all about. A good perspective comes from also asking yourself, Is the expected emotional connection in line with the brand cause, belief or Purpose? – Brands are more than messages; a brand is a personification of a company. This personification should make you more likeable, memorable, and desirable for consumers. Similarly, an Organizing Idea should be in sync with and even a proponent of the brand’s tone and style. You can easily and quickly ask yourself, Does it sound like the brand would say this? – Remember, the goal is to inspire immersive experiences. When you think about your Organizing Idea, do you instantly feel like you can create an experience that will deliver the behavior? – Finally, Storyscaping is about building a world of immersive experiences and participation. An Organizing Idea is a core platform of experience, and as such, it needs to seek participation, either overtly or through likely behaviors. It’s a hard ask, but it’s one worth considering: Does the Organizing Idea have the potential to inspire experiences where people will involve the brand in their stories?

You have studied the overall model and approach for Storyscaping. Throughout your journey, you have uncovered your brand’s Purpose uncovered a key emotional insight, uncovered a behavioral insight, and developed product or service differentiation that delivers big on these values. By connecting these four pillars, you have inspired an Organizing Idea.