StorySelling:Selling Your Brand's Story

StorySelling: Telling and Selling Your Brand's Story

Intro and Chapter One.  More chapters at www.storysellingbook.com

INTRODUCTION: There Is No Truth

My favorite thing in school had nothing to do with rule-based subjects like reading, writing or arithmetic. I liked “show and tell.” When the assignment was to bring something in from our last vacation and write a report about it, I acted out the report with a pair of sock puppets that represented my parents arguing about directions. I didn’t know I was using Italian swear words until Nancy Boscorelli told the teacher. That incident kicked off a round of family counseling.

I’ve always been someone who marched to the beat of his own bongos.

I grew up disdaining anyone or anything that prescribed doing something by the rules. This started a very early rebellion against commands like “Color within the lines,” or “Don’t improvise – write your ‘S’ like mine on the chalkboard.” I now know that it would have been more practical to follow certain rules, especially the latter. To this day, many mistake my signature for Lim Gignorelli. As for coloring, fortunately, my livelihood has never depended upon how well I push a crayon.

For me, rules were made to be tested. Often, risk didn’t matter. I was the guy who would step on the crack that would break his mother’s back, open umbrellas in the house and walk under ladders. My mother and I are still doing fine.

I looked for any and all opportunities to break with convention. In the fourth grade I managed to embarrass myself in front of the whole Catholic parish during my Confirmation, the Catholic coming of age ritual (similar to the Jewish Bah Mitzvah, I used to think of it as moving up from the farm team to the big leagues in Catholicness).

Preparation for the Confirmation ceremony was agonizing. For one full year, we would be drilled with questions from our dreaded Baltimore Catechisms. That book would go with us everywhere. To this day I can recall the smell of its pages. And I vividly remember the daily competition for gold stars, holy cards and rosaries – the rewards for giving right answers to the book’s questions.

At the end of the year, in a sort of “graduation ceremony,” the bishop was scheduled to come and administer the sacrament of Confirmation. But that year there was a surprising change of plans for the big day. We got upgraded to the Archbishop. You’d have thought that we were being visited by the Pope, given all the uproar. For the nuns of our school, it was like Patton coming to visit the infantry. And for the priests, it was a prime career visibility opportunity. For us children, it was holy terror!

The Archbishop’s grand entrance down the long main aisle of the church was preceded by a convoy of clerics, religious officials and altar boys wielding three-foot candles and swinging incense holders. When he finally appeared, he was, figuratively and literally, like a big exclamation point at the end of a long sentence, his mitre head gear adding nearly a foot to his already-imposing figure.

After a lengthy Latin introduction that I’m certain nobody understood, the Archbishop strode into the audience like Elvis coming down from the stage. With his ringed index finger, he would randomly point to one of us and, in a booming voice, fire off questions. “Who made you?” he demanded. “G-gawd, um , Gawd made me, uh … your Excellency, highness, uh … your Oneness. ” I thought the kid was going to have a bladder malfunction.

“Good! Next,” the Archbishop bellowed, pointing to the smartest girl in our class, Sally Kilowski. “Why did God make you?” Sally quickly stood up and, as if to say, “That’s easy, Arch,” gave the much-practiced answer in two seconds flat: “Godmademetoknowloveandservehim.”

He then walked slowly up and down the rows, looking for his next victim. As he approached my pew, he waved that long finger in the air until it landed on the poor kid sitting next to me, Charlie Bannocelli. “Why do we need to be baptized?” Charlie stood up, inspected his shoes for a good, long embarrassing moment, and then sat down again in shamed silence.

The Archbishop cast his gaze upon me. “Do you know why we need to be baptized, son?” I stood up and … I honestly forgot the right answer. Didn’t have a clue. But I figured if I was going down, I wasn’t going down like poor Charlie.

I blurted out, “Your Excellence,” paused to collect my thoughts, then finally replied, “We don’t have to be baptized.”

The congregation gasped, my parents winced, at least one nun may have fainted and, in my mind, the parish priest gravely contemplated his imminent assignment to some rural outpost downstate. With a gently raised hand, the Archbishop magically hushed the crowd. He took a step toward me, furrowed his brow into the full down position, and challenged me to explain.

I have no memory of being in that particular moment. I think I was in shock. But apparently I had answered by explaining, “We don’t have to be baptized, because God gave us a free will. But it would be a smart thing to do, just in case.”

According to our pastor, the Archbishop wasn’t happy with my answer. But after praying on it, he decided that my parents were to be congratulated “for raising such a creative child.” No doubt that was his euphemistic way of saying, “Keep an eye on this kid – he’s a real pain in the ass.” Which, admittedly, I was.

This world view continued to create problems for me as I grew up. It sometimes still does, both professionally and personally. Certainly, I’ve come to appreciate that rules do play an important function in creating order, predictability and, yes, even freedom. I don’t act out my rebellion against rules as I did in my youth. But I still do question them. And in that way I’m still, to many, that same pain in the ass.

Now I run a company. An advertising agency. I’d come from agencies that had lots of rules about the “right way” to create advertising. Each had their little organized religions, with mantras like “Make human contact” or “Believe in the power of simple truths.” Any agency worth its declining margins has one of those. And to me they’ve always seemed a little too manufactured, too rigid, and could hardly be applied to any and all situations.

I’ll never forget pitching a high tech OEM manufacturer who had a highly differentiated product with features and benefits that were considered “breakthrough” by a very select group of left-brained engineering geeks. At the presentation rehearsal, our creative director took us through a campaign that was richly detailed and fact-oriented, and my boss interrupted with, “Where’s the human contact? I want human contact!”

No doubt the creative director was thinking about giving him a little human contact, of the kind that would have landed him in the county jail. But the boss insisted on advertising that extolled an emotional benefit for buying the product – “some empathy, some warmth, some understanding of the buyers’ very personal needs.” He wanted violins; we believed beating a drum was far more appropriate in this circumstance, even though, yes, it defied “the rules of human contact.”

A long debate later, we ended up with some terrible, forced mash-up of the two approaches (sort of like trying to play the violin with drumsticks) along the lines of, “They’ll think you’re a genius for building XYZ into your product.” To no one’s surprise, we were unceremoniously dismissed from any hiring consideration.

The truth is, “human contact” helped create some great, durable campaigns. Campaigns that highlighted universal emotional touchstones such as pride and ambition (”Be All You Can Be”), love and commitment (”Diamonds are Forever”), reliability and security (”Nothing Runs Like a Deere”), and the bonds of family (”Reach Out and Touch Someone”).

But then there were the square pegs we forced into round holes with theme lines like, “We’d do it like you’d do it, if you did it like we do it at Burger King.” I believe we were trying to say something about individual choice. Nevertheless, the campaign sparked double-digit sales declines right up to the point where we were fired.

But the real truth is, there is no “one truth” when it comes to branding and advertising. (And if you think there is, this book is not for you.) That said, there does need to be discipline. An agency cannot approach every assignment completely differently. Every agency has to have a unifying language and process, or else very little gets done. The trick is to find a planning process that provides flexibility. Add a checklist of insightful questions, a means to inspire the creative staff towards heretofore unimagined solutions, an easily followed format and something that clients will champion as helpful, and you’ve found a process worth bragging about.

This explains, in part, why our agency uses the Story Method as our unifying approach to planning. You see, it it’s not something we invented or manufactured. Stories have been around since the first cavemen talked about the wooly mammoth that got away.

Because of that, the Story Method isn’t something we have to force on anyone. There’s no magic trick that has to be learned. It doesn’t use a made-up language to sound New York smart or L.A. cool. And it is something that can be used in parts or as a whole.

Certainly, some instruction is needed (or else there would be no reason for this book). But as you’ll see, it’s all very intuitive, easily digested, and useful in solving any and all advertising/branding problems. Why?



For skeptics like me who won’t buy a statement like that without proof, this book will provide plenty. Chapters 1 through 4 will share an accidental journey that yielded a great deal of insight into the world of stories and their parallels with brands. Chapter 5 is really the epicenter of the book in that it describes the Story Method, and shows how it can be used to dissect a brand into its story component parts. Its purpose is to help answer important questions during brand planning while ending up with a document that will do a better job of inspiring creative teams than traditional creative briefs can.

Chapter 6 through 10 will detail each element of the Story Method with tips on how to optimize its use. Although this book is not about how story structure can be used to execute advertising as much as it is a book about ways in which advertising can be better planned, Chapter 11 discusses some important storytelling principles that can help companies more effectively communicate about their brands, both internally and externally to target audiences.

While reading, keep in mind that the objective is not to provide another set of rules or to proselytize another truth in which to place your faith about what will work under all circumstances. Rather, it is to help you find or uncover your already existing brand story, and to articulate that story in ways that will maximize its value. That’s very different than saying our way is the right way or the only way. Instead it is saying that our way is your way – the way you and your ancestors have been persuading, informing, inspiring (and all the other things that brands do) since the beginning of recorded history.

CHAPTER ONE:  I am a "suit"

The use of “suit” as an epithet has a long history. I understand that it started in England during the Victorian era and was used to describe the elite ruling class. “Suit” gained popularity here in the late ’60s/early ’70s as a way for the liberal youth to describe people who made up “The Establishment” — conservative, “my country, right or wrong” Americans in white shirts, black ties and Nixon/Agnew stickers affixed to the chrome bumpers of their large cars.



About the same time, “He’s a suit” also became the way to describe anyone who worked in an advertising agency’s account management department (otherwise known as account people). In case the derogatory nature of the term is not clear, one source helpfully directs readers to “see slime.” When I arrived on the agency scene, fresh out of college with a blank slate on which I expected to enthusiastically add a long series of accomplishments, I was ill-prepared for being called a “suit.” I had just started — what had I done to earn this pejorative punch in the stomach?

I did everything I could to rid myself of the label. I started using words like “man” and “like” in my everyday speech to suggest that I was anything but elite. My appearance was half preppy, half bohemian. Sure, I had to wear a suit, but my ties looked like Walt Disney sneezed on them in living Technicolor. I grew my sideburns down to my chin. I sported the same tinted glasses that Peter Fonda wore in Easy Rider. But nothing worked (and I couldn’t get dates either).



Soon, however, I learned not to take it personally. “Creatives,” or people in charge of writing and producing the advertising, believed that all account people were born with the same original sin. We were regarded as vacuous, left-brained, brown-noses who were more concerned about pleasing the client than protecting the integrity of the creative product.

Over the years, advertising agency dress codes have changed. Except for being a dead give away that somebody is out interviewing for a different job, wearing a suit is pretty rare for account people these days. The really obsequious among us will wear a polo shirt with the client’s logo prominently displayed for all to see, but most account people dress in ways that are indistinguishable from creative people. Still, the negative associations with “suit” go more than clothes-deep. To this day, many creatives think that account people wouldn’t know good advertising if it grabbed them by the hand and walked them to the cash register.



At our agency, we have a rule that a good idea is a good idea, no matter who comes up with it. This rule encourages cooperation between creatives and account people. But there are no guarantees. The wounds from wars that took place long before our agency existed run pretty deep. That said, something happened at our agency to silence the traditional account vs. creative wars. For the most part, they tend to get along and respect — even like — each other. There are a lot of reasons for this, some of which could be the subject of other books. But the most important one, and what will become increasingly apparent to you throughout this book, came about as the result of a baby-step beginning toward understanding what the real conflict was.

The birth of a notion
In most agencies, it is the account person’s responsibility to prepare what is called a “creative brief.” It goes by other names like “input document” or “assignment sheet,” but whatever it’s called it serves as the one-page summary of the creative assignment. It includes the basic background information that the writers and art directors (the creative team) will need to develop the advertising.

The account person’s job is to fill out the form, get it okayed by his or her boss, then present it to the client for approval. The process can be brutal. Hours are spent huddled over the form, debating such minutiae as the use of “from” versus “to,” whether “but” sounds too negative and should be replaced by “and,” and the difference between an objective and a strategy. If there are conflicts, the client usually wins — or, at least, is made to believe he did.

There are as many forms for creative briefs as there are agencies. But typically they ask for answers to the same questions as the brief shown here:

Creative Development Brief

Why Are We Doing This Work?

Describe what event has taken place that requires the communications. For example: do we need to react to something the competition has done? Is there a new product launch? Has the market changed in some manner? Is there a need to “freshen” the pool of ads?

What We Want to Accomplish?

What action do want consumers to do as a result of hearing/seeing this work? Do you want them to write, call , click, order, visit, etc?

Who’s the Competition?

It may be brands our client competes with (e.g., LaSalle Bank’s competition may be other banks). Or it may be other categories that we believe we can take business from (e.g., Southwest’s competition may be driving instead of flying).

What Do We Know About the Target?

Not just a perfunctory description of target demography, but the critical things about the target in terms of feelings and behavior related to this product/category.

What Does the Target Think or Feel Now?

What, if any, barrier or opportunity exists from the consumer’s point-of-view that we need to impact? This may be imagery about the category (All ready-to-assemble furniture is viewed as bad), the product (The Skil cordless screwdriver is seen as not having enough power for most jobs), or the brand (Can I trust Jiffy Lube, given all the bad press they’ve been receiving lately?)

What Do We Want the Target to Think or Feel?

What message do we want to leave in people’s heads? The creative needs to leave an impression that addresses a need, a barrier or an opportunity.

What’s Our Support?

What is it that the client’s product or service actually does that lets us make the above impression? The reason may be differentiating and dynamic (It’s 73% faster than its manual counterpart) or it may be subtle (Most people feel better knowing that our client has a 24-hour customer service number).

Whether the final brief was something that would inspire advertising as interesting as plain-white wallpaper didn’t matter as much as getting the all-important client green light. And once it was blessed by the client, the account person always had the five-word key to turn off all complaints from the creative team: “This is what they want.” (Often preceded by, “Sorry, I’ve been down that road with them” and/or “I put my ass on the line arguing the same points” and/or “I know the client is being stubborn but, but, but,” ad infinitum.)

A lot of false expectations are set up by the creative brief. For no matter how much the creative product aligns with what the creative brief directs, if the ads are boring, cliché, flat, too edgy or any of an unlimited number of descriptives that clients use to indicate that they don’t like what you’ve come up with, it matters very little what was directed in the brief. Sure, the advertising business has evolved and is much more sophisticated than when I started, but the all-important creative brief is still the blueprint for success or disaster.

A Different Direction
A few years ago, I was summoned to visit with the client’s marketing team to discuss plans for a new brand campaign that was to be launched for a well-known Midwestern manufacturer. Having a mental picture of the creative brief that we were going to need to fill out, I listened intently during eight hours of charts, diagrams, research summaries and paradigms (both shifted and unshifted) for the information we would need to come up with a brief that would meet this client’s expectations. At the conclusion of the meeting, the client asked if they would be able to see the “start” of a creative brief the next morning. I saw this merely as a test to see if we were all singing from the same hymnal. Because I had been writing the brief in my head all day, and merely needed to play back words on paper, I agreed without hesitation.

The next morning, as I sat in my hotel room over coffee and the dreaded thought of another eight-hour meeting, I started filling out the brief. As I was writing, I caught myself asking questions like, “Will they prefer this word over that?” or “I wonder if they’ll be tripped up by the way I paraphrased their diagram,” etc. As I was tying myself up in rhetorical knots, the phone rang. It was a colleague asking how long it would be before we could show them “their” brief. It was in that moment that everything changed.

“Let me call you right back,” I said.

I suddenly realized what I was doing, and why, perhaps, I deserved that “suit” epithet. Their brief. I was writing their brief, as I had so many times before, simply to win their approval. To assuage the client’s concerns and let them know that “we get it.” Not once while writing did I ask myself whether or not my words would do anything to trigger creativity, inspire new thinking or truly help the creative team understand the consumer’s problem beyond the rational, surface level. This brief was asking for facts. Even descriptions of how the prospect felt were mere data dressed up to look insightful — he wants to feel “in charge” or “more in control.”

I called my colleague back and said, “Give me an hour.”

I quickly finished the brief as directed. But then I tried something a little unorthodox, as an experiment, to see what would happen.

In addition to the brief, I wrote a short story. The story was about the prospect. Written in the first person, it read like a memoir. As the prospect, I described who I was and got right into the problem I was having that needed a solution. I didn’t have to say I wanted more control — you could sense that need from my description of the experience I was having and the real problem I needed to solve. While writing it, I became like an actor who was getting into his role, absorbing insights into the prospect and the problem that went well beyond any factual descriptions contained in the formal brief. In the end, I had translated the brief into something that had an emotional context — something that forced the reader to vicariously feel the way the prospect feels.

An hour later, I took both the brief and the story to the client. Sitting across from them at a large boardroom table, I ticked off the questions and answers in the brief to the approving nods of the assembled group. “Yes, that’s right.” “Yes, that’s what we said.” Having made it over that hurdle, I then pulled out the short story.

“I have something else that I want to share with you,” I said, to the surprise of the rest of my team. I told the client I wasn’t happy with the way I had described the prospect in the creative brief. That I didn’t think it would help our creative team understand — really understand — the prospect and his plight. It wouldn’t help them achieve the level of empathy necessary to nail the creative.

Given the green light, I started to weave the story for them. As the prospect, I told them about myself and my goals. My family and my hopes for them — for their health and happiness and security. And I talked about the challenges I faced in providing all of that. The difficulty in making time for them, the demands that pull me in so many different directions. And how the company’s product, which I bought to help me, has actually been letting me down. Its performance wasn’t as promised. I felt the money I’d spent had been wasted, and nobody seemed to be listening to my complaints. Worst of all, I felt I had no choice, because there was nothing else in the market that was any better. I was like a hostage. And the company, more interested in making money than satisfying customers, was laughing all the way to the bank.

When I finished, you could hear a pin drop. Eyes darted straight at me. I truly thought someone might want to throw furniture at me, or toss me out of room. After a long pause, someone said, “Yeah, I hear stuff like that all the time.” And someone else piped up, “I’ve been there myself,” and another said,“That’s exactly how I feel when …” Everyone was adding their own experiences to the story, building layers and enriching it with meaning. Suddenly the creative brief — that cold, analytical document — had gained a pulse.

“Where did you get this idea?” the client asked.

“From you,” I lied. (Because honestly I didn’t know where I got the idea. It was simply born out of my own frustration that the creative brief wasn’t getting me where I needed to go.) “Isn’t this what all the research said?”

“Well, yes, but it’s not quite the same,” came the response.

“That’s precisely my point. We know what the facts are. But from the brief I wrote, and that you agreed was on target, did you get the same feeling?”

“Well, no of course not, but … ”



I kept going. “Imagine a customer walking into this room. Do you think they would say what’s said in this brief? You’d hear some anger, some frustration, you might even hear a few words that we’d never put on a chart or graph. That’s real. And in order to connect with these people, we have to know not only what they think and feel, but we have to somehow experience what they’re experiencing.”

“Well, this is all an interesting exercise, Jim,” one of the clients observed, “but what are you going to do with this? Is it actionable? ”

“It’s a helluva lot more actionable than this creative brief,” I guessed. (Because, really, I didn’t know for sure until we tried it out. But I had a strong feeling about it.) “Let me take it back to the team. We’ll see you in a week.”

When I got back to the agency, I called a meeting. I took everyone through the same presentation that I had given the client. And the response was immediate. Suddenly the team was able to connect with the prospect on a level that a promise and bunch of proof points could never deliver. They understood his challenges, his frustrations. They felt it in their gut instead of just in their brain.



A week later, I saw some of the most engaging creative work I had ever seen for this client. It truly reflected the voice of the prospect more than it did the voice of the advertiser.

In his presentation, the creative director was more alive than I’d ever seen him. Tapping into the words and emotions sparked by the story, he BECAME the prospect. And aside from the typical nitpicks — “Can you make the logo a little bigger?” and “Can you change the color of the background?” — the client loved the work. Afterwards, in a private session, the client told me the creative team “really nailed it.”

I knew we were onto something with this new approach. However, exactly why and how it worked was something I couldn’t yet articulate. Instinctively, using a story approach made sense, but I needed to know more in order to really apply it, to make it a regular part of what we do, and before we could abandon the traditional creative brief approach to developing advertising. I knew there would be a ton of questions that I would have to answer.

Thus, a journey into what ultimately became our Story Method began. A process that triggered fresh new insights about our prospects and pushed us all toward greater authenticity in our work. And finally brought together the creatives and the “suits” — not in perfect harmony, mind you, but for a collective purpose: a drive to arrive at more provocative and meaningful insights and output.

You can jump to Chapter 5 to get right to what the Story Method is. But my suggestion is that you keep reading all that leads up this chapter. It’s important to understand the meaning before working with the mechanics.