Does Your Story Match Your Experience?

Marketers have never been so vulnerable. While technology has enabled people to seek out brands more than ever—an estimated 3 billion times a week—it's also crippled corporate-controlled messaging: over the past decade, ad recall has declined 80 percent despite a doubling of cost. And in this age of radical transparency, a single negative user comment can stay with a potential customer longer than anything on your multi-million dollar website.

In this world where the customer can control your message, how can you drive demand and desire for your brand? At Lippincott, we believe two things matter above all else: authentic stories and inspiring experiences. Senior Partner Michael D'Esopo explains:

Q. What do you mean by story? Experience?
A. Every brand has a story. Sometimes the company tells the story, through advertising, for example. What we are now seeing more frequently is that the customer tells the story, through word of mouth and the like. The challenge for marketers everywhere is to have their brand convey a story that resonates on an emotional level and is so simple and true that the customer can be the storyteller. Experiences are the distinctive interactions that bring the story to life. The most powerful experience brands are able to engage the customer in moments of delight with a unique, brand-specific way of doing things.

Q. How can I craft a more meaningful story for my brand?
A. We've found that the most compelling brand stories are ones where the brand is a hero with an authentic personality and human dimensions. These brands help to resolve a fundamental conflict that is relevant today, in pursuit of a goal or mission that is bigger than just money. For Dove, the conflict is fighting superficiality and the goal is discovering your inner beauty. Nike's conflict is addressing self-doubts, with a goal of helping everyone be an authentic athlete. Apple's conflict is how to overcome convention; unleashing creativity is the goal.

Q. Don't the same old stories get tiresome?
A. Not the good ones. The best stories are based on a core truth that stands the test of time. For example, Walmart—a Lippincott client—addresses the conflict of how to make money go farther, with the goal of enriching lives. The contemporary version resonates with consumers, yet it's the same story Sam Walton told when he founded his first store nearly 50 years ago.

Q. How do stories and experiences work together?
A. A great example is BMW, a brand built on the story of performance obsession. That story is not just told in its advertising, it's part of its event sponsorships, racing, employee recruitment and training, dealership design, and of course the product itself. In each of these interactions, BMW is more than just the features of the vehicle, it is the experience built around being "the ultimate driving machine". The challenge here is that many aspects of the experience fall outside a marketer's domain, so there's a growing need to actively partner with functions such as human resources, proposition development and operations. Perceptions are shaped by both the sum of the experiences and the sum of the messages, so it's important to get both right at every touch point.

Q. How can a brand track its performance on story and experience?
A. As Amazon's Jeff Bezos has said, "A brand is what they say about you when you leave the room", so you can measure story power by researching how the general public perceives a brand, and experience power by looking at how a brand's strongest users feel about the actual experience. Lippincott has created a proprietary methodology called BrandView that does just this, enabling us to track how brands perform on these two dimensions.

Q. What are some interesting findings in the research?
A. Our study reveals four types of brands. There is a group of what we call Legends that deliver strongly on both the story and experience dimensions. Storytellers have big buzz, but under-deliver on the experience, while Experience Masters enjoy a tribal following among a smaller niche audience. And finally, there are large number of "Unattached" brands that are not yet delivering on either dimension. The Experience Master category is full of potential, because all these brands need is a compelling story to broaden their appeal and achieve Legend status.

We aim to help our clients strengthen their story and their experience so that the brands can grow beyond their core faithful following. Only a handful of brands—such as Harley Davidson, Google, Coca-Cola and Southwest Airlines—truly excel in both. And because 80 percent of the companies that fall in the Legend category have lower than average media spending, they have a quantifiable competitive advantage.

Q. Why are there so few?
A. It's hard to get C-level executives to accept how radically things have changed. The old metrics—like how many eyeballs have seen your ad—are far less meaningful, but the new ones aren't well established. It's a pretty big leap from questions like "What drives awareness?" to "What drives delight?" but category leaders are realizing they can't afford to wait.