8 words to inspire more SHOW in your brand story

Here is one of the most important concepts I promote in N-of-8 story development:  the difference between SHOW and TELL.

A complete brand story SHOWS a customer how, not just TELLS them what.

Look for ways you can add more persuasion in your story.

Brand Stories: tapping into song lyrics for another kinds of storyteller

I’ve been working on a number of brand story engagements lately. And I really enjoy observing where insights emerge – and how projective techniques can help stimulate creative expression.



For me, great song lyrics often inspire ways to help tell a story.


One of my favorites is:

"I once had a girl,

or should I say, she once had me."



"Norwegian Wood (This Bird Has Flown)" first appeared on The Beatles’ 1965 album Rubber Soul. It is one of several songs on the album referring to an antagonistic relationship with a woman. When asked about the meaning of the lyrics, producer George Martin answered, “My wife is going to give me a hard time for saying this. It was one of John's indiscretions. I remember we were sitting at the veranda outside our hotel rooms in St. Moritz and John was playing at his guitar and working out the text. He felt that Cynthia had tricked him to marry her.” Martin referred to the words as "a very bitter little story".



The song is a lilting acoustic ballad featuring Lennon's lead vocal, signature McCartney harmonies in the middle, as well as the first use of the sitar by a rock band, of course played by George Harrison. The exotic instrumentation and oblique lyric represented one of the first indications to fans of the expanded musical storytelling and experimental approach the group was adopting.



Another of my favorite song lyrics is from Jackson Browne’s “Fountain of Sorrow.” He writes in the opening line,


“Looking through some photographs I found inside a drawer,
I was taken by a photograph of you.”



In both these examples, it’s the twist of the meaning and perspective that makes the lyric so memorable.



Do you have a favorite song lyric that tells a story?

The difference of storytelling

on Storytelling

"If you tell me, it’s an essay. If you show me, it’s a story." 

—Barbara Greene

Reason for brand narrative

on Storytelling

"Storytelling is the most powerful way to put ideas into the world today." -Robert McKee

10 years from now, how will you measure your life's investment?

"It's actually really important that you succeed at what you're succeeding at, but that isn't going to be the measure of your life."

Too often, we measure success in life against the progress we make in our careers. But how can we ensure we're not straying from our values as humans along the way? Clayton Christensen, Harvard Business School professor and world-renowned innovation guru, examines the daily decisions that define our lives and encourages all of us to think about what is truly important.

“Typically, the way you calculate profitability, investments that pay off tomorrow go to the bottom line and are much more tangible than investments that pay off 10 years from now,” he says, before noting that this pursuit of short-term achievement distorts the lives of people as well as companies.

Read more in Christensen's latest book, and on the website www.measureyourlife.com

Storytelling: Is it the secret weapon of the 2012 presidential race?

Here's a topical view on storytelling from Arianna Huffington.

If we can all take a break from the breathless back-and-forth about Bain-gate for a moment -- and if you can't, maybe later you can retroactively take a break -- there was a more meaningful exchange that came out of President Obama's interview with Charlie Rose that aired on CBS last Sunday and Monday morning.

The president used many of his oft-repeated lines, saying that "this campaign is still about hope... it's still about change," and that he "underestimated the degree to which in this town politics trumps problem-solving." But it got really interesting when the conversation turned to what the president considers the biggest mistake of his first term. It was, he said, "thinking that this job was just about getting the policy right."

So what else is needed? 

"The nature of this office," he said, "is also to tell a story to the American people that gives them a sense of unity and purpose and optimism, especially during tough times."

That's a spot-on description of one of the key elements missing from the last three-and-a-half years: storytelling. 

But while Obama has accurately diagnosed the ailment, he hasn't delivered on his own prescription. Where is the narrative that will give us that sense of unity and purpose and optimism? His campaign has given us all a crash course on the ills of Bain Capital and the sorts of business practices that shouldn't be happening, but he hasn't given us an alternative narrative of the kind of capitalism that should define the nation as we emerge from the financial crisis -- if, in fact, we ever do.

But of course, neither has the Romney campaign. Indeed, its ineptitude on the subject was underlined when it responded to the Rose interview by saying, "Being president is not about telling stories. Being president is about leading."

So Obama hasn't delivered, but Romney remains clueless about the fact that the office he's running for isn't CEO of the country. It's much bigger than that. And telling stories, casting a narrative, is an essential element in communicating ideas and values, and an integral part of leading -- especially leading from the Oval Office.

"Stories are the creative conversion of life itself to a more powerful, clearer, more meaningful experience," says screenwriting guru Robert McKee. They are "the currency of human contact." Or, as film producer Peter Guber, author of Tell to Win: Connect, Persuade, and Triumph with the Hidden Power of Story, puts it: "Telling purposeful stories is certainly the most efficient means of persuasion in everyday life, the most effective way of translating ideas into action."

And translating ideas into action is, of course, the essence of the president's job. So that's exactly what campaign season should be about -- each candidate telling us the story of where he thinks we are as a country and, more importantly, where he wants to take us. The best way -- the only way -- to do that is with narrative. "The stories our leaders tell us matter," wrote Drew Westen, "probably almost as much as the stories our parents tell us as children, because they orient us to what is, what could be, and what should be; to the worldviews they hold and to the values they hold sacred."

Stories and narrative, as the currency of human contact, are how we all communicate with each other. 

We don't sit down with our friends and loved ones and throw out statistics and PowerPoint slides. We swap stories. In fact, we can't help it. "Stories, it turns out, are not optional," writes Peter Guber. "They are essential. Our need for them reflects the very nature of perceptual experience, and storytelling is embedded in the brain itself." Recent neuroscience research bears him out and shows we are hardwired to use narrative to make sense of the world. Neuroscientist Michael S. Gazzaniga, who studies the functions of the two hemispheres of the brain, has uncovered how the left side, which he calls "the interpreter," takes the jumble of data and sensory information we encounter and spins it into a narrative. "Gazzaniga suspects that narrative coherence helps us to navigate the world -- to know where we're coming from and where we're headed," writes Big Think's Jason Gots. "It tells us where to place our trust and why."

So if the part of our brain that is telling us where to place our trust is all about narrative, doesn't it make sense that any candidate asking us for that trust should appeal to our need for what Romney dismissively calls "telling stories"? This is especially true in times of crisis and transition. Over the last decade our country has been through extraordinary crises, not least the failure of practically every institution in which Americans had placed their trust. How did that happen? How did we get to this point? It couldn't have just been a few bad apples. If we don't know why it happened, how can we fix it? And if a candidate doesn't have a compelling narrative for what happened, how can we trust him to get us out of it?

"Instead of indicting the people whose recklessness wrecked the economy, [President Obama] put them in charge of it," writes Westen. "He never explained that decision to the public -- a failure in storytelling as extraordinary as the failure in judgment behind it."

Unlike Romney, at least Obama sees the need for that narrative. The fundamental tension between Wall Street and Main Street is still unresolved and still not framed in a narrative that gives people the confidence that it will be resolved any time soon. And making the entire campaign about Bain Capital isn't going to do it.

"Every presidential election is a renewal," says biographer and historian David McCullough. "Like spring, it brings up all the juices. The people are so tired of contrivance and fabrication and hokum. They really want to be stirred in their spirit. That's when we are at our best."

Copyright © 2012 TheHuffingtonPost.com, Inc.

8 Parts of Speech: Words that matter

Persuasive writing makes a single, focused argument, and even the most basic communications must prove or demonstrate a thesis through explanations, examples and concrete details. 

All this week, my blogs will focus on words -- words that matter.

Sometimes we have to go back to the basics to write and analyze the most compelling brand stories.

For example, remember the 8 basic parts of speech:

1. Nouns
2. Pronouns
3. Verbs
4. Adverbs
5. Adjectives
6. Interjections
7. Prepositions
8. Conjunctions

How we use them, and how we connect them, makes a difference.

I feature several lists of words that matter in my upcoming book, N-of-8.

The elements of an N-of-8® story

As I’ve often written in my articles, story development is deliberately interactive, allowing us to establish a dialogue with customers and hear it in their own words.

In my use of this qualitative, iterative N-of-8® process, we present three stories in customer listening groups of eight physicians. Customer response and participation is key in this process.

The stories are presented in raw, “unpackaged” format in order to gain the most valuable customer input. This means they are simply typed on a page – not an ad, brochure, or commercial.

Each story is divided into main components (headline, introduction, claim, call to action, etc.). They must be crafted as a narrative, not simply a recitation of bullets points. So there are the components of good stories: setting, characters, action, conflict, hero, resolution, and sometimes, even a moral.

Conflict is essential to these stories. Author Robert Penn Warren said, “No conflict, no story,” and my experience has led me to agree.

When, considering the angles for the three different stories, you make them deliberately distinct and appropriately provocative.

For example, for a new biologic treatment for a rare disease, you might begin with these three angles:

1. Patient Impact

Content: awareness of the disease, their feelings about it, and their current usage of treatments

Tone: emotional Voice: second person “you”

Reference: research data from patient organizations and disease societies

Close: you can count on us, so make Brand your preferred medication

2. Speed of Effect

Content: process of care, action of agent

Tone: urgency

Voice: third person “it”

Reference: cause of symptoms, mechanism of drug, dosing levels, clinical trial data

Close: what role could Brand play in helping you feel better faster?

3. Functional Living

Content: connect with condition and problems it causes, easy to understand how drug fits into lifestyle about it, and their current usage of treatments

Tone: authoritative Voice: first person “we”

Reference: ethnographic research of impact on activities of daily living

Close: treat at first sign of symptoms

I've doing many N-of-8® groups in the past few months, and have more planned in several countries this summer.

6 ways that "Narrative Medicine" stories can strengthen healthcare practitioners

When I saw this ad in THE NEW YORKER for a graduate program in “Narrative Medicine,” I had to dig more.

“Narrative medicine” is one cost-effective and evidence-based method to equip health care professionals with the skills needed to respond to the challenge.

Narrative training enables practitioners to comprehend patients’ experiences and to understand what they themselves undergo as clinicians.  This is because a narrative improves the ability to recognize, absorb, interpret, and be moved by stories of illness.

Increasing narrative competence can strengthen one’s:

1. Professionalism
2. Cultural competence
3. Bioethical competence
4. Interpersonal communication skills
5. Self-reflective practice
6. Ability to work with health care teams

For sure, the effective care of the sick requires a deep knowledge of the patient and the competent commitment of the physician – plus, a sturdy bond of trust between them both.

Despite the many sociocultural and professional factors that may divide doctors and patients – not to mention the impact of political and economic pressures on health care – an effective medical practice needs to replace hurried and impersonal care with careful listening, empathic attention, and personal fidelity.

I found that next week, March 6, Columbia University will be hosting a talk by Debra Litzelman, MD entitled, “The Use of Stories in Changing an Academic Health Center's Culture: Indiana University School of Medicine as a Case Report.”

This is one of a series of Narrative Medicine Rounds presented by scholars, clinicians, or writers engaged in work at the interface between narrative and health care.

You can download past programs on iTunes

Debra Litzelman serve as Professor of Medicine and the Associate Dean for Research in Medical Education at IUSM. She completed her Health Services Research (HSR) Fellowship training at the Regenstrief Institute (RGI) in 1989 and served as the HSR Fellowship Training program director from 2000-02 securing funding from HRSA to maintaining funding for the HSR training program during the 10-15 years of its existence.

She has mentored over 15 post-doctoral fellows in HSR and in Medical Education Research most who have gone on to academic medicine careers.

Dr. Litzelman is currently the Principal Investigator on a second $1.5 million NIH Behavioral and Social Science Integrated Curricular Training grant for IUSM. She served as the co-PI on the Fetzer funded Relationship-centered Care Initiative (RCCI) directed at influencing and studying the impact of organizational change strategies on the professional learning environment of IUSM/IU Health System.  She was an investigator on an internal IU Health Value's Education grant from 2006-08 to adapt the RCCI organizational change intervention to the IU Health System's patient care sites.

Sharing music: a powerful way that humans bond

This weekend, I started listening to the audiobook of Oliver Sacks' Musicophilia

The Columbia University professor is probably the country’s best known neurologist. He has the ability to make the complexities of neurological disorders understandable to laymen while portraying the afflictions of his patients in a compelling and compassionate way. 

When the book was first published, writer Scott Horton of HARPER'S Magazine put 6 questions to Dr. Sacks about his remarkable study of music and the human brain.  

Here's one of the exchanges:

4. You suggest that we favor language as our primary medium for the communication of ideas, but your book develops the case for music as another important vehicle. Doesn’t this suggest that music and language have the potential to reinforce and support one another as media of communication?

There is a great deal of debate about the relationship between music and language, and speculation about which capacity evolved first. It has often been suggested that music emerged as a by-product of linguistic capacities. But musical rhythm, with its regular pulse, is very unlike the irregular stressed syllables of speech. We will probably never know the answer here, but whether parts of the brain evolved specifically to process music, or music happened to make use of neural pathways that arose for other reasons, it is clear that music has been central to the human enterprise for 40,000 years or more. Bone flutes, some of which date back even further than this, have been found at Neanderthal campsites. Sharing music is one of the most powerful ways humans bond together, and this has obvious survival value. We still use music in this way, to come together in singing religious songs, holiday music, national anthems, protest songs, even “Happy Birthday.” If we had a time machine, it would be fascinating to learn how early music and speech came together in the form of song. Steven Mithen, in The Singing Neanderthals, proposes that speech and music developed simultaneously, as a sort of song-speech, which later separated into spoken language and music.

Read the full interview at harpers.org

“Sphere Within Sphere” sculpture at Vatican: reflecting a fractured world

When I posted this photo to my Facebook friends, I got many comments wanting to know about this unusual sculpture.

This bronze sculpture is called “Sphere Within Sphere” (Sfera Con Sfera) and it is the centerpiece of the Courtyard of the Pinecone at the Vatican Museum. 

Measuring four meters in diameter, it was created by artist Arnaldo Pomodoro in 1990 for the Vatican Museums.  Pomodoro's specialty is the casting of gigantic columns and/or globes.  In this magnificent sculpture, the fractured surface of the outer sphere reveals a very complex inner sphere.  

It tells a story of the harsh difficulties that the modern world finds itself in at the end of the second millennium. 

Rome: streets on the move

It's fun to see the scenes of Rome streets on the move.  Here are some videos.



1, 2, 3 now 4th album from Feist - with a lesson for writers

Canadian singer-songwriter Feist has a new album Metals due for release on Tuesday.  

A New York Times reviewer says it "simply ignores all the glossy, computerized, impersonal pop of the 21st century; it’s made for intimacy, not for mass-market broadcast."

And what Feist says about her songwriting also has relevance to all of us who write branded communications.

“I always think about how I’m in my room alone writing it, and eventually most people listen to music alone,” Feist said. “So there’s actually a quiet little direct line between writing and listening. It’s a strange bubble of solitude, because you’re linked, but you don’t know each other, yet you’re communicating.”

5 questions for the author of "Tell to Win"

Persuasive talkers tend to do well in business, and yet we don't typically think of storytelling as a professional discipline. Hollywood producer Peter Guber is on a crusade to remedy that. In his new book, Tell to Win, the CEO of Mandalay Entertainment takes a look at the way people use stories to do business. 

He spoke with Inc.com's Mike Hofman.

Your book looks at the power of purposeful stories. So, what exactly is a purposeful story?
 

A story you tell with a specific purpose in mind. So when you tell a joke, you want to make someone laugh, or if you tell a story about someone who had a heart attack, it may be because you want the listener to exercise. Stories are tools to create social cohesion and to get humans to strategize together.

You believe the best stories are interactive. How so?
 

You have to try to engage an audience. You cannot just talk at them; you have to talk with them and modify your story as you tell it, based on their feedback. If you do this successfully, your listeners are more likely to metabolize the information you wish to convey, to change behavior, and to repeat your story to others.

OK, so how can someone in sales or marketing turn a garden-variety pitch into a purposeful story?
 

It's so simple, it's embarrassing, and yet a lot of people overlook the basics. First, when you walk into a room to sell a product or pitch an investor or whatever, you absolutely have to know what your intention is. What do you want from your listeners? You have to understand your objective and be transparent about it in order to establish trust. Second, you have to figure out a way to capture your listeners' attention. It can be a physical movement or asking someone about the pictures on his desk in a way that builds mutuality. Finally, the goal of your story must be to show what is in it for the listeners. The audience must win.

You teach at UCLA. Do your students have well-honed storytelling skills?
 

No. Most young people haven't used their storytelling skills since they were 8 or 9 or 10 and wanted to persuade Mom and Dad to take them to the ball game.

Was there a moment in your business career when you suddenly realized the power of storytelling?
 

There was a series of moments that I could look back on—I could follow the bread crumbs—and all of them involved my failures. So I started to wonder why I had failed in some instances when I had succeeded in others. And I realized that I failed when I neglected to tell a purposeful story to the audience or to my employees or to my shareholders. I looked inside myself and saw what had worked for me.

Seeing the same brand hallmarks in new ways: Lessons for N-of-8 from “Indiana Jones”

When using the N-of-8 process, it’s important to remember that you’re not just writing a story – you’re developing a BRAND story.

So the core brand hallmarks must be presented and maintained consistently. But that doesn’t mean the story can’t be told in many different ways.

Consider the series of Indiana Jones movies. The respected, intellectual professor pulls off his bow tie and glasses to search for treasure. Even across four installments, there are elements that make an “Indiana Jones” story:

• Jaunts to exotic destinations
• Dodging booby traps
• Fighting hand-to-hand with the bad guys
• Unearthing ancient ruins
• Hacking through jungles
• Taking unusual transportation
• Dining on spectacular, even bizarre meals
• Snakes!

And there are the hallmarks of Indiana Jones’ personal brand: hat, whip, watch, journal, unshaven beard, even the influences of his father.

With these central and fundamental ingredients, many stories can be crafted with their own unique locations, characters, plots, dangers, and fantasies.

It can be extended from Raiders of the Lost Ark to Temple of Doom, The Last Crusade, and 20 years later, Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. What’s more, it can provide the story platform of media extensions into TV series, pinball and video games, and an amusement park ride.

Far from limiting your creative potential, defining the brand hallmarks gives a structure to which you can then build endless story possibilities.

The same principles can be seen when analyzing other popular movies series, like Star Wars, James Bond, Pink Panther, and Rocky. That’s why I often use these as a warm-up exercise with our creative teams before we start writing stories for N-of-8 groups. It helps us find parallels, archetypes, villains, conflicts, and climaxes. We recall the look of the titles and credits. We even sing the theme song or hum the main chorus.

As you begin crafting your brand’s story, put together a list of the escapades you’ll experience – plunging into a pit of snakes, cruising around on elephants, hitching a ride of a zeppelin, or searching for the Holy Grail.

6 checkpoints to master social storytelling

Here are six checkpoints suggested by Lars Bastholm (co-chief creative officer of AKQA) that'll help get you started mastering the art of social storytelling and invite consumers into the conversation:

1. Look at any marketing effort as the beginning of a conversation.

2. Closely monitor the conversation and be ready to respond to consumers.

3. Provide consumers with tools that help them carry on the conversation for you.

4. Leave room for consumers to interact. Make sure your creative universe is big enough that there are unexplored areas.

5. The conversation is over when the consumers say it is, not when the media plan (or the budget) says it is.

6. Listen and learn from the feedback loop.


Read his “Social Storytelling” point-of-view at http://creativity-online.com/?action=news:article&newsId=131936§ionId=pov

Tell me a story

Worried about the increasing number of people who love theories more than stories, filmmaker Ken Burns recently told the San Francisco Chronicle, “We are experiencing the death of the narrative. We are all so opinionated that we don’t actually submit to narrative anymore. That’s the essence of YouTube: Abbreviate everything into a digestible capsule that then become the conventional wisdom, which belies the experience of art.”

Stories are always more persuasive than beliefs. Which makes sense – wouldn’t you rather someone delight you with tales of their experiences than listen to them recite dogma.

Our assignment, dear reader, is to help reverse this damaging trend. Gush fewer opinions and share more stories. And let’s encourage others to do the same.