OUR GUIDE TO CORPORATE STORYTELLING - APACD€¦ · · 2014-10-17Emotional connection is perhaps the most vital defining ingredient for storytelling. Yet it is the hardest thing

O U R G U I D E TO C O R P O R AT E S TO R Y T E L L I N G

S E R V I C E B R O C H U R E

2 APACD Service Brochure

CON T EN TS

This Service Brochure is part of a series published by the Asia-Pacific Association of Communication Directors (APACD). They are intended as constructive manuals that give advice on practical challenges and topics in communications. The APACD is cross-national network for in-house communication directors, managers and spokespersons in the Asia-Pacific region. It aims to establish common quality standards and advance professional qualifications within the field by organising events such as debates, seminars and workshops. In addition, the non-partisan Association lobbies for the profession, offers practical advice, provides useful services and information for its members, and publishes Communication Director, a quarterly magazine devoted to corporate communications and public relations.

+The authorRobert Mighall // Author & Brand Consultant, Radley Yeldar

Robert Mighall is a writer, brand consultant and corpo-

rate storyteller. A former fellow in English Literature at

the University of Oxford, his book Only Connect: The Art of Corporate

Storytelling brings these two worlds together, and is due to be published

in December 2013. He is a senior brand consultant at Radley Yeldar, a

leading independent creative communications business based in London,

where his clients include GSK, Shell, JLT, The Share Centre, Pearson. For

more information about Radley Yeldar, or to contact Robert, please visit

www.ry.com

Introduction: What is corporate storytelling ? 03

What are the essentials? 04

Why it is needed? 05

Where it is needed most 06

Why has storytelling been rediscovered? 08


T H E E AC D B R I E F G U I D E TO C O R P O R AT E S TO R Y T E L L I N G

Introduction: What is corporate Storytelling

‘Story’, something of a buzzword in marketing and communi-cations, is finally storming that last bastion of the bar chart and the bullet point, the corporate world. Books are being published on it, and companies of all sizes and sectors have started talking about “getting their story straight”, where once such terms would have seemed alien. But what is corporate storytelling? Why is it needed now? And where should we apply its principles to achieve what ends? This brief guide attempts to provide some answers.

Storytelling: the beginningStorytelling – as old as human history – is not entirely new to the corporate or commercial setting. In the US it has been promoted as a leadership tool since the 1990s, pro-viding a more human-centric alternative to the hard-nosed, bottom-lined, persuasion arts traditionally dominating the US board room. Or there is the tradition that behind every great brand or business there is a founding legend, with the likes of Innocent, Google, Apple or Dyson lending iconic evidence to this claim.1

Yet I’m not talking about the leadership or legend-type of storytelling here. The stories increasingly being sought and developed by corporates are less concerned with wielding influence, and more with justifying the company’s existence. And these aren’t so much the stories that stand behind a company, as those it puts forward to the world. They say less about where the company has come from, and everything about where it is going, what it’s all about, and why this ultimately matters.

As such, storytelling in this context is not unlike positioning a brand. They are very close, and can work powerfully in part-nership. But there are also some key differences. Branding, as a practice, is principally the preserve of professionals who create and manage these valuable assets. These brands are largely abstractions, formed in the realm of ideas, and are only made real when they are experienced and associations or anecdotes are formed about them. These anecdotes might then be shared for the purposes of advocacy (or its opposite, defamation). It is at this point the brand starts to live through story.

Story, on the other hand, is understood, practiced and exchanged by every culture on the planet, nearly every waking (and dreaming) hour of every day. It doesn’t need to

1 The ‘Leadership’ school of corporate storytelling has been pioneered in the US by Stephen Denning, whose The Springboard: How Storytelling Ignites Action Into Knowledge-Era Organizations (2000) helped popularise the idea of using narrative to convince and influence mostly internal audiences. Paul Smith’s recent Lead With a Story: A Guide to Crafting Business Narratives That Captivate, Convince and Inspire (2012) extends this tradition. The Legends of great brands are showcased in the Great Brand Stories series, edited by John Simmons, now published by Marshall Cavendish, and featuring the likes of Google and Innocent.


be translated into an experience because it is one already, and is ready to be shared. By consciously applying the prin-ciples that define this universal human currency, some of the work of brand building and expression can be carried out and perfected.

What are the essentials? At its most basic, a story is an explanation. It is simply the best means humans have to grab attention, convey infor-mation that makes sense, and impart some relevant social or emotional truth. Storytelling, be it for entertainment or commerce, needs just three things to do this: clarity, coher-ence, and emotional connection.

I. ClarityClarity ensures the company’s narrative grabs attention, and what it offers is clearly understood. There is constant com-petition for our attention, a myriad of messages besieging

us on every side. Without the singleness of idea or theme a story demands, the company narrative will go unheard. What a company does might be highly complicated, in many different places, for a wide variety of people. Yet the more complexity involved, the more simplicity is needed for the story to do its core job of explaining.

An effective way to achieve this simplicity, as well as en-suring the story remains relevant, is to focus less on what the company does and more on why this ultimately matters. Too many companies develop fact-obsessed boilerplates fix-ating on their scale, scope and footprint, whilst neglecting to consider why anyone might actually care. Clarity of benefit and singleness of focus starts to lift such statements into the realms of storytelling, emulating the greatest narratives of page, stage or screen whose central premise can usually be summed up in a sentence.

II. Coherence Coherence ensures that clarity is carried through with con-viction, providing the thread that binds the parts of the nar-rative together. The human brain seeks pattern and order, and intuitively senses when something doesn’t quite add up.2 In entertainment stories this means the right events in the right order leading to a satisfying denouement. We unconsciously bring the same demands to any calls on our belief, and feel similarly unsatisfied when a communication designed to convince us lacks coherence.

There’s a reason why integrity is such an important ideal in the corporate world, because the order it demands is funda-

2 On the psychology of storytelling, see Jonathan Gottschall, The Storytelling Animal: How Stories Make Us Human (2012), and Brian Boyd, On the Origin of Stories: Evolution, Cognition, and Fiction (2009).

“ ST ORY ” IS U N DER ST OOD, PR AC T IC E D A N D E XC H A NGE D B Y EV ERY CU LT U R E ON T H E PL A N E T. I T DOES N ´ T N E E D T O BE T R A NSL AT E D I N T O A N E X PER I E NC E , AS I T IS A L R E A DY ON E , A N D R E A DY T O BE SH A R E D.


trust is built, and no number of tabulated facts will convince without that connection. Business may be measured by results, and those results may easily (albeit deceptively) be given a numerical value; but any business operates by and for people, whose choices and affinities are influenced much more powerfully by what they feel than what they think or can measure.

Emotional connection is perhaps the most vital defining ingredient for storytelling. Yet it is the hardest thing for so many companies to embrace. A tour through the homepag-es of the FTSE100 companies simply tells us that they are “leading” in their particular fields; “global” in their footprint or ambitions; and provide “solutions” for their various custom-ers. Fixated on the cold, hard, factual what of their worlds, they fail to demonstrate their vital connection with ours. The warm, living, breathing world of human needs, desires and dreams they are ultimately there to serve. No matter how purely business-to-business a company is, it is still part of a chain that touches people. In fact, the more removed the company is from that world, the more effort it should put into specifying why what it does matters.

And so, whilst storytelling appears to finally be making its presence felt in corporate communications departments, there is still a long way to go, and rather stubborn pockets of resistance to embracing what it can achieve. Why might that be?

Why it is needed Whilst most companies would like to think they have some-thing unique to offer there is comfort in conformity. Wishing to be taken seriously by their peers, they all end up sounding like them. “The facts speak for themselves”, some might

mental to all our dealings with our fellow humans. It simply means ‘holding together’, and integrity in the ethical world is the equivalent of coherence in the realm of ideas and their expression. Coherence of story is a far more effective way of demonstrating integrity than simply listing it as a value. If the story holds up, then we are more inclined to believe the company will hold up to ethical scrutiny.

Story demands a coherent thread, but it also provides one. Developing a clear corporate story helps a company maintain that clarity through all its channels and points of contact. Companies that tell a single story to all their audiences are far more likely to inspire trust than those that partition their messages or tone for different stakeholder groups. In the glasshouse of modern communications, this is increasingly difficult to justify. Any duplicity or multiplicity of message suggests a company is either speaking with a forked tongue, or is confused about who it is. Either way, it is less likely to inspire belief than the company that provides a single coherent account of itself to all its audiences everywhere.

III. Emotional ConnectionTrust is also at stake with the final essential ingredient of storytelling: emotional connection. This is what story does best, and where it leaves the facts and figures, list and di-agrams out in the cold. For it is on the emotional level that

E MOT ION A L C ON N EC T ION IS PER H A PS T H E MOST V I TA L DE F I N I NG I NGR E DI E N T F OR ST ORY T E L L I NG .


claim. No they don’t. People speak to other people, and the way they reveal their true selves and convey relevant or universal truths is by sharing stories.

Storytelling might be dismissed as a childish, frivolous distraction whose proper sphere is the nursery, not the boardroom. Yet it is in the nursery that we first learn about our world and the bigger world beyond, through stories. A world with meaning, cause and effect and consequence, with agreed ethical standards, and with nearly limitless possibilities bounded only by the imagination. In short, the very stuff we “children of a larger growth” attempt to depict and promote in our business communications.

A child doesn’t say “Read me a list, daddy”. Nor do business audiences, whatever they may believe or claim. We can learn a lot from that child, whose favourite word in those formative years is likely to be “why?” ‘Why’ should be the imperative of corporate communications, designed to answer equally persistent interrogators: why does this matter? What’s in it for me? Why should I believe you?

Story has a role to play in business, because business needs to more firmly explain its role in the world of hu-man beings. We’re not talking about once-upon-a-time fables here, but about taking a leaf from what masters of storytelling throughout the ages have perfected to get their points across and move their audiences. There are no hidden secrets to something we all of us engage in every day. We just occasionally need reminding of this, and to apply these principles consciously and consistently when we are doing business.

Where it is needed most Story, like branding whose work it can assist, is needed throughout the entire corporate communications spectrum, with a core story providing the central focus of the compa-ny’s conversation with the world. There isn’t room to explore this spectrum in any detail here,3 so I will briefly touch on just two areas where story can help companies convince some of their toughest audiences: investor relations and employee engagement.

Investor RelationsInvestor relations, with its key documents the annual report and accounts, is both tailor-made for storytelling and in desperate need of its help. Tailor-made because, it is worth recalling, the word ‘account’ doesn’t have an exclusively numerical or financial significance but also comes close to meaning a story. It is difficult to give a coherent account of something without turning it into a story. Communication demands it. And so, every year, a listed company is com-pelled to give an account of itself, encouraging a degree of retrospection almost unique in the communications mix where the moment is always NOW, and the focus generally on tomorrow. As a well-made story has a beginning, a mid-dle and an end, so the year-end of the company’s business should encourage a coherent summing up, explaining how that year’s performance is part of an on-going, developing narrative with a clear directional focus. A plot, in short.

Investor relations is in desperate need for help from story because, despite these affinities, it best exemplifies the sto-

3 A much fuller discussion of how story can be a part of the communications mix is provided in my forthcoming book, Only Connect: The Art of Corporate Storytelling (2013).


ry-resistant mindset I identified above. The numerical sense of ‘account’ dominates, with the head decisively overruling the heart. Furthermore, the legislative framework closely regulating reporting practice has turned what should be an opportunity to engage into an exercise in disclosure. The very word ‘discolsure’ suggests a buttoned-up, imposed obligation to comply with the letter of the law, at complete variance with the open, expansive impulse to share a story.

And yet, the tide may be turning. That same compliance is now making new demands on reporters that can perhaps be summed up succinctly as “tell a more coherent story”.4 Such thinking is clearly behind the recent UK law demanding that reporters must explain their business model. The ‘what’ of financial performance is no longer enough. How it creates value, and the value this creates for people in the wider world, must now also be spelt out. Such needs are the solid foundations upon which sustainable value-creation is built.

A joined-up investment story helps bring everything – business model, strategic vision, marketplace focus, a company’s place in a value-chain – into a coherent frame

of reference. It helps case studies fulfill a defined purpose, providing compelling evidence of the core story and stra-tegic focus in action. And it encourages better integration of financial with non-financial disclosures, bringing a clearer understanding of how sustainability measures are material to the company’s business. This is not only more efficient – one story, different emphases and evidence – but also more convincing, and therefore more likely to inspire trust.

So a compelling narrative developed through words and imagery, is becoming the benchmark for effective reporting, putting current performance convincingly in context, as well providing clear signposting for the journey ahead. It’s still early days, but ‘story’ is now firmly on the reporting agenda.

Employees CommunicationsA perhaps even more cynical and harder-to-convince au-dience than investors is internal. We all know that brands have to be ‘lived’ by all employees if they are to deliver on what they promise. We know that this is particularly im-portant for service or B2B brands, where, as Wally Olins has pointed out, the brand is the employees, and so they are its “most important audience”.5 Yet we also know how difficult that is to put into practice, despite the best efforts of brand inductions and instructions. Brands are difficult things to live, as they are not themselves alive. They need other things – assets, collateral, people and experiences – to give them life. But stories are already part of the fabric

4 The Accounting Standards Board 2009 report ‘Rising to the Challenge’ explicitly stated: “Business models cannot be conveyed through numbers alone, and it is up to the narrative report to tell the story of what the company does to generate cash”: http://www.frc.org.uk/Our-Work/Publications/ASB/Rising-to-the-Challenge/Rising-to-the-challenge.aspx

5 Wally Olins, On Brand (2004).

ST ORY IS N E E DE D T H ROUGHOU T T H E E N T I R E C OR P OR AT E C OM M U N IC AT IONS SPEC T RU M, W I T H A C OR E ST ORY PROV I DI NG T H E F OCUS .


of the everyday, and therefore so much easier to believe in, belong to, and make part of our own lives.

We make sense of our own lives through the stories we tell ourselves, constantly reinforcing and updating the narratives that bind us to our pasts through memory, and to our future through ambitions and aspirations. Story,

therefore, can help give shape and motivating impetus to the strategic objectives of an organisation. Especially one undergoing change (and when isn’t it?). Stories are often about journeys, and therefore about change. They often identify goals that encourage us to imagine a changed reality just over the horizon (or rainbow). The corporate soul is similarly restless, permanently seeking new battles to fight, new glories to claim. Hence the perennial need for organisational change, which engagement is tasked to implement. Whilst people generally hate (imposed) change, they love and need stories, and are likely to harbour per-sonal goals of their own. Story can help align the corporate narrative with the personal, but only if that story resonates with the employee’s own stories.

Employees have an almost unique status when it comes to communications and the objectives of engagement, in that they are both audience and actors in the story the company tells. This is why they are the most critical audience (in all senses), and where the identificatory power of storytelling comes powerfully into its own. The stories that move us most are those in which we can see ourselves reflected. From the classics to the latest blockbusters, stories hold up mirrors to their audiences. Such reflection is also essential to corporate storytelling. If employees cannot see themselves reflected in the story – in terms of their values, their motivations, what they believe in or feel part of – the narrative will ring hollow, and fail to move anyone.

Storytelling: An Engagement ProgrammeThe answer? Use storytelling and sharing as part of an engagement programme. Story should be at the heart of engagement, because engagement is at the heart of story-telling.6 Not just the beautifully crafted narrative a company broadcasts from on high, but the stories it should gather from within, that can inform the ‘official’ story and ensure it is built on real solid foundations. Any company is awash with these stories, where the heroic or humble deeds of real participants encourages personal ownership of the corpo-rate narrative, helping them to truly live the brand story or the corporate values.

Gathering, celebrating and circulating such stories can demonstrate to a disparate collection of people how much they have in common with each other (cutting across silos,

6 An excellent book explaining how to use storytelling, mostly for internal audiences, is Annette Simmons’ The Story Factor: Influence, Inspiration and Persuasion Through the Art of Storytelling (2006).

A C OM PE L L I NG N A R R AT I V E DEV E LOPE D T H ROUGH WOR DS A N D I M AGERY, IS BEC OM I NG T H E BE NC H M A R K F OR E FF EC T I V E R EP ORT I NG


functions or geographies), and can help to identify where their own personal stories and values resonate with those of the company. Companies don’t really have values, people do. The best way to identify them is through the stories that place them in context, dramatise and demonstrate them at work. The emergence of social enterprise platforms, such as Yammer means that these stories can be given visibility and be showcased as the vital narrative ‘soul’ of the company. Evidence of values in action is far more convincing than a list of adjectives attached to a corporate vision.

Why has storytelling been rediscovered? Story, instinctive, universal, as old as history itself, is suddenly newly-relevant, and making its influence felt where it has been most strenuously resisted. Why now?

The most obvious answer is the revolution in commu-nication brought about by digital and social media. At no other time in history have so many people been able to communicate with so many others in real time, leaving such a visible and permanent legacy. Technology has created both the means and the need to forge greater connections with each other. The more virtual and dispersed relationships and communities become, the more they rely on the most primitive and universal means of communicating and mak-ing sense of the world.7 Hence the renewed focus on story

as a universal currency. The effects of this new currency might also explain why the corporate world feels compelled, finally, to get its own story straight.

Everywhere we look digital and social media are eroding age-old distinctions. Between creators and audiences; brand owners and consumers; content and promotion; inside and outside an organisation. The public (if such a multi-faceted concept is still sustainable) no longer simply consumes the products, brands or messages a company broadcasts; but increasingly participates in the meanings brands carry and the stories that circulate about them. Whilst brands are traditionally the preserve of professionals, stories belong to everyone. And now everyone has a voice, and that voice has nearly infinite visibility and volume.

7 A fascinating discussion of this historical paradox, how technology is bringing about a return to the most primitive arts and ethos, is provided by Jonah Sachs’ recent book, Winning The Story Wars (2012). Sachs neatly sums this paradox up by dubbing the era we have entered “The Digioral Era”, expressing the idea that digital technology has brought about the more fluid exchange of stories characterised by oral traditions, in opposition to the “Broadcast” mode that has dominated all forms of professional storytelling (including marketing) since at least the Renaissance.

8 Coca Cola’s recent “Liquid and Linked” content marketing strategy, and revamp of its corporate website as a story sharing hub called Coca Cola Journey provides a high-profile example of how distinctions between consumer and corporate, brand owner and brand storytelling are becoming increasingly blurred. See: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LerdMmWjU_E

E M PLOY E ES H AV E A N A L MOST U N IQU E STAT US W H E N I T C OM ES T O C OM M U N IC AT IONS A N D T H E OBJ EC T I V ES OF E NG AGE M E N T, I N T H AT T H E Y A R E BOT H AU DI E NC E A N D AC T OR S I N T H E ST ORY.


Digital RevolutionA brand, someone once said, is what people say it is. Now there are the means to amplify and circulate that say a thou-sand fold. Whilst some consumer brands, such as Coca Cola,8 have actively embraced such an ethos, the corporate world has been slow and reluctant to face up to the realisation that controlled monologue is increasingly difficult to sustain. Or

to put it more bluntly and urgently, if a company isn’t pre-pared to tell its story, there are now plenty of highly vocal and visible volunteers who are happy to share their version of it. Those companies operating in controversial sectors, or that have been happy to stand in the shadows, are now seeing the writing on other people’s walls.

The general failure of trust in the financial and corporate world has brought about the need for greater transparency and proactive engagement, for companies to emerge from behind the facts and figures and reveal something of their authentic selves. Storytelling is humanity’s tried and tested means of doing this. This is why companies large and small are starting to find their voice, develop their story, and en-ter the conversation. The great age of story may only have just begun.

Deliver the s

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narr

ati v

e ev

ery

ti me.CLARITY

EMOTIONAL CONNECTION

COHERENCE

Focus on what matt ers in a clear andunderstandable way

Tell a

sing

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ory.

story and embrace the human aspect.

Leave the numbers and fi gures out of your

+Figure 1 INGREDIENTS OF CORPORATE STORYTELLING

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OUR GUIDE TO CORPORATE STORYTELLING - APACD€¦ · · 2014-10-17Emotional connection is perhaps the most vital defining ingredient for storytelling. Yet it is the hardest thing

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