do brands have stories?

A few months ago, Shawn wrote about brand stories and how he thinks the word "story" is being misused. I agree with him. In fact, I don't think that you can have a "brand story" but brands absolutely have stories around them.

Let's say that a story contains (i) character(s), (ii) location(s) and (iii) events that befall the characters. A character doesn't have to be a human being but we tend to prefer stories with characters that are. If the character isn't a human (e.g. a dog, a car) then we anthropomorphise them. We give them emotions and moods. We give them reason. Above all, we give them agency. They choose to do stuff. Otherwise things just happen to characters in a story. And we find that unsatisfying. Someone tells us an anecdote about an event (e.g. missing the bus, winning a million dollars) and we often respond: "So what did you do?" That combination of event and (human) response is what makes stories compelling.

Now I'm going to use wikipedia's definition of a brand and today it is this: A brand is a collection of symbols, experiences and associations connected with a product, a service, a person or any other artifact or entity. Brands do not have agency. They cannot choose to do stuff. That makes brands a prop or a piece of the stage scenery. Advertising has traditionally gotten around this by anthropomorphising a brand - giving it a face. Michelin Man, the Jolly Green Giant, etc. And in an age of broadcast media, this worked pretty well (and will continue to work sometimes).

Consumers and employees do have agency. They make interesting characters in stories. And they tell each other stories. In fact, the stories they tell each other are a big part of what makes up a brand. Stories are as important as data. And ideally you combine the two to achieve understanding. And yet many people seem comfortable with either one or the other - rather than both. This is missed opportunity.

The Nokia example embedded in Shawn's post is an interesting one because it tries to tell a very specific story that positions humanity as the protagonist ("we") in an epic tale with Nokia product as the key prop. The comments indicate that not everyone agrees with that story.

There's a few more points here:

• All this social software stuff can make these stories more visible. The stories have always been there, but they've been hidden & isolated. Antony van Leeuwenhoek's work with the microscope allowed us to see things that had previously been invisible. We've built ourselves a whole bunch of story visualisers and accelerators.
• There is sometimes an assumption that all stories have to be epic (like the Nokia example) or that stories need to follow a structure like the Hero's Journey of Joseph Campbell. But they don't. Most of the stories we tell each other aren't epic (as Yiannis Gabriel noted, they are mostly quite banal). Attempting to force the everyday into the epic can be silly.
  
• There is no one story here. We often believe that if we find the one story then everything else falls into place and yet it rarely does. Salman Rushdie wrote a book called Haroun and the Sea of Stories. I've not read it but I love the image in the title. Stories as a sea that surround us and that we inhabit like fish. A sea that we cannot live without and yet rarely recognise.