Net van het web geplukt:

“Uit een kwalitatief marktonderzoek van het New Yorkse onderzoeksbureau 3DAccountability, in samenwerking met CoolBrands blijkt dat storytelling de koopintentie verdubbelt.”

Bron: Marketingonline.nl

Consumenten kopen dus niet je product, dienst of idee, maar zijn primair geïnteresseerd in het verhaal dat eraan vastzit. Zo concluderen alvast de onderzoekers.

In een ‘laboratoriumsetting’ werden onder meer de merken OMO (Unilever), DSM en KLM onderzocht ten opzichte van hun concurrenten, door deze merken te presenteren door storytelling. In alle gevallen was een positief effect waar te nemen.

De belangrijkste feiten op een rij:

- De netpromotorscore (NPS, zou je het merk aanraden aan anderen) voor OMO steeg met 33 procent.
- De koopintentie van Pepsi verdubbelde.
- Het merkattribuut ‘Ik wil werken voor DSM’ steeg met 20 procent.
- Het merkattribuut ‘is relevant voor onze maatschappij’ steeg voor KLM met 76 procent.

Gedragsverandering
Maarten Schäfer van CoolBrands over de resultaten:

‘We wisten al dat informatie door de linker hersenhelft, de rationele kant, wordt verwerkt. Dit onderzoek heeft duidelijk gemaakt dat informatie die is verpakt tot verhalende content, de emotie triggert en dus wordt verwerkt door de rechter hersenhelft. Duidelijk is vervolgens geworden dat emoties kunnen leiden tot gedragsverandering, terwijl de ratio doorgaans alleen tot attitudeverandering leidt.’

Anouk Papers van CoolBrands voegt daaraan toe:

‘Storytelling beïnvloedt niet alleen de merkperceptie van de persoon die het verhaal uit de eerste hand hoort of leest. Verhalen reizen vervolgens ook verder. Dus de invloed van het vertellen van een goed verhaal gaat veel verder dan de merkperceptie van het individu aan wie het verhaal verteld wordt. Dat biedt kansen voor merken in een tijd waarin klassieke communicatie, zoals reclame, steeds minder goed werkt.’

Stephanie Lopez van 3DAccountability: ‘Koopgedrag wordt zwaar beïnvloed door peer-to-peer communicatie, 70 procent van alle aankoopbeslissingen wordt gebaseerd op peer-to-peer invloed. Dit onderzoek laat zien dat het loont om te investeren in storytelling, omdat dit de driver is voor word of mouth.’

Methodiek
In een experimenteel onderzoeksontwerp werden door middel van kwalitatief marktonderzoek 5 sets van 2 merken getest. Daarbij ging het steeds om een test van een merk en daar tegenover een concurrerend controlemerk. De pretest vroeg naar bekendheid met het merk, consideration, eerste keuze bij aankoop, koopintentie en Net promotor score (NPS). Daarnaast werd een aantal merkattributen getest om inzicht te krijgen in het merkimago. Na de pretest waren 50 studenten aanwezig bij een gastcollege. Tijdens dit gastcollege zijn de 5 testmerken besproken aan de hand van storytelling. Na afloop van het gastcollege hebben de studenten deelgenomen aan de post-test. De post-test onderzocht dezelfde aspecten als de pretest, om de vergelijking te optimaliseren.

Over the past years, communication has evolved from broadcasting your message to really connecting with your audience.

This evolution has an impact on the way we need to communicate. Unfortunately, most managers have failed to evolve along. Traditional communication no longer works. Organizations, brands and their leaders need to change the way they communicate today. The gap between what they want to communicate and what people actually take in gets bigger every day.

It’s a whole new world out there. And to make it in this new world, you need a whole new story!

Catch, create and connect is the central theme in my storytelling book ‘No Story, No Fans’. It is THE way to connect your message to this new hyper-connected world.

The last 3 years I have been reading and collecting -as crazy person- great articles, videos, blog postings and many more on the power of storytelling. I have been collecting all of this story stuff in my Delicius account. Today I thought is was time to share it with you. Hope you find it as interesting as I do. Enjoy. Just follow this link to access the goldmine

Finding time to write about storytelling can be quite a challenge.

I know. It sounds like an excuse doesn’t it? Fact is that I don’t take enough time sharing not only my thoughts but also the great story stuff I find on the Net. Story curation is (and has been for the last year) the new big thing on the internet. Have a look at this fantastic collection of stories by Gregg Morris.

I love Gregg! His story curation efforts have been a great source of inspiration for my book  “No Story, No Fans”.

When I was reading through the stories of the people I follow on Twitter, I came across this blog post of Anna Lantz.

I like David Henderson. We have something in common.

I generally don’t like PR agencies. We have little in common. Let me tell you why.

PR agencies are:

“clinging desperately to decades-old methods, sidelining staff training because it cuts into billable hours and getting farther and farther behind fast-moving digital media trends.”

“Most agencies today have so-called digital teams. They’ll claim to be at the “forefront” of anything online. In reality, it’s just the “B-S” factor turned up full blast. Pull back the veil and you will find few agency people with deep experience or practical accomplishments, even now, in the online world.”

(Read the full blog post -PR Agencies, The “B-S” Factor and Lagging- of David here)

You may have noticed I included a picture in this blog post. It’s a cartoon from Tom Fishburn. Tom knows how to tell this whole out-of-sync PR-agency-story in just 1 image. So… I like Tom as well. We are now a team of three trying to change the world of old school communications. We are still looking for a fourth team member (so we can kill time by playing cards if we don’t find any clients who are up to this challenge). Anyone?

Storytelling… Always Storytelling.

I recently met an acquaintance from college whom I hadn’t seen in more than 10 years. We weren’t that close in college, but kept up sporadically through email. In more recent years, we updated each other on our lives through Facebook and Twitter. So when we finally met in person, I didn’t need to ask him the usual “What have you been up to since college?” question. Through his Facebook and Twitter updates, I already knew that he had recently changed jobs and had just moved into a new house. I even knew about his struggles to get internet installed in his new home.

In fact, I felt like I knew so much about him that I was briefly at a loss for words when we finally met in person. “So, how are you?” I asked, after we re-introduced ourselves to each other.

From there, we immediately started telling each other stories and we dove straight into a deeper conversation.

After we parted, I marveled that we hadn’t made much small talk – that little warm-up exercise before the real conversation starts. We also didn’t trade many facts and figures about ourselves or about our mutual friends from college. Because we felt like we knew each other from our Facebook updates, we immediately started trading stories. The authenticity of the updates and stories I had been receiving from my old acquaintance made me feel like I was still connected to him in some strange way, despite the time and distance between us. So what is it about stories that makes making and maintaining connections between people look so easy?

Stories are basic to the human experience.

So basic, actually, that we even have evidence of storytelling from the Stone Age (some would argue that even Adam was a storyteller). Storytelling has been used to pass along knowledge and share values for thousands of years. We are still cavemen, all of us. Intelligent scientists argue that much of human behavior is explained by the fact that we are using prehistoric brains to navigate a modern world. Stories are our main navigating tools to develop trust and commitment and generate an emotional connection with others and our world.

There has never been so much writing and talk about storytelling for companies and brands as in the last year. More and more companies are talking about “a brand positioning story”. But what exactly is the difference between branding and the story? And where does the concept of positioning fit in?

“Content is King” is the current meme for organizations and brands that want to connect with their audiences. Whenever you read something about social media these days, you will read about “the power of content marketing”. By now the expression “content is king” has become so standard, the meaning of the word “content” is no longer clear: what is content? And more importantly, what is the story of this king, and will he connect with his audience in today’s hyper-connected world?

Still today – and I would even say especially today – if you have a good story, and tell it well, people are more likely to remember you, and more likely to pass it on.

No Story, no fans.

The net has created new ways of telling your story. But it is my experience that many companies today fail to find their real story and get stuck in a self-promotional story that puts the entire organization in a less believable category.

Most corporate and brand stories are mere bragging, which tends to turn people off. They are blaring out messages, cleverly packaging them in stunning ad campaigns and repeating them as often as possible to augment the impact. But cavemen told their stories in a way that basically dragged people toward them. They could whisper the story around the campfire circle (the circle is what we label today as a “community”) and still find connection with their audience. Companies are in need of real and emotionally engaging stories to tell. “No Story, No Fans” (the book as well as the phrase) reflects the idea of shifting your mindset from broadcasting about your products to really connecting to the people who will eventually be spending money on your products.

How difficult do you find it today to get your story connected to a new, hyper-connected world?

How difficult is it to tell real, authentic stories to the right people and find real engagement? Believe me, I know how challenging it can be to produce smart, highly targeted and truly innovative stories. But I also believe companies today would be able to connect better with their audiences if they would start using stories as little gifts to the community, if they would start to trade authentic and truly engaging stories as a means to reconnect with their audiences and regain trust. And trading stories is (or has to become) the new “business as usual”. You can read all about that in Part 1.

I would like to share with you a few recent blog posts that I think clarify the importance of storytelling much better.

First this article ‘For Brands, Being Human Is The New Black’, an illustration how brands are seeking to gain customers by showing their human side.

Then there is artist Jonathan Harris’s new digital platform, aiming to help people “find a signal amid social media noise”.

German giant Siemens is (successfully) humanizing its brand through storytelling

And of course my book on storytelling “No Story, No Fans” is full of examples of engaging storytelling. For instance: “Days with my father” (page 70), or the story of Steve Jobs on page 73.

Storytelling is a process, in the sense that you actually need to take different steps to make it work.