how the power of storytelling in retail is fundamentally changing in the volatile world we’re now living in, and what we’re likely to see in the future.
“a story is the narration of a series of events deliberately arranged for telling”
Fundamentally, this implies clear purpose and control in its creation. Genuine and enduring engagement is the ultimate goal, to truly connect with your audience or customer, bringing joy and life into ‘events’ and experiences.
For as long as people have traded in an expanding economy, storytelling has existed as the method of coherently binding the entire process together. This includes brand development, marketing, interior design, visual merchandising, packaging and so on – these are the deliberately arranged ‘events’. The art of storytelling is to use our senses and emotions to generate commonality and empathy within the customer and create a cycle of feedback.
Frequently however, it has been the control element that has dominated brand storytelling in the years up to the end of the 20th Century.
Historically, story-telling in print, radio and TV advertising meant that the narrative only flowed in one direction and that was outwards. We’d like to think that narratives became more sophisticated when in fact the emphasis was only about being better, stronger and faster acting than rival brands. It was oppositional - all rooted in difference of separation and uniqueness. The narratives were unilateral and frequently brazen in their claims. Our visual sense was the only one being stimulated, meaning engagement was fleeting and that enduring loyalty became almost non-existent.
Return of Investment had to be visible on balance sheets and because emotional connection was hard to quantify, it was almost impossible to generate investment in. Marketing became an industry in itself – narratives were commodified, moving them one step further away from the brands. Even into the early 90’s, brand storytelling was still languishing in single channel, one-way, “better, brighter stronger, faster” mode and didn’t look set to change any time soon. It was going to take fundamental global change to address this mono-channel approach to storytelling.
They say be careful what you wish for because we actually ended up with two global changes.
The first of these changes came about in 1990 when Tim BernersLee provided us with the World Wide Web. This created a feedback loop by opening channels of communication and interaction never before dreamed of. Brands were dazzled by the enormous potential of the global reach
The lack of physical boundaries, omni-channel retailing, the use of ‘big-data’ – but this all came at a cost. The WWW empowered customers, it gave everyone with access a voice to share their opinion and make their demands known. The fourth wall had been permanently broken and it revealed the one-way storytelling for the limited thing it had become. Customer interaction had completely re-set storytelling expectations.
For the first time, customers played a role in Brand Storytelling; as integral characters that could affect the whole development of the brand narrative. Brands slowly began to realise, especially with the libertarian nature of sharing and advent of review websites, that customers had the potential to become protagonists – but could just as easily become antagonists.
With technology, customers now generated their own individual ‘back-stories’, their own personal brand identities, which they shared on social media. Brands lost exclusivity in this area and became disenfranchised. Adding to this was the question of what happens where a brand has not one, but hundreds of thousands of protagonists, all with different ideas and causes.
Technology had become a great equaliser and shifted the dynamic between brands and their customers. It was clear that brands were going to have to work a lot harder. Total control was no longer an option, but engaging as a human certainly was.
Between 1990-2020 we started to see progress in the development of brand engagement, and the stories that unfolded with it.
Recession in the first decade challenged brands and the nature of bricks-and-mortar retailing. Doom mongers forecast the death of the high-street and some slow-moving behemoths did fall by the wayside . Positively, its evolution provided some enduring and engaging results that shaped the next few years.
Although spending was restricted, people were prepared to invest in quality rather than immediate gratification. Premium and luxury brands weathered the course, as did dining out as an experience, and pop-up became a viable method of storytelling – it was inexpensive, and low risk, but best of all it embodied human qualities of fun, creativity and spontaneity.
Experiential retailing began to demonstrate that physical brand spaces didn’t have to sell product, they could inspire and bring joy and discovery. Curated retail could scale the offer to a local level, responding to geographical needs. Customised retail could deliver products or services tailored to an individual, with the help of technology. Sustainability began to lose its optional status and became a key plot-point in brand stories.
Overall, there were great leaps and bounds, but brands were still shell-shocked at the options available and how they guided the narrative. Return on Investment, especially within the recession was boldly highlighted. We did start to see companies reviewing Return on Experience, but it was still hard to gauge long-term loyalty and to publish metrics.
Despite the uncertainty, it was an exciting time within the creative industry.
Agencies knew they had to evolve commensurately, APPLYING the same agility and storytelling to their own client approach as clients were doing for their customers.
95% of our decision making process occurs subconsciously ...and is arguably out of our control
3 seconds TO MAKE A FIRST IMPRESSION
3 MILLISECONDS to ASSESS PERSONALITY
“Everybody experiences far more than he understands. Yet it is experience, rather than understanding, that influences behaviour.”Marshal Mcluhan
Empirical work in retail psychology was forging the way for measurable decision making, and the basis of genuinely engaging narratives. Pivotal work in this area was spearheaded by Harvard Business School’s Professor Gerald Zaltman. With his seminal work, ‘How Customer’s Think’, providing a springboard in the noughties for creatives to develop a sound basis to re-assess retail thinking. Today, thriving and dedicated agencies like Humanising Brands in the U partner with agencies to demonstrate actual return on investment and experience a basis to help our clients deliver a coherent narrative.
The customer’s renewed identity as antagonist was strengthened as psychologists consolidated the notion of ‘brand personality’ in the 1990’s. The Journal of Marketing Research proved that we actually store brand personalities in a specific location within our brai when presented with a brand experience, we test its consistency against the stored image to determine the level of trust it deserves. This reflects the same behaviour as when we build human to human relationships.
Therefore, consistent and positive engagement based on honesty and authenticity reinforces the humanity of their brand personality and generates loyalty and empathy from the customer.This process, in the main happens sub-consciously so brands must find a way to engage at this level. Concurrent research from Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky, suggests this can be done by ‘priming’ subjects, to engage their full sensory range in a congruent way.
Practically speaking, if you infuse your “deliberately arranged events” and appropriately engage the senses, you build lasting attachment. An example of this influence is that lower lighting levels increase desire and impulsive behaviour, while brighter light drives self-awareness and control.
As a result, authentic engagement and compelling stories were beginning to take root - we were seeing human responses to challenges Brands faced. Consistent storytelling was beginning to emerge.
But then the second fundamental global change hit that changed our protagonist status...
Covid knocked us out of our frenetic hamster-wheels of daily normality and changed everything. Just as brands had started to make those vital links and consolidate their narrative, lockdown and physical isolation severed shared experiences, cutting off our full range of sensory connections.
As consumers, we suddenly lost our newly evolved status with brands. We looked to technology to relieve some of the anxiety of being separated from friends and loved ones. Yet physical isolation and the scale of the pandemic profoundly affected perception in our lives, playing out a storyline that we were nearly powerless to do anything about. The emotional chaos of the pandemic put us in a conflicting state of protagonism / antagonism.
Without definitive narratives to follow, we quickly became reflective and inward looking, re-assessing our own lives and values. Without our daily grind, and the narratives we had in place, we looked at the world from an almost mindful state. We could see other stories building around us, not only in relation to Covid, but wider narratives around gender, diversity, inclusivity and sustainability. In reflecting on our mortality and the value of the time we have, we re-assessed our own stories, our own narratives with the net result that we were prepared to make decisions and life-changes unthinkable prior to the pandemic.
Emerging from Covid into an equally unsettling background of conflict and financial turmoil, our period of self-reflection has, once again, changed our personal brands. Having focussed on our inner-voices and selves, our external voices have become amplified to reflect and demand change. We have shed our passive protagonist status and become more demanding in the face of additional challenges. We are now Editor-inchief of our own stories.
As both customers and consumers, our expectations of ourselves and of others has been reset. We have similar demands to those that we had pre-Covid, but they have since been greatly amplified. As editors, we need to be aware of the profound impact we have on not only our stories, but those of the brands we use and work with.
As editors we are a lot more selective. We’re now empowered to make decisions about the course of the narrative we become involved in. We’re also empowered to completely cut-out the ones we don’t believe in.
We’re more demanding of these stories. Our time is a commodity with increased value and we’re now very particular about where we’re spending or investing it. Our finances are stretched due to global recovery, so quality is non-negotiable and we’re demanding transparency of governance and authenticity of communication.
Customers may think like editors but they still act like humans. Brands, in response, need to deliver sensory experiences that bring joy and happiness and enrich our lives, to make up for the deficit of the last four years.
They need to provide products and services that are highly tailored to our needs and demonstrate human engagement that allows us to build trust in the long term.
Brands need to demonstrate a breadth of narrative that becomes inclusive and encompasses both human and environmental impact, seamlessly delivered with empathy from choice to final delivery.
“The stories they tell need to amplify value, whether human or commercial.”
The pandemic has emboldened us, technology has enabled us. As we stride into the future, the nature of ‘influence’ has irrevocably altered storytelling. In our role as Editors of our own stories, we need to shed the passive protagonist role and proactively engage with the elements shaping our world. We need to boldly ensure that our own aspirations and beliefs become part of the global narrative. The demands we make of brands and the way we interweave our stories with them is within our control, we can make a difference. It is our responsibility to edit out the noise and create focus.
• sensory experiences bringing joy + happiness
• unique products & services
• human engagement
The stories Brands tell should be
• seamless and empathetic
• diverse and inclusive
• valuable, whether human or commercial
• use technology to engage human senses, enhance human emotions and spread human stories - it will never replace them.
• technology will only ever be a tool to aid human creativity efficient development of ideas It will never be original or creative in and of itself.
• AI / VR / AR can only illustrate a story, or commonality of human experience - it can’t generate originality as efficiently as humans can.
Trust your feelings AND...
As work/life balance has fundamentally blurred we need to continue to
• Trust our senses and build empathy
• Find the joy
• Dream and aspire
As omnichannel develops ever-increasing conduits it’s very easy to drown in the white noise
• DON’T lose focus of what’s important in our lives now
• Your time is precious, Be selective: Support the things that are worthy of your time
• Cut out the noise: focus on the things that clearly define your story
• trust your senses to build meaningful experience
for all enquiries please contact
E. j.breaks@therpagroup.com
M. +44 (0) 7967 690 367
t. +44 (0) 1784 256 579
W. therpagroup.com
As an architect with over 30 years’ experience in the retail sector he has seen the retail sector transform exponentially beyond the physical realm into an integrated omnichannel experience.
Within a rapidly evolving retail landscape James has led rpa:group and its partners to educate its clients, providing creative solutions that address customer psychology and the effective application of technology to drive brand attachment. James contributes regularly in the retail design press and speaks at international forums including Euroshop and Retail Design Expositions in London, Koln and Mumbai as well as curating rpa:group’s own annual retail gathering in Amsterdam.