Why do stories move people in ways that facts, features and clever messaging rarely can?

In this episode, Jacob Cass and Matt Davies speak with Park Howell, Emmy Award winning brand strategist, founder of The Business of Story and one of the world’s leading voices on business storytelling. Park explains why story remains one of the most powerful tools in brand building, what separates a memorable narrative from an interesting one and how brands can shift from simply telling stories to becoming truly story driven.

The conversation explores Park’s StoryCycle framework, the commercial value of storytelling and why moving from pitching to proving can create a genuine competitive advantage. They also examine storytelling in the age of AI, including where technology can amplify the creative process, where humans must continue to lead and what new opportunities AI creates for brand strategists. If you want to build a brand people understand, remember and choose to become part of, this episode is for you.

Plus, see Park’s own article breaking this episode down further.

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Transcript

Hello, everybody, and welcome to the latest episode of JUST Branding. We’re going to be tucking into storytelling and particularly thinking about why story still wins in brand building. We’re going to ask this question basically at the outset, why does story still win? As brandbuilders, we spend a huge amount of time talking about positioning, competitors, messaging, visual identities, etc. But we know behind every great brand is a story and a narrative that consumers can choose to be part of and manage well.

That is where the meaning and the value of a brand truly lies. So story is so important for us to wrap our arms around and get to grips with as we manage brands. And today we have the perfect gentleman to tuck into this beautiful subject with us. We’re joined by the one and only Park Howell to help us explore this. For those of you that don’t know Park, he is known mysteriously as the world’s most industrious storyteller. He’s the founder of an amazing podcast where I first came across Park, The Business of Story, an Emmy award-winning brand strategist and host of one of the world’s leading podcasts on storytelling, which I think is also called The Business of Story. Park has shared the stage apparently with Robert Redford, coached leaders on NECA Island, trained with the US Air Force for many years, and so we’re in very good hands. Throughout his 40-plus year career, you don’t look like you’ve had a 40-plus year career, Park just putting it out there.

Glad to hear that.

But throughout that career, he’s helped organizations harness the power of story to build stronger brands, win more business and create deeper connections with their audiences. He has also been exploring, and hopefully we’ll tuck into this, how AI can amplify rather than replace the strategic role of storytelling. Park, welcome to our show.

Matt, thank you so much. Jacob, great to see you. I appreciate being on your program.

I wonder if for those that perhaps haven’t come across you, Park, you could just give us a little sense of, why don’t we start with the story of how you got into storytelling?

Oh, gosh. I got in the advertising branding marketing world, yes, well over 40 years ago, and I ran my own ad agency in Phoenix, Arizona called Park & Co. I ran that for 20 years. One of the things we were always really good at was taking complex messages and making them simple and interesting and compelling to consumers. I think probably my core strength, I come at it from a writer’s strategist standpoint, but I’m really a brander. I mean, people would always come to me and say, look, I got this big idea and I got this company, but nobody knows what we do and how can we do it. Then I say, okay, pump the brakes, take a breath, give me your intel, let’s figure out what is that core brand narrative. That’s really what I’ve done for the 40 years of my advertising career. About 10 years ago now, I weaved away from being an ad agency owner and totally into the business of story, where I now consult, teach, coach and speak on the power of story to leaders around the world. It could be, like you said, one star to four star generals and their staff at the US Air Force to help them be able to communicate their complex messages. To Walmart Canada, I do a whole ton of internal training with them, to still building brand stories for major companies. And yeah, that’s kind of how my life has evolved.

So, Paul, like you’ve obviously had a great career, except why do you keep doing what you’re doing? Like what gets you out of bed in the morning?

Everybody asks me that. Are you retired yet? And I’m like, well, define retirement for me because I’ve not worked for anybody else but myself for 35 years. So if I was to retire, I’d be retiring from myself. And what? I can only play so much golf and build so many birdhouses. Now, I’m still really fascinated by the world of communication and storytelling and how we homo sapiens, we storytelling apes make meaning out of the madness of being human beings. And then how folks like you and the clients that you work with and your listeners and viewers here, how when you become an intentional storyteller, the impact you can have on a person, on a team, on a society is really quite remarkable. And so that’s what keeps me going. I’m just, I still love dabbling in the storytelling world.

Nice. So question, let’s tuck into this subject a little bit more. You mentioned there obviously like stories help to create meaning, etc. So why is it, why is that the case? Like why does a story, for example, move another homo sapien, right? Beyond say like, I don’t know, some facts and some figures or some data.

Well, let’s go way back. Let’s go like 70,000 years back. And let’s go find a cave on the savanna somewhere. And let’s picture a cave mate there. We got to, let’s call him Larry. He’s fairly retarded, he’s hanging out, looking kind of lazy by the fire, warming his hands. And he looks up and in walks his other cave mate, Thog. Thog has got a broken fishing pole and he looks pretty disheveled. And Larry sits there. Just for less. No, yeah, it’s the picture that’s- You gotta defend yourself on that, Jacob.

Not of me hanging out in the savanna.

So Larry, we’ll call him Jacob, actually looks up at Matt, who’s just walked in the door. And Jacob says, Matt, where have you been? And Matt says, well, I was down at river fishing for a cyber tooth tiger for dinner. Jacob goes, uh-huh.

Do you know what, it sounds exactly like Jacob.

I was just thinking the same thing, Matt. The first couple of minutes here, I picked it up. You know?

Keep going, keep going.

So Jacob goes, uh-huh. And then, you know, Matt says, but saber-toothed tigers show up. Jacob goes, oh, what do you do? And Matt finally says, well, I give salmon to tiger. It likes salmon better than Matt. Therefore, I’m back here at fire safe with you. And Jacob goes, aha. So now let’s look at the three grunts that Jacob gave to that little story. Uh-huh. Uh-oh. Uh-huh. Three act story structure, set up, problem resolution. Now stories serve the same purpose today that they did 70,000 years ago between Jacob and Matt in that cave as a learning tool, a meaning making tool. So now that Jacob knows if he ever finds himself out at the river and he’s got himself a salmon and that saber-toothed tiger shows up, he knows what to do for survival. Now, that’s just kind of a fun way to say storytelling is so powerful, even a caveman or woman can do it and they really did to evolve as the most invasive species we’ve ever known. Well, it’s the same thing that we use today in branding and advertising to make sense. Let me ask you this, what’s the first syllable on the word numbers? Num. Num. Numbers mean nothing to our brain unless they’re put in the context of a story so that our brain can picture it, can feel it, can understand it and then it uses those logic driven numbers to be able to support the story that we’re trying to tell. So it hasn’t changed. I like to say that stories are important to our survival as oxygen is to our lungs. It’s where we make meaning out of the madness of being human beings.

So, Park, I’ve got a follow up question on that because storytelling has been used incredibly much more in the past decade than all the previous years. So why all of a sudden in the past decade has storytelling become this big buzzword?

You know, Jacob, that’s a hell of a good question. I first started hearing about story when I was running my agency in 2003. And why I remember that date or that year, I have no idea other than people started really talking about story in our line of work, in advertising, marketing, branding, whatever. And I was talking to our creative director at the time, Luis Medina, and he and I were talking about it. I go, well, duh, I mean, don’t we all do story? And we just had never talked about it. And then I looked at a campaign that we had run that year, this TV campaign. There were two 32nd commercials. The first one polled unbelievably well. I mean, it was, it increased same store sales by 42% the very next month. The second spot in that campaign did not pull at all. I mean nothing, even so much so that the client made us pull it, said, just run the first one all the time. And I’m sorry, we had to spend all that money on the second one. And I looked at it and I did not know why that second one didn’t pull until I started studying story and story structure. I realized that first one was intuitively a very well-structured story. The second one was not, there’s no story structure at all. It was just us being these creative, wonderful brand guys and we loved it, we were going to win awards with it, but it meant nothing to the people that watched it. After I started studying and learning about story, I realized, oh, we all fall into this trap of being intuitive storytellers, as we all homo sapiens storytelling apes are, we’re intuitive. But if we leave it to our intuition, we end up winging it more than winning with it if we become an intentional storyteller, and you do that by truly understanding story frameworks. I’ve got three that I work with, the and but therefore, this three word structure that will blow your mind how powerful it is. The five primal elements of a short story, a story you can tell in under one minute, an anecdotal story that shows or makes your business point for you. And then finally, my larger ten step story cycle system that we use for brand story development, strategy development and long form communication.

Amazing.

Right.

Let’s tuck into those. Let’s tuck into those three things. Come on now. You can’t just drop those. You can’t just drop that and then just move on. We’re going to pause there and put a foot forward.

Where do you want to start?

Well, let’s start with that three step one that you mentioned.

I was hoping you’d say that.

Give us a flavor. Give us a flavor.

Here’s what we’re going to do. Let’s show it in action. All right. I’m going to work with you guys creating an ad, but therefore I’ll first explain what it is and then we are going to build an ad, but therefore live for your audience on your, and it’ll be about your JUST Branding Podcast.

All right.

Let’s go. So, and but therefore, real quick, let me give you the real quick theory. It uses the three forces of story of agreement, contradiction, and consequence that are pattern-seeking, problem-solving, decision-making, buying limbic brain loves because it hand-delivers meaning to it without it having to work for it. Set up problem resolution and but therefore agreement, contradiction, consequence. So, for branders out there, here’s how you start. And I’m looking for a piece of paper because I’m going to write on the back of this as we go through it. Here’s the first question. Story truth number one, you are not the center of your story. Your audience always is. So I want you guys, Matt and Jacob, tell me as specifically as possible who is the audience for this show?

I would say brand builders seeking to get more strategic.

Yeah, that’s pretty good. I was going to go with brand builders as well, but you have to unpack that sometimes. Like what is a brand builder? But depends how deep you want to go, Park.

All right. Well, let’s just start with that for right now. Then we can come back to it. So I wrote down brand builders seeking to get more strategic, to be more strategic. All right. Now I’m going to ask you, and why is that important to them? What’s in it for them to become more strategic as a brand builder?

To become more valuable and move up the value chain.

To who?

To them. It’s more valuable to them, yeah.

But whose value chain will they be moving up? If they become more valuable, if they’re more strategic, then whose value chain?

Whoever they’re working with, their clients. Yeah.

If they work for a company, it could be internal clients, it could be if they’re freelance or they’re working in agency, it could be external clients. So yeah, so I would always say that they’re seeking to be valuable for people. They’re seeking to be of service basically.

Yeah.

Okay, great. And I just wrote down then become more valuable to their clients and colleagues.

Perfect.

Just clients and or colleagues. We’re just going to go high level at this point. That’s our end statement of agreement. We’ve introduced our audience. You are a brand builder who seeks to become more strategic. And if you do, then you will become way more valuable to the clients and the customers, or the clients and the colleagues that you serve.

Yes.

Is that fair enough?

Everybody listening in is nodding along and applauding with excitement.

That’s why we call it a statement of agreement. You don’t start off with the problem, you start off with what the shared vision is for the future. And in doing so, you are hopefully demonstrating to your audience that you understand them and you appreciate what they want and why it’s important to them. All right? Now, let’s pull the rug out from underneath them. But what problem do they currently have and how does that problem make them feel that is keeping them from becoming more strategic?

They don’t have clarity on how to do that. Well, their approach?

Yeah, they might feel a bit lost and confused. Perhaps they’re not sure who or what to listen to, and there’s a lot of noise out there. One other thing to throw into the mix, I think people are a little worried that AI is going to come and eat their breakfast, so that’s what I hear a lot of anyway, they’re worried that that’s a thing. So I don’t know if that is helpful, Park, for where we’re going?

Yeah. No, I can’t, this is like, you guys know this because you work with clients all the time. It’s just downloading, just throwing it out there, and I’m just taking it in. Okay. All right, and I’m just-

This is what live storytelling looks like, folks.

Yes, but you know what?

They tuned in, they didn’t realize this was going to happen. Now they’re on the edge of their seats.

We’re going to do this in under five minutes. All right, so here we go. So we’ve got the end, we’ve got the end statement of agreement, we’ve got the but statement of contradiction. That’s like act two. That’s the problem. If there’s no conflict, you have no story. There you have just identified what the conflict. Now let’s talk about the therefore. What’s the way forward? So therefore, what is your solution? Which I believe your solution is listen to JUST Branding.

Yeah. 100 percent.

Okay. Why listen to JUST Branding?

You’re going to hear from awesome people like Park Howell, basically. That’s where we’re going with that. But no, you’re going to hear insights from knowledgeable experts from across the world.

Well, I can’t even write that fast. All right. How is that going to make them feel?

Jacob, what do you reckon? Ecstatic?

Clearly, clearly.

Do we make people feel ecstatic, Jacob? I think we’d like to think they would. I think I genuinely listening to having what reading some of the feedback, I think people feel that we equip them with interesting insights, access to-

New perspectives.

Yeah, new perspectives. I like that. Tools and practical examples as well, I think for them to use in their work.

All right. So, I got everything I need here. Now, a couple of things there. I asked you first what the problem was and then how it made them feel. When you write these, I want you to flip it. I want you to make them communicate how they feel first and then the problem. So, but you feel confused, frustrated, anxious, whatever it might be. You use the conjunction word because to set up the problem that’s making you feel that way. And Harvard did this amazing study back in 1978 about the power of the word because to get people to do things and the belief is it uses this cause and effect meaning making apparatus in our survival limbic brain. Remember Jacob and Matt at the door, you know, well, I’m back here because I gave Salmon to Tiger and therefore, and anyways, it’s a way to speak to that meaning making machine. So I want a negative emotion right after the but because of this problem. Now you’re really raising the stakes. It’s called find the hurts, you know, because you’re frustrated, amplify the pain because of this problem, therefore heal the wound. And so then after the therefore, I want you to lead with the positive emotion because in storytelling, you want to you want to have as much conflict or contradiction and contrast as the word I’m looking for throughout this ABT. So that and statement of agreement is here’s the perfect world. This is what I really want. The but statement is the exact contrast to that, but you don’t have it because of this problem. And then the therefore is imagine how you’re going to feel when you get it. So with all that in mind, let’s just read through real quick what I have. And you’re going to speak directly to your audience. So you’re going to do the pronoun shift. You’re not going to just generally say brand builders. You’re going to say you are a committed brand builder seeking to get more strategic in all you do. And if you could find the insights and the people that have been there before, then you can grow and become more valuable in your brand