...or everything I know about corporate storytelling I learned from Dungeons & Dragons.
As brand storytellers we're trying to engage consumers and convince them to buy our products. Yes, that's the bottom line goal. The challenge (and most often, failure) of brand storytelling is that we rely on flash, but not on resonance. Too often brand storytellers attempt to extol the virtues of their product - the HERO of their story - as an attempt to attract buyers. It's not about your product. As any good salesperson will tell you, it's NEVER about your product. It's about what the product means to the buyer. And that is exactly what I learned from Dungeons & Dragons.
The central premise of Western narrative is: there are heroes and villains. While there are some who prefer to play the villain, the majority see some part of themselves - real or aspirational - in the hero. There is the struggle, the flaws and the ultimate triumph, and all of those are aspects of narrative that bring us along for the ride.
This is also the central premise of pretty much every game of Dungeons & Dragons, a kind of storytelling game I played in my youth, with pencils, paper and dice, in which we played the roles of mighty adventurers and battled fierce creatures in order to win exotic treasures. We each took turns as the Dungeon Master (DM), the person who was part host, part narrator, part moderator and arbitrator. The job of the DM was to provide a series of challenges for the players and keep it interesting by wrapping it in a good story. If you were a good enough DM, players would come back week after week anticipating what new surprises were in store. One of my favorite DM's back then was a gangly film studies student named Jeff Gomez, who would wind up becoming a successful producer and pioneer of transmedia storytelling as CEO of Starlight Runner Entertainment. He recently posted this advice for a young woman who asked him what went into being a great DM:
"Think about something important you want to say and lay that in as a driving theme in the story you tell, whether or not you are using an established module [store-bought playset]. Talk to your players in the days leading up to the first game. Learn the aspirations and fantasies they'd like to express and experience through their characters, and script your game sessions so that each one of your players is challenged and rewarded for grappling with them. Encounters and journeys are metaphors; non-player characters, even villains have memories, desires and inner lives. Know your story world well, because most of all this is as much about how this world illuminates your players as it is about how it is an expression of who you are."
In other words, yes it's about your company or your brand, but more importantly (especially in this day and age) it's even more about the players. The big mistake companies make when trying to tell stories is they think their brand is the hero, but really, the customer is the hero.
You have to do the extra work of drawing a powerful narrative link between what your customers genuinely yearn to be, and how your product or service can assist them on their heroic journey toward being it. Through careful listening, you can find a way to entwine these separate threads: hero and sword, champion and sage. Good (often metaphoric) storytelling takes care of the rest, and you'll know you've done well when you've successfully woven your prospects and customers into an ongoing shared narrative, where all of you leave "the game" feeling fully expressed and better for having played. Nothing can be more validating!