information you write it very clean. I’m very lucky to get this information from you.

William, can I also get a copy of the full paper?

Thanks!

A

Ultimately I think we have to consider a few factors here, all of which suggest to me there is a more subtle and nuanced answer out there than ‘this is right’ or ‘this is wrong’…

1. Not all ‘storytelling’ is complex, multi-platform or even fiction, which I think may be your starting point when you talk about ‘layers to wade through’. See my earlier comment above to Jeremy for more on this. It can be an incredibly simple thing.

2. A short blogpost from earlier this month which is relevant here – http://bit.ly/12rFlI – talks compellingly about participative branding: how brands energise and contribute to conversations with interesting stories and experiences. If brands aren’t there, participating, they lose out (‘stop contributing and you’re dead’). Nor is this an old school, one way street: ‘the best brands invite people in to help create an evolving brand story’. In short, the best brand stories are fueled and curated, but only so that they can be remixed, retold and owned by others.

3. There’s is a danger we just add unnecessarily to the noise on the web if we’re not careful. But that’s as likely, if not more likely, to come from millions of voices all clamouring to be heard, as it is from brands trying to share their story. And hence the question still arises: how does anyone cut through this to sell a product in the first place? Not for nothing is getting noticed and standing out still marketing’s equivalent of first base (the latin word ‘advertere’ means to pay attention to, if I’ve remembered that right). Ultra personalised and targeted comms is of course part of the answer and you may argue that if a product is good enough it will get talked about, right? Unfortunately that is easier said than done. Instead, I think it’s beholden upon us to find new, compelling ways to communicate what a brand stands for and hence why it should be chosen. Brands that talk with their audiences in an open & direct manner (Innocent, Starbucks, Zappos are the most famous examples) still make sure they weave amazing stories into the dialogue about them and around them.

4. Finally, without question there’s a time and place for facts, rational reasons and zero wastage, I could not agree more. Equally, there are times when we want to be inspired or even moved before we make a choice. Perhaps that comes from a recommendation from someone we trust, but I wouldn’t be too surprised if – for that recommendation to be truly memorable – it involved, you guessed it, a story.

A traditional story-based brand was and is a product of a very unique era, one dominated by limited one-way media and populated with a passive consumer. Umair Haque http://www.bubblegeneration.com says this kind of branding only made sense for the economics of an industrial era when “interaction was expensive – so information about the expected benefits of consumption had to be squeezed into slogans, characters, and logos, which were then compressed into thirty-second TV ads and radio spots.”

So, if the conditions that surrounded marketing when the story-based brand emerged have now been completely uprooted shouldn’t we at least be asking if this is still the most efficient way of selling our client’s product or service? I can’t speak for clients but if I were one and I had a product to sell I wouldn’t want my agency folk fussing over storytelling, I’d want them obsessing over the new technologies, products or services on the web that are eating away at my profits, helping my competition sell more products and develop better products than me.

While I agree the web is really great at telling stories, if you’re in the game of storytelling, but it’s also a really efficient marketplace that now favours the consumer. The social web lets consumers find what they want faster than ever before, let’s them check if it’s a product or company they can trust and then let’s them buy it with one fail click. The web is effectively taking over the role of the brand in consumer’s lives.

In Umair Haque’s words “when interaction is cheap, the very economic rationale for orthodox brands actually begins to implode: the information about expected costs and benefits doesn’t have to be compressed into logos, slogans, ad-spots or column-inches – instead, consumers can debate and discuss expected costs and benefits in incredibly rich detail.”

I’m not saying we should stop thinking about brands as storytellers, but when we live in age of stripped back, authentic, peer-to-peer communication should we really be thinking about creating more layers of story for people to wade through. Marketing’s original purpose was to sell the client’s product, not to create more marketing.