When you think about Lucky Charms, the first thing that comes to mind isn’t “sugar, modified corn starch, corn syrup, dextrose, gelatin, calcium carbonate, Yellow 5 & 6, Blue 1, and Red 40.” Of course it isn’t. The first thing you think of when you think about this particular breakfast cereal is marshmallows or a spunky leprechaun narrowly escaping pursuant kids. Why? Because the story Lucky Charms has written about dextrose and calcium carbonate is “marshmallows.” It takes the sum of its parts (at least the parts of its most popular parts) and weaves them into something greater. Furthermore, these marshmallows come into play in the adventures of Lucky the Leprechaun, also known as Sir Charles. This story has been told in variations since 1964, and I dare say that Lucky Charms is the most popular marshmallow-centric breakfast of all time. In short, that’s the power of storytelling in marketing.
What if General Mills had chosen to read aloud the ingredients that go into their sugary cereals? They could even show pictures of the hearts, stars, and horseshoes in Powerpoint fashion as a voice dully reads “Yellow 5 & 6.” You can imagine that it wouldn’t do much for sales. Unfortunately, too many advertisers seem to believe that listing products, service, or even company history is sufficient to attract your attention. Effective marketing strategy can’t rely on the meat and bones of the product or service alone, there must be some story to engage the consumer. In fact, there is a very basic human need for storytelling in marketing.
It turns out, our brains can’t tell the difference between real-life events and events we read or hear about. What’s more, in a Spanish study, scientists found that the primary olfactory context lit up in subjects who read sensory words like “perfume” or “coffee,” just as if they were actually sensing these scents.
For example, if you were watching and listening to that Powerpoint presentation about Lucky Charms, certain parts of the brain called the Broca’s and Wernicke’s areas would be activated. These areas are in the language processing parts of the brain, where you decode words into meaning. That’s it. However, if that same information is put into story form, your brain will begin to forge actual physical connections with the information. According to the research in Spain, “Metaphors like ‘The singer had a velvet voice’ and ‘He had leathery hands’ roused the sensory cortex… Then, the pains of the participants were scanned as they read sentences like ‘John grasped the object’ and Pablo kicked the ball.’ The scans revealed activity in the motor cortex, which coordinates the body’s movements.”
So, our brains are wired for storytelling. But more importantly (at least when it comes to marketing strategy), Google is wired for storytelling. Google Panda 4.2, Google’s ranking algorithm released July 18, 2015, determines that a site is of higher quality if the content is written in a conversational, narrative way. That content needs to be original, too. Duplicate content can bog down otherwise strong sites. That’s why it’s important to have quality storytelling in marketing campaigns. Even if your brand is scattered across the internet on a billion different sites, it could do less for search ranking results than one quality post.
The moral of the story is, in your quest to stuff keywords into your copy or sling your name around the inter-webs to optimize your search results, it may be a good idea to remember SEO as Storytelling Excellence Overall.