”Brands need to keep investing in connecting emotionally.”
BOYD COYNER, German born, American raised, Dutch citizen was behind many appealing brand stories that you might have seen. He worked for major brands like Adidas, Nike, Volvo, G-Star, C&A and others. The website of his current company Meanwhile says: “We leverage strategic insight and creativity to unlock brand potential.” We asked Boyd 5 questions.
What is it what you do for your clients?
We help brands express what they stand for, in an meaningful manner. It all starts in a verbal context since I am a writer - but also a multimedia creator. When you have an articulation, the expression of the brand, it can express itself better. I help brands to find out what they stand for. We want to have something that is emotionally relevant, mostly from a customer-centric point of view.
Often, we work for brands that have a positioning or tagline that is traditional in nature. Companies tend to talk about their product, how good it is. Their point of view is centered in the product. But that’s not what triggers people anymore. Take the Portugese beer brewery called Superbock. They had an outdated positioning, talking about ‘authentic flavour’, just the product.
There was a low-end competitor that suddenly popped up next to them in the market, after it was bought by Heineken and started to do upscale marketing. We went there, talked to everybody from CEO to Head of Research. What makes the brand tick? What makes it unique, what’s its history?
We walked through the brewery, talked to customers. We did brand archeology. Then we took out the part that we considered to be the most relevant to consumers. It was all about ‘taking friendship for real’.
Every beer brand is talking about friendship, so we said, just a slogan alone is not moving your brand. We will also present a storytelling platform to allow you bring your position to life, move your customers. It’s not just storytelling, it is story doing or active storytelling. That is what brands need to do today.
Brands should behave in line with their story: they should do their story. With superbock we said: take friendship for real, take it seriously. Do something that shows you care. So we created mobile bars. A bus with a bar, with camera’s to create content. We targeted at age 30-35, the busy people with jobs and kids, and with friendships squeezed out of their agenda’s.
We made the brand say: your friendships are disappearing but don’t forget about your friends. We can help. Have our bus drive to this friend that never has time anymore to go out, and pick him up. So we connected friends again.
We als convinced the brewery to create a “Friendship Fund”. On every beer sold a contribution to the fund is made. Money used on later date to celebrate friendship. For example, Superbock gives away tickets for music festivals, but only to groups of friends that show up together at the gates of the festival grounds. Now, the brand is doing the story about friendship in stead of just telling it, and everybody believes it.
Your work, like the European Volvo campaign introducing the C70, has always been focussed on storytelling. Why do you think it is such a powerful tool?
Storytelling is the oldest form of sharing information: All over the world people share narratives that appeal to a deep emotional level. Those stories, often about heroes, are universal. Social circles are like camp fires, where we share with friends, where we pass stories on.
The digital revolution changed the world completely. Now we carry our social circle everywhere we go to. For instance, just right into shops. Footsteps in retail stores went down 50% but people that go in buy twice as much. They know what they want, they share what they like with friends before they buy.
Women make selfies in the fitting room and post them on Facebook, waiting for likes from friends. So it is useless these days for a fashion store to show a combination and just tell the customer to buy it. In order to engage with the customer the store should connect emotionally, for instance to inspire, and to show it understands the needs in daily life of the buyer. The way to do that is to tell stories that show they really get it.
Storytelling has always been an important part of communication. What has changed, in the eyes of brand owners, that it has gotten the hype-like focus that it has right now?
The sale used to be the end of the marketing process, brands just invested in marketing and advertising and waited for the sale to come. Once there, they could sit back. But in these days, the sale is just the beginning. The process never ends anymore.
Once you buy something, you become part of a community. Do you fit in, do you want to be seen there, do you want to stay? Brands need to make sure that they keep engaging the customer. That’s why storytelling is so important now. Brands need to keep investing in connecting emotionally.
What makes good storytelling? Can you give us some essentials?
It is not just telling some story anymore. Once you found the story that fits your brand best, you need to do it. You must bring your story to life. Show that you are what your story claims. That is how you bring relevance to your brand in the digital age. You can like a beer on Facebook, but you cannot drink a beer with friends on social media. That’s why we made Superbock drink beers in real life with friends, by having their bus drive to customers and pickup their friends to celebrate their beer together.
I was a global creative director with Nike at advertising agency Wieden & Kennedy. Somewhere in the past decade things were changing dramatically for them. Nike experienced that just spending millions in telling customers their brand was cool didn’t work anymore. Now consumers say: we are holding you honest to your claim. You cannot tell us if you are cool, we tell you.
I told Nike: you don’t buy cool anymore. You have to act it. So we designed programs for them with engagement, were Nike offered cool things to their customers that had already bought something from them. They made them feel special so they started saying: cool! It is about the right content in your storytelling that emotionally connects. That responds to the customers question: what’s in it for me if I join?
The next thing is product storytelling. Too often, storytelling is not adding emotional value to the life of customers. If you tell customers: here is your life, we understand, and here is how our product fits into it, you might connect emotionally with them. That’s what we did with C&A.
We told stories to moms with young kids, about their busy lives. The early mornings they spend on their knees, preparing their kids for school. A few ours later they are in their office and need to look sharp. We showed them their lives as they knew it. For such a life, a tight haute couture dress is of no use, so that story featured easy to wear dresses that also looked sharp. Could you give us an example of a storytelling practice that rocked your world?
I just came across this one that really rocked me, so a very recent one. Look at this: Burger King is proposing a peace deal with its biggest enemy McDonalds. In order to celebrate the upcoming world Peace Day, it is creating the McWhopper. Look how they tell that story on the special website. A brilliant gimmick and a great story. Just imagine: how is McDonalds going to respond to that?