Brain Food

Stories are powerful.

They are among the engines of culture and we have relied on sharing them for millennia as part of our human socio-cultural and spiritual development. Stories are also crucial to our empathic development, as well as providing context to our lives.

The best stories are easy to remember because they paint pictures in our minds that tap into our deep feelings. Because they often create emotional responses and evoke strong visualizations, they play into our long history of communicating through pictures. In many ways, stories are the framework by which we remember things. 

All great retailers are also great storytellers. They understand their brand identities and present them to customers in ways that are understandable as discrete narratives. In the retail world, brand stories are told overtly through sales associate and customer interactions; and advertising, marketing, in-store communications, visual merchandising, architecture; and through the very nature of the products retailers sell.

The core components to storytelling shape the message that’s conveyed to shoppers, and now, into the extended customer journey by way of handheld and other digital devices. While the core components of good storytelling may be the same as they have been for years, the way they’re being told across various platforms is rapidly changing.

While reading, listening to or watching stories unfold on screen, we develop elaborate mental representations of the situations described in the text, lyrics or scenes. Researchers have gathered evidence through fMRI scans of individuals reading narratives that “the neural responses to particular types of changes in the stories occurred in the vicinity of regions that increase in activity when viewing similar changes, or when carrying out similar activities in the real world.” (See: Reading Stories Activates Neural Representations of Visual and Motor Experiences, Nicole K. Speer, Jeremy R. Reynolds, Khena M. Swallow and M. Zacks, Psychological Science, Volume 20 – No.8, 2009).

In other words, as subjects read about characters in a story, their brains react in a manner that is similar to them personally experiencing those characters’ situations. Studies by Brian Pulvermüller (See: Pulvermüller F. Brain Mechanisms Linking Language and Action. Nature Reviews Neuroscience. 2005;6:576–582) have demonstrated that brain regions involved in reading action words (verbs) are some of the same regions involved in performing analogous actions in the real world. So, if you read the word “throw” or “catch,” brain regions light up in fMRI scans that are activated when moving one’s arm or hands.

One key takeaway from the fMRI research, is that our brains react to words as if we’re experiencing the story in the real world. In many cases a simple message, even a single word, can tell a story and activate feelings within a customer. This suggests that brand stories don’t have to be long and elaborate.

Stories quickly influence customer behavior by getting to the heart of our emotional beings and activating our brains. And when communicating with a generation which has created an emotional shorthand of smiley faces and text-based acronyms, brand messages that are simple and emotional might prove more effective, especially upon those who are primed for impatience through the immediacy of the Internet.

Adding emotion to a storyline doesn’t just tug on our heartstrings, it actually activates areas of the brain that make customers want to be a part of the narrative. At its best, great brand storytelling gets customers to care about the “cause” and makes them want to support it. When shoppers make a brand’s story part of their everyday lives, they become co-authors in its narrative; they become part of that brand, actors in the play, each one delivering roles that align with their own lives while following a plot established by the retailer.

Understanding the whole story of a brand is an integrative exercise that requires understanding facts and figures along with feelings and fantasies.

“Humans are not ideally set up to understand logic; they’re ideally set up to understand stories,” says cognitive scientist Roger C. Schank. Telling a brand’s story through a sea of price-point signs may get customers “emotional” about getting a good deal, but it doesn’t activate images in the customers’ mind’s eye in the way that rich lifestyle graphics, well-crafted visual merchandising or animated brand ambassadors do when they interact with customers face-to-face.

When customers experience a store, it's important to understand that what they see, hear and read is always triggering memories of their previous experiences. These memories and their associated feelings profoundly influence how a customer interacts in a retail environment.

David Kepron is the creative director of Little’s Brand Experience Studio and author of “Retail (r)Evolution: Why Creating Right-Brain Stores will Shape the Future of Shopping in a Digitally Driven World,” published by ST Media Group Intl. and available online from ST Books. His retail design work focuses on the creation of relevant shopping experiences at the intersection of architecture, sociology, neuroscience and emerging digital technologies. @davidkepron; www.retail-r-evolution.com; www.littleonline.com