Balloons and Memories and USP's

One of the many questions I get asked is what makes good story? 

The first thing to say is that stories do not need to be formalised.  I’m passionate about the art and performance of stories but that is only a part of it. I am in awe of the masters of performance storytelling and I have learnt more from them than any text book, seminar or experiment. TED and The Moth are my top two most visited sites.

The storytelling we use day in, day out, is not about having all skills in the stage craft tools, using different voices or postures, timing and silence. That is storytelling as a performance. The day to day communications, the staff meeting, the school run, the conversation on the way to the coffee machine. That is where the magic of storytelling happens and is most effective.

Then they really work best when you can throw in an 'ah-ha' moment, the twist, the shift in perspective, the 'so you were thinking that and then this different thing happens'. The twist in the tail.

Memory loves tags, unique tags. and the more unique the better. OK, I know,... more unique  is redundant but I used it for effect.  You can do that in storytelling :Grammar is a guide to be ignored at will because it is a tool that can be used to show a difference in the normal pattern that wakes brain up. If it sees a famiilar pattern it just files this away in the massive folder or miscellaneous other stuff which isn't that unusual. The shed that is our head.

But if you can take a pattern, and then can tag it with something that isn't that easy to file away in the business as usual bucket then it is far easier for the mind to find it, recall and then far easier to bring to the fore when making decisions.

Our brains function by making sense of the mass of millions of bytes of stimulation it receives everyday and then putting it away, filtering it and then some filed away for later use, and the first thing its does is it asks the question. Is it is of any use. It may not be at the moment but it may be of use later on.... so it gets put away in the, not sure what that means but its may be of help later on.

It's quite easy to prove this and I'm sure you can come up with different examples in a heartbeat or less. 

Here is just one example.

I was driving down a local street the other day, passing a second hand car lot I would normally just trundle on by as queued at the rush hour traffic lights. Outside they had tied lots of bright balloons , yells and sky blues, which certainly coloured up the usual rows of  bonnets and price stickers. Obviously the balloons are not going to instantly persuade me into thinking ‘Gosh they have balloons, I must go in and buy a car and right away;’  No,  that doesn't make sense, after all we are grown ups and not that impressionable…. What the balloons  will do is remind us when I eventually do think I need to buy a car. One of the images that will spring into my brain, whether we like it or not, is the not every car lot we have passed in our lifetime but the one with the clunkers who had balloons.  That  is all the balloons are,  a mental tag. I may actually want brand new car but at least I've thought about them and it makes me think.

(The choice of colours are a brilliant choice by the way. They are the most visible colour combination from a distance, that is why the emergency services  use them. First pioneered in Sweden in the sixties, and we have swathed over form the rage shoes we used to have...But if they had thrown in a few some red balloons too the power of recall would be several times more effective,... ask me why??? and why this is massively important to my web site and business card.) 

The brain can be helped even more by constructing a simple story tag around the recollection imagery around the balloons. For example, In my world the balloons make me think that it must be 'one of the car’s birthdays.' Now try forgetting that car lot!

The point is that if there is something that disrupts the pattern, especially something that would not threaten or make us feel anxious, then that small set of memories  can have a profound effect or how we make our decisions and how we feel about anything at all. We haven't even started thinking about whether to buy a German or British car yet We are remembering the used car lot with the clunkers!!

The twist is what gets remembered and gets the memory higher up the recall list. Some call this The USP in marketing… I call it storytelling. The difference is that storytelling is all about authenticity and truth. You cant' invent or make up good stories..you just need to know how to harvest them and then put them in the right bin them for re-cycling.