This is not a post about Brexit; this is about conversations. Storytelling rose in the 80’s as a key marketing tool – phenomena like the Nescafe “Gold Blend” adverts demonstrated how the ability to tell a story could convincingly engage consumers en masse. Truth be told, this was nothing new – the “soap opera” is so-called because those ongoing serial dramas used to be sponsored by soap manufacturers. But, the key insight by the storytellers was that creating a story around a message you wanted to communicate (rather than simply being associated to or referenced by the story) was very powerful.

Now, Nescafe coffee had only a tangential bit-part within their famed serial adverts, and indeed broadcasting on television is a remarkably expensive way of telling a story – so in fact, the technique didn’t really start to take off until the early 2000s, with the advent of the internet. Of course, big names continued to tell stories in the way they had – Guiness being the more modern exemplar – but now smaller organisations could do it; they felt it built relationships with their consumers.

There is a lot to be said about discerning what is storytelling and what isn’t. Critically, a story ought to have an arc – a beginning, middle and end at least – but at a deeper level ought to have a structure which creates emotional engagement. Shakespeare was a master of the five-act structure, and most blockbuster movies to this day retain a very similar make-up. Advertisements alone do not lend themselves to that level of sophistication, but people started applying storytelling in many different areas of business – although seen as a marketing tool, it quickly leaked into sales, the boardroom, investment decks and beyond.

Many people get benefit from story-thinking without necessarily having a huge amount of structure. The process of thinking editorially about their message, and trying to frame that in the form of a story is difficult and restricting. In a similar way to writing a Tweet, the added restrictions make you think carefully about what you want to say, and it turns out these restrictions actually help rather than hinder – a message has to be much more focussed. However, those restrictions (while helpful) are not the power of storytelling – more the power of subediting / thinking (which, is seems, it less common than you’d think).

People have said before me that storytelling is dying – Berkowitz’s piece on becoming storymakers rather than tellers is well-cited. It’s a very marketing-oriented perspective, and there’s lots to agree with, but I think it’s dead wrong for digital-native organisations.

Politics is an awful lot like marketing and product development in some key ways; in many ways, it actually resembles the market before software-as-a-service:

• highly transactional nature (votes instead of money)
• very seasonal sales periods, often years between sales
• competitive marketplace for a commodity product
• repeat customers very valuable, but profit function dependent on making new sales on the current product line

Not just that, but crucial is the engagement of the “customer” (the voter) in an ongoing fashion, to ensure that the party is developing policies that they believe will be voted for. Interestingly, in blind tests, the Liberal Democrat and Green policies rate very highly – so we can see that while the product is important, market positioning is critical to ensure customers have a specific formed belief about your product.

Within continuous delivery thinking, the digital organisation is concerned primarily with conversations to drive the brand rather than positional or story-oriented marketing. However, what was particularly interesting with the Brexit debate: this conversational engagement was writ large across the whole leave campaign.

Things we can note about the campaign:

• meaningful engagement on social platforms like Facebook and Twitter. Of course, campaigns have done this before (Corbyn would be another example), but while others have been successful at deploying their message, Leave were highly successful in modifying their conversations quickly
• a stunningly short period of campaigning. Who knows why this happened: the Scottish referendum on independence was over a period of 18 months. The UK Brexit debate was complete in 4. There was no way a campaign could hammer home messages; each thing they said had to be well-chosen and timely
• absolute control over the conversation. While Leave conversed freely with their own supporters, they meaningfully achieve air superiority in terms of the conversation in the debate. Their messages were the ones discussed; they created the national conversation. People are shocked by how “untrue” many of their statements were: but people can recall them readily. I doubt many could recall anything Remain said other than vague threats about the economy.

The speed of the conversation here was crucial. They adapted in a truly agile fashion, and were able to execute their OODA loop significantly more quickly. In the end, it was a tight contest, but it really should not have been.

Storytelling is a blunt instrument in comparison. It’s unresponsive, it’s broadcast, and it’s not digital native. Its time is up.