Building Trust through Storytelling w/ Park Howell | builders podcast

0:00Here's the shift I want you to make. You will never convince anyone with your logic, with your reason, with your data, with your numbers until you place them in the context of a story.

0:20In today's podcast is a storytelling masterclass with Park Howell. He's from the aptly named Business of Story. And in short, our brains are wired to make buying decisions based on emotions that can be stoked by telling the right story. We'll discuss how to do it right now.

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1:54Hi, Park. How are you? Thanks for being on the podcast today. Hey, John. Well, thanks for having me. And I understand you're up in the Seattle area, near and dear to my heart. I was raised and grown up there, but I've moved my way down to Arizona. I've been down here, gosh, about 35 years. So good to talk to us Seattle. Yeah. Well, although I didn't grow up in Seattle now, having been here 25 years, I can call myself a Seattleite, not a transplant anymore. And we were talking before the pod, you grew up in a really gorgeous area right outside of Seattle. My tennis team is playing your hometown's tennis team on Sunday.

2:34And we're probably going to get killed, as I was saying. They're a great team. That would be the Woodinville hometown team, right? Exactly. Exactly. So we're talking today about storytelling and how it can grow sales and business. And before we get into the process by which you do that or once you do it, what's your origin story? What's the storytelling behind your business and your brand, the business story? Yeah, well, gosh, it did all start up there in Woodville, Washington. I went to Washington State University and I graduated with two degrees, one in music, composition and theory, because as a little kid, I started playing the piano and I just wrote song after song after song.

3:18And I thought, man, this is great. But I also figured, John, I probably wasn't going to make much money as a composer. So I also got a degree in journalism, public relations, advertising. And really my years, almost four decades worth now, has been in the advertising, branding, marketing world. 20 of those years, two decades here in Phoenix, Arizona, where I ran my own agency called Park & Co. And had that. It was a traditional ad agency. Started in 1995. We did TV, radio, print, outdoor, direct mail, PR, that kind of thing. And, you know, storytelling was a big part of it, although we weren't intentionally thinking about stories.

3:59We were just intuitively doing it. Right. And then about halfway through that early 2000s, of course, the internet, the interwebs come along and disrupted everything. And we started really trying to find an answer of how do you stand out in this very noisy world? And as I would tell my clients, I said, you know, it used to be that you as the brand own the influence of mass media through your media buys. But now the masses have become the media and they own your story, my story, everyone's story. And what is maybe worse or trickier is there is so much noise out there that the old way of branding and marketing like we used to do it back in the day just wasn't working.

4:43So I went in search of an answer. And this was along about 2005. The word story and storytelling just started bubbling up. And I was like, well, duh, this is what everybody does. And then I realized, well, we don't always do it. We will lean into it, but we won't be intentional about it. And so I was lucky. Our middle child, our son Parker, was going to film school at Chapman University. When was it? 2006, graduated 2010, spent 12 years in Hollywood specializing in virtual reality and what he calls mixed reality filmmaking. He has since moved on to Austin, Texas, the conversions of technology and filmmaking, and he's killing it out there with it.

5:29But I tell you all that because when he first started going to film school there, and I was really struggling with how do you make this whole digital landscape work? I said, Parker, send me your books and your recorded lectures when you're done with them since I'm paying for them because I want to know what does Hollywood know about storytelling that we should probably be paying attention to in the sales and marketing and advertising world. And that's where I first found the hero's journey, Joseph Campbell's 12 to 17 steps, Blake Snyder's 15 beats to story, boiled that down to these five primal elements of a short story for big impact, and even boiled that down now to what we teach.

6:13And that is the three words of the and, but therefore. We call it the ABT framework. And we teach sales and marketing team, branding companies, anybody and everybody that wants to have their messages land right the first time, every time using the three forces of story of agreement, contradiction, and consequence as captured in the ABT, that's where it all begins. Now I'll take a breath. I love it. A little dose of Hollywood, some family influence, your own experience, experience creating a formula and an acronym, ABT. I wanted to ask you about that. What's the best way to go through it? What does the A stand for?

6:53Yeah. And I'll tell you, John, this stuff has been around since the beginning of time. So I've not invented anything. I've worked with a number of really smart people that have revealed a lot of different kinds of story frameworks to me, and I've tried all of them. And I have found this three-act structure of ANBUT, therefore, which I learned real quick from a friend of mine now, a great friend of mine now, Dr. Randy Olson. I learned it in 2013 in his second book. Now, Randy is a former Harvard PhD evolutionary biologist, so he understands evolution. But he also gave up tenure in his mid-30s, went to USC film school, graduated, produced three documentaries on climate change and global warming.

7:40But really, his body of work has been about teaching scientists and academia how to take their complex messages and simplify them using the frameworks he learned in Hollywood, all starting with the and, but, therefore. So what that is, you're right, and is a statement of agreement, but is a statement of contradiction. Therefore, is a statement of consequence. Agreement, contradiction, consequence. Why that works, so think about it as act one, act two, act three. Why that works is our primal, subconscious, pattern-seeking, problem-solving, decision-making, buying limbic brain loves to be fed information in this structure, this basic story structure of setup, problem resolution.

8:31When you're in sales and marketing, you're building a business or doing whatever, you are always solving a problem for someone. So what the ABT does is enables you to articulate precisely what that problem is your audience, your prospect or customer is suffering through and therefore how you are there to help them fix it. It does make sense. And as I was marinating and preparing for our conversation, thinking about stories, I was thinking about the ones that I'm exposed to a lot. I go to Whole Foods. I turn around the packaging on something organic. And I'm sort of told how I'm going to change my life.

9:18by eating this thing that's really good for me. I guess the point of that is certain brands like a lifestyle brand, a travel brand, a food brand, I kind of connect with immediately why a story matters. How about for a more, I don't have a better word for it, a more pedestrian brand like a credit card or a credit card processing terminal or all of the widgets that a B2B company or a more pedestrian B2C company is they're trying to grow their company. How, how does the story still relate in that context and how? Well, sure. So what do they all have in common? Let's, let's take, say you've got a real sexy product like Apple and then get away with all kinds of cool storytelling.

10:08And then you got, say a mom and pop HVAC company out of Tucson, Arizona. Okay. I love that example. Yep. All right. What do those two brands have in common? You're asking me. Okay. So they have... I'm good at the hot seat. What do those two brands have in common? Well, they both have a product they want to sell. They're both trying to grow their business. They both want to connect with people. I don't know. I'm searching for an answer. Right there. That's the closest one you're getting to. What do they both have in common is they're both trying to engage a homo sapien or another way of saying it, a storytelling ape.

10:52That's what we are. Yoval Harari's fascinating book called Sapiens, highly, highly recommended. Oh, I read that. Great book. Yeah. Isn't that great? He said it the best in there to me is we are storytelling animals. We're storytelling apes. We are the only beings that we know of in our universe that think, plan, organize, and act in story, right? So for instance, if you are selling anything, you are trying to get your audience to listen to and believe a fictional story because you haven't made it true yet. You're asking them to buy into this fiction as how their life can be better tomorrow when you solve this specific problem for them.

11:41And then you as the brand, business owner, whatever, your job is to deliver on that promise, turn that fiction into fact. But they are playing off of what is the outcome? What does this actually mean in my life? So you might be selling an Apple iPhone, really sexy. They can do all kinds of stuff. Or a two-ton HVAC unit for my grocery store. you you've got to connect with that prospect using story to demonstrate the outcome you are going to create in their life and that goes to story truth number one is your stories are not about what you make but what you make happen you never see apple really talking about other than they were so stupid i think in this last rollout of the ipad and how thin it is and i don't know if you've seen the firestorm they created with the ad that they ran by smashing all of this creativity and musical instruments into this iPhone.

12:40And they're selling it on its thinness, kind of like, who cares? Is there really nothing else? It's about what do you make happen? So your stories are not about what you make, but what you make happen in my life. So let's jump over to the HVAC company. You're selling a 210 HVAC unit. It's a commodity. I can buy that all over the place, lots of different vendors. Why should I buy from you? What is your service going to do? How are you going to increase my confidence that I can survive a 120 degree day down here in Tucson? What is the outcome? Now, there is no bullet point list of facts and features and functions with a little bit of benefits sprinkled in that is going to communicate to that homo sapien storytelling ape sitting across from you, watching your digital ad or your TV commercial, it's not going to connect unless you use the setup problem resolution story dynamic told from your prospect's point of view.

13:39And so when you're talking about the bullets don't work, I think what I'm hearing is oftentimes, you know, I'm in a marketing meeting or I'm the receiver of a deck, PowerPoint presentation trying to sell me something as a CMO. And it's like, it's cheaper, it's faster, it's AI powered. Talking about sort of features instead of what it's going to do for me. That's our default because we get so excited about what we've created and it may be better than anything else in the market. And we want to just pound our chest and show the world, look at how magnificent this is. And everyone goes, who cares?

14:25What does it do for me? How is my life going to be better tomorrow because I bought this? And so one thing, here's another thing to think about. Most people, especially in the B2B world, will lead with logic and reason. Logic and reason does not sell. Emotion sells. In fact, The very famous American social psychologist, Jonathan Haidt, said one of my favorite lines of all time. He says, our minds are story processors, not logic processors. Now, let's connect that to Hollywood. Fifteen years ago, I was sitting in Robert McKee's famous three-day story conference, story seminar at the LAX Sheridan.

15:08And Robert McKee, for those of you that don't know, is this absolute legendary storytelling screenwriting coach and story consultant. And he has these famous lectures that he does all around the world. Well, he was sitting there one day and I went. There was 300 of us in the room. I would say 290 of us or more were really about screenwriting, becoming that next Academy Award winning screenwriter. And then there was a handful of us, maybe seven of us. that weren't in Hollywood. We were in sales and marketing and trying to understand what does Hollywood know that we could use. He says, he goes, and he's talking now, not to us marketers, but to that audience of screenwriters.

15:51He says, you have to understand your audience in a God-like way so that when you are telling them, you are showing them their story, they become an active participant in it. And then he said, make no mistake, our conscious mind is simply the PR department for our subconscious limbic mind, where all of our real buying decisions are being made. That was something that hit me upside the head so hard, John, because I'm like, here's a dude, he's not even talking to sales and marketing people. And yet, he's showing these screenwriters how they can sell the audience on the premise of their movie and their overall production by playing to what's happening in the interior, our survival mechanism of the limbic brain.

16:39We can learn a ton from that in the sales and marketing world because we buy with our limbic brain and then we justify that purchase with our conscious, our neocortex, our conscious brain. It's so interesting to hear you talk about this. So I'm thinking back to the HVAC example where where they're trying to, the owners, the mom and pop owners are trying to understand their audience. And maybe they're thinking about a story and the story is like, sort of like, we keep you cool, you know, no matter what. And how, how do they, how would you recommend that they try to understand, like, like, what about that is connecting?

17:17You know, do people feel like, yeah, do people think things are too expensive? Do they, do they, do they, do they think that, that, you know, there isn't there isn't reliability like what what's underpinning the problem i would look well i would certainly be um talking to my customers my prospects who i really know what's going on between their brain but i'll just take a guess at this point and i'll take it off of when i was a young man working with another agency before i started my own i was a writer and produced a lot of radio commercials and one of them was for robinette roofing uh the company owned by this guy by the name of Warren Hess, he was a real character.

17:54The one thing we played off through years of campaign is the distrust of roofers. So that was the thing. That was the nemesis. That was the enemy that we were playing to in our customer's mind, that we know what you're thinking about our industry. And you probably think about us the same way. Can I trust Robinette Roofing? So every story we told was about their 30-year warranties, about how it protects them from the monsoon seasons coming up, that we only have licensed, bonded, and insured people working on your roof. And, oh, by the way, you're going to get the most aggressive sales pricing. You know, we'll beat any price out there thing, but we're not selling on a commodity thing.

18:40We're selling on purely trust. There is no bullet point list of arguments we could make to make you trust us more than if we show it to you in action. And so we did some fun things with it. Like we did one commercial where it was a 60 second radio commercial. And it is this priest in the Sistine Chapel hollering up to Michelangelo who's painting it. Right. And Michelangelo thinks his mom got him the job. Like, you know, he was a young Michelangelo, needed to make a little extra money, a little side hustle. And he's thinking, look, I thought I was going to be painting Navajo white. What, you want a fresco?

19:20You know, and the priest is going on. Oh, stop your complaining. And then you hear this dripping going on. And he goes, plus your roof leaks, you know. And he says, you really ought to call Robinette Roofing to come and fix this whole leaky place. And the priest goes on and say, I don't know, Michael. I get a lot of roofers in my confessional playing right to that thing that they can't be trusted. And he goes, ah, you can trust Robinette. They got a foam and coating system that will fix this. Guaranteed. It goes on and on and on. So we would do it in a fun, disarming way, but we were always selling about confidence.

20:01No one's going to give you the confidence in your roof like Robinette Roofing. Hmm. Does that make sense? Yeah. So you take an unsexy product like roofing in there in Arizona and you make it sexy. You have fun with it. You make it entertaining and you play directly to outing that nemesis, that that that enemy of no confidence, no trust. These people are all despicable. You know, we are the ones that you don't have to worry about. That does resonate. That resonates a lot. I think a lot of folks listening like myself, as I apply it to my own world, are going to be inspired by what you said. And I wonder, as your clients or just business owners, business decision makers that you talk to, where do they struggle most in applying this type of advice or this type of framework?

20:55Well, number one, they got to get out of their own heads. So the first struggle they have is they make their stories about them when what they really need to do is think about your audience and make this story about your audience. Tell it from their point of view. What's in it for them? And they don't really care about the logic and reason of buying your product. I hate to tell you that. I know. And it seems counterintuitive. They care about the emotional impact you're going to have in their life. And I don't care if you're selling B2B or B2C, ultimately about what is in it for me. So that's the first thing.

21:30The second thing is a lot of companies will say, oh, we're great storytellers, Parker. We do all kinds of storytelling. And they don't. They will tell you what they believe is a story, but it's nonfiction. It's non-narrative because they never get out of exposition. And what I mean by that, they just go with, and this, and then this happened, and then this, and, and, and, and, and. and they bore you to death. You see that in business-to-business communications all the time. That's why I call it boring-to-bored communications because they're not using a narrative framework like the and-but-therefore that actually gets your audience to perk up, to lean in, can even give them goosebumps because you have identified that problem-solution dynamic so clearly in their minds that they're like, okay, what do I do next?

22:20I think I think it's really true in in B2B, because oftentimes in in my experience, it's like people, marketers, sales folks complain about the buyer where they're like, they don't they don't get that we do X, Y and Z so much better. All all all they want to do is that is is they want to be promoted. They want to advance their career. And and like, exactly. Exactly. So how can you solve that problem for the individual that you're selling to? Yeah, I mean, that's it. You are talking to what's in it for them. So let's walk through the and, but therefore real quick, the structure of it. And then I think you and your viewers and listeners will get a better idea of it.

23:03Let's do one for you. All right, John, let's create a branded narrative for this particular show. Okay, love it. All right? So here's the exercise you walk through. The first question, John, number one is, who is your number one audience? How would you define as quickly, but specifically as possible, your audience for this show? I think motivated marketers and business owners that want to grow their career and their business and do so with a lot of action. Great. And why is that important to them? They want to grow their motivated marketers and business owners who want to grow their business. And why is that important to them?

23:52What are they ultimately trying to get out of the growth of their business? I think there's both intrinsic and extrinsic motivations. In intrinsic, I feel good. I feel good. I feel I'm fulfilled when I improve the business. And then also, I make more money, I grow my career, etc. So I think both of those things are factors. okay so they want to they're they're motivated marketers and business owners who want to grow their business and if they could do this one thing then they could fulfill their dream of business ownership and make the money you know they seek the income we're going to come back to that in just a second but this is our statement of agreement all we're trying to do is do what you're doing right there is not go yep yep that's what they want you you want a positive statement of agreement to illustrate to your audience, your prospect, your customer, whatever, that you understand who they are and you appreciate what's important to them in life, right?

24:53Understanding and appreciation. Now let's go into the problem. And then we're going to come back to the statement of agreement. What problem do you solve for them with this show? Well, I think getting real detailed advice from experts is far superior than googling something like how do i tell a story and reading an article about it so um that's my take that's my that's my knee-jerk reaction to that question yeah so instead of reading it they're bringing it in they get to listen they get to watch in the conversation and learn from experts there's there's so much called there's so much color commentary that you're providing, Park, in describing how your company came to be, what you learned along the way.

25:46They're just nuance that's hard to find elsewhere. I'm not saying it's not available on the internet. It's just it's hard to find. And that's what this show provides. Yeah. So, all right. So let's go back to our end statement of agreement. You are a motivated marketer or small business owner who wants to grow your enterprise. And if you had a board of excellent advisors to guide you in your way, then you could create that fulfilling career and lifestyle you're looking for. But you're frustrated because you're a small company, you don't have access to those minds on a daily basis. And it's holding you back in the growth of your personal growth and the growth of your company.

26:38Therefore, imagine every day listening to an expert from around the world who can give you at least one pointer to help you build incrementally over the course of your career to build, because that's the way everything grows, by listening to John's show, the business builder. You know what I'm saying? I love it. What we did, I've just cobbled it together, right? We've identified your audience, the motivated marketer and small business owner who wants to grow their enterprise. And now let's raise the importance of that. And if you had access to a board of dedicated, committed advisors to help you grow, then you would achieve the fulfilling career goals that you have set.

27:27But you're frustrated. You're not growing as quickly as you like because you're a small business and you don't have access to those brilliant minds. Therefore, you could even replace the therefore. Now, you could have a daily dose of incremental improvement by learning from experts around the world right here on this show. That becomes your overall brand narrative setup, problem, resolution. you've you've you've connected with them with agreement which gets them just leaning in you trigger their limbic problem solution survival brain by saying but here's the problem you're trying to solve for which you've opened up the story loop now and this brain says okay so what is the answer you've got to give me an answer therefore listen to this show and you are going to find the answers you need that's a quick way for anybody out there if you want to do this for your brand, just follow those steps.

28:24The one last thing, John, I'll say in that is what I've learned in this process is where you've got the three forces of story of agreement, contradiction, and consequence, which plays that brain. It also sets up the three forces of what I call trust building. People aren't going to buy from you if they don't trust you. So what that is, is you are placing your audience at the center of the story, demonstrating to them that you understand them like Robert McKee said of the screenwriting audiences, you understand them in a God-like way. They appreciate the fact you've done your discovery and you understand them.

29:00Then you write out what they want and why that's important to them. So you are demonstrating that you appreciate what is important to them in your life. When you then insert the problem in your statement of contradiction, you're demonstrating your empathy. You start with an emotion, but you're frustrated that you're not growing because you don't have access to these people. And then that trust is built. Therefore, trust me, here's the way forward with our particular product or service. I think, first of all, are you charging me for the advice on my own podcast? Absolutely not. Okay, great. You know, I want to shift a little bit.