The Boutique Individual: Corporate Storytelling

PART ONE: CORPORATE STORYTELLING, June 2006

When I was six years old, I went with an older cousin to look at sailboats in Fisherman’s Cove in West Vancouver. At the gas station opposite the marina, he parked his 1969 Dodge Charger and offered to buy sodas. What about one of these? He indicated his favourite: Orange Crush. I declined, although I wanted the drink. But I’d been so indoctrinated on the evils of fast food and soft drinks that I didn’t dare indulge.

A few decades later, I understand the whole incident in terms of the microeconomics of branding. That summer day – seagulls gliding in the salty air currents above a thicket of swaying sailboat masts – Orange Crush made me a “brand promise,” an offer of membership in a tribe of guys like my cousin: Dodge Charger enthusiasts with girlfriends, puka shell necklaces and brown corduroy boot-cut Levi’s. This was my incentive to buy.

And yet the more powerful incentive to me, just on the savvy side of kindergarten, was to keep ranks with my existing tribe: my immediate family, my homemade clothes-wearing, West Coast Trail-hiking, Schubert-loving Anglican/hyper-individualist, tiger’s-milk drinking family. A tribe so… unique that even now I struggle to explain it beyond saying that we were somehow taught, implicitly, to reject what was mass in culture. To be suspicious, particularly, of any identity offered to us by an ad campaign.

I relate this old anecdote because, sniffing the cultural breeze lately, I’m tempted to think that the world is realigning itself with this old-school way of thinking. Mainstream mass culture is dying, we read. We could summarize the legion articles like this:

On the way out: network news, broadsheets,  Hollywood,  corporate music, and of course the mass culture community builders that used to be stamped on us at birth, like neighbourhood and social class.

Rushing in to replace them, meanwhile:  Webcasts, swapping playlists,  social networking, online communities,  video blogs,  “solo-preneurial” web marketing of your own line of facial products/dog accessories/lingerie.

Ordinary people are seizing control of their own cultural experience of life, in other words. And empowered by technology (particularly bandwidth – just think of that kid in Baghdad writing his wartime blog read by millions) individuals are breaking the grip that corporations like CNN have had on cultural experience in the past. As Reed Johnson wrote in the LA Times recently: “The culture is being boutiqued or, as the expression goes, unbundled.”

This would seem to read like good news, if you came from my old tribe. If mass culture suppressed individual choice and creativity with its top-down, monolithic approach, then the new decentralized, bottom-up culture should foster a new, more robust individual: a Boutique Individual, let’s say, able to distribute content, build community, and unleash personal creativity in previously unimagined ways.

Or that’s the theory, anyway. But online manifestations of boutique culture, regrettably, suggest that the identity liberated with the erosion of mass culture seems to have been primarily a consumer identity. Sure, some online communities form around a common philosophy or moral outlook. But you’ll find a lot less communities of Hegel enthusiasts than people sworn to all things, say, Helly Hanson. And this is because when Boutique Individuals describe themselves they tend to sound like highly-personalized, self-edited assemblies of consumer components.

“You see this in popular services like Friendster and Myspace,” writes culture critic Hal Niedzvieczki in our e-mail exchange on the topic. “People using shared consumer archetypes to define personality: ‘I like kung fu action movies, Italian food, NASCAR and Starbucks.’”

We are what we buy, in other words. Why else would marketers be pitching that belief so directly now? Marketing the products of mass culture (think highway billboards and 15-second Superbowl spots) was largely a matter of volume. A national ad campaign wasn’t much more than a cold-call on the entire nation at once. Marketing to Boutique Individuals, by contrast, is about forging personal connections, about putting a sales transaction on the same intimacy level as a relationship.

Consider Proctor & Gamble’s “buzz marketing” initiative Tremor, involving a quarter million teenagers paid to covertly talk up select products with close friends and family. Or “neuromarketing,” where brain scans are used to fine tune the warm and fuzzy impact of an ad. Or “immersive marketing,” which kids’ site Neopets.com uses to weave sponsor messages into its online characters. As Business Wire reported: “NeoPets.com Inc. reports that results for major corporate sponsors over the past six months… are broadly exceeding expectations.” No wonder. If I’d been playing with an online pet for two hours a night as a kid, I probably would have responded too if it started suggesting, I don’t know, Orange Crush.

If these techniques seem sneaky, it’s not entirely fair to blame marketers. The recent bestsellers Freakonomicsand The Undercover Economist make the persuasive argument that microeconomic incentive analysis can explain how the world works. People act in response to financial, moral and social incentives – out of self-interest, in other words. And marketers, who are no different in this respect, may be thought of as meeting a demand that the new Boutique Individual has revealed to them.

Niedzviecki argues that this need has arisen because of how popular culture has replaced spontaneous folk culture. “We no longer communicate with one another directly, meaningfully,” he warns. “Our stories and myths, articulations of deeper meaning and purpose, are now owned by corporate entities and produced for profit.”

Nothing addresses that point more succinctly than the rise of “corporate storytelling,” a hot new marketing tool that involves unpacking a company’s dusty Mission Statements, Brand Promises, Statements of Value and Commitment and re-packing them into a compelling narrative.

“The shortest route between two people is a story,” says Dianna Carr, a senior storyteller at Envisioning and Storytelling, one of the world’s most successful story management consultancies. We’re in the kitchen of the E+S offices in West Vancouver, a place of recycled-timber beams, high open spaces, walls of books and lots of Aboriginal and folk art. The kitchen smells great. Cookie dough and coffee, I think, although this might only be the story the country-kitchen table is subconsciously telling me.

The heart of the E+S methodology, Carr explains, is the “envisioning” session, where the consultants tease out the narrative strands that may be woven together into a compelling company or product “story.” A story that’s transformative to the client, to be sure, but also transformative to the target consumers. Because stories do compel people to act.

The resort giant Intrawest has sold 10 billion dollars worth of real estate at developments like Storied Places since E+S helped them envision themselves out of what E+S co-founder Jake Chalmers calls the “real estate deal business” and into the “experience business.” For American sprits giant Brown-Forman, which found itself with an excess of wine on its hands from South Africa (a country with lingering consumer-image problems in the US), E+S envisioned a story to move that wine. It’s titled “Eleven Tongues”, a narrative inspired by the 11 official languages of South Africa and designed (not subtly, but not without elegance, either) to blow away the consumer memory of apartheid with a breath of fresh, multicultural air.

Explaining how stories create consumer behaviour is more difficult, but after looking at many corporate stories, one trend did stand out for me. In promising a product-driven transformation, Corporate Storytelling invariably deploys the language of spiritualism. You won’t find E+S promoting a real estate development in Santa Fe using the words “God” or “church.” But watch the movie they created, called “The Light of Inspiration,” and the sensation is like being lowered into a warm bath of quasi-spirituality. Aboriginal carvings drift onscreen while pan flutes play and a sage baritone intones: You see farther, more deeply, more completely… Each new day is a beam of sunlight from the creator… Later, the words Native, Catholic and New Age Spirituality appear, the text scrolling across the images like an ecumenical screensaver.

E+S is far from alone here. I Googled “corporate storytelling” and could hardly find a practitioner who does not make use of aboriginal imagery from somewhere. You’ll find sun masks and loons and Nazca Lines and cave paintings of people dancing around primal fires. It’s the visual language of deeper meaning – regardless of whether any such deeper meaning could be thought to exist in the products and services these images now serve to market. “People are looking for things that will touch them emotionally, that will help them connect,” Carr says. “If it’s objects they’re connecting to, I suppose it does say something sad about us, but it’s also telling,” she admits.

I agree. It tells us how these consumer stories succeed in providing the human connection that seems to be missing in so many Internet-driven lives these days. The last great forces that managed to connect us – which in North America come down to the assertion of religious, political and individual freedoms – seem to have grown quiet of late. Perhaps we take them for granted, but they seem, in any case, to have lessened in their ability to bind us. It is sad, pitiful even, that so many would look to replace them with shopping, where meaning and connection are offered only by proxy: in the form of a ski hill promising magic, a wine offering absolution for historical sins, an adobe structure in the New Mexico desert that just might have intrinsic spiritual power.

I step out of the E+S offices feeling exhilarated. This kind of thing happens to me after lively discussion with intelligent people, which is what I’ve just enjoyed. It likewise happens after a bit of practical human business – in this case, the highly refined strategies we develop to sell things – seems to crack open and reveal something of concern to the human heart.

But the more important reason for uplift is an epiphany I’m having, right here. In one of those seemingly fated symmetries of human experience, I realize that the E+S facility in West Vancouver is built on the exact site of the gas station where my cousin long ago parked his Charger. I’m maybe a metre away from where that early brand promise was extended and rejected, seagulls still gliding in the breeze over the marina opposite. And with apologies to Orange Crush, which I have enjoyed numerous times over the years, it is intensely satisfying to think that my story of that day, with all of its nostalgically hazy details (Charger or Thunderbird? Cousin or a family friend?) might have worked a little transformative magic of its own on me, so long ago. I never got the puka shells, but I made a tribal choice and I’m sticking with it.