SINGAPORE – With tales of sleeping beauties, wicked step-siblings and wicked witches, children’s bedtime tales offer valuable lessons for brands looking to ramp up their story-telling skills, according to Evidently.
“Stories teach us enduring lessons, it’s how we make sense of the world,” Evidently’s CEO Danie Zeff and Amy Lavalette, vice president, Asia, said in their Spikes Asia 2014 session, “What Brands Can Learn From Bedtime Stories”.
The content company offered 8 tips in developing spellbinding brand advertising that encourage consumers to care and to share.
Great stories should have:
1. Beginning, a surprise and an end
2. Same, same but different
3. Instantly establishes its reality
4. Truth to the core
5. Constantly evolves their media
6. Many levels, a single shared experience
7. Responding is irresistible
8. Poetry pleases
Speaking on tip two, the speakers noted that scenarios that feel safe and familiar yet different are more interesting.
“Sometimes there’s no need to explain a context – just get straight to the point,” the Evidently duo said of the third lesson.
Expanding on the fourth point, the speakers noted that great stories often speak to a universal human truth, and they resonate by doing. In this respect, children’s stories tell universal tales in the simplest way.
Kid’s stories also continue to play their media – things pop up, unfold…” said the speakers, noting that brands should similarly evolve their media constantly when telling their stories.
When a story fascinates, they compel the reader to respond, to repeat, to engage with and to interact, the speakers said of lesson 7.
For their final tip, the pair reminded delegates that “language and poetry elevates us from the tyranny of function”.
