The Strategic Storyteller

Doug (00:06):

In December, 2020, the Marriott Hotel made a business decision. One, a lot of hotel chains were already making and have made sense. Remember those little shampoo bottles and soaps we all used to take home with us when we stayed at hotels? While in December that year, the Marriott announced it would replace those with larger bottles and wall-mounted dispensers. It made sense environmentally, and let's face it economically for the hotel chain. CEO, Arnie Sorenson was the one to do the TV interviews on this change, and that presented a unique challenge. I mean, here is this CEO of a hotel chain with 7,000 hotels in 131 countries telling us, we're not going to let you take those little plastic shampoo bottles home anymore. You could almost hear the expected backlash, right? And how much does he make? So Arnie adopted a proactive message into his media interviews in the form of a story.

Arne M. Sorenson Message (01:11):

A funny story, when we moved my mother about a decade ago from her townhouse into sort of an independent living arrangement, I found in a very large drawer in her bathroom, a full drawer of unopened hotel soap. Now, it won't surprise you to know that they were mostly Marriott branded bars of soap, but here, this depression era woman had collected soap from every place she stated and basically never used 'em. And we know lots of people take the toiletries from hotels. I don't think really it's that big a deal to them. I think most of them will look at this and say, this is much more sustainable, makes more sense. And by the way, I can get more shampoo guilty out here.

Speaker 3 (01:53):

Guilty, guilty if you come and stay at my apartment and use the spare bathroom. I think you'll feel quite at home with the condiments

Doug (02:03):

And stories may be the most powerful weapon in our arsenal, but without a strategic purpose, they're a waste of time today on stories and strategies, strategy first, then stories. My name is Doug Downs. My guest this week is Mike Nation joining today from Boston. Hey, Mike.

Mike (02:36):

Hey, Doug. How are you? Thanks so much for having me on. I appreciate it.

Doug (02:39):

Glad you could be on. How are things in Boston today, Beantown? Well,

Mike (02:43):

We're recording this right now before St. Patty's Day, but I know the show's scheduled to drop on the 17th, so by then the city is going to be bright green and really looking forward to it.

Doug (02:53):

Oh, that's the big part. Is it like a parade that they do through the main streets? That's a big deal's

Mike (02:59):

Day. Yeah, there's some serious, there's a parade in the south part of Boston and Southie, which is a lot of fun. It can get a little rowdy at times, but it's fun. It's fun.

Doug (03:13):

Awesome. Mike, you're the founder of Fortis Strategic Communications, LLC. You spent over a decade on active duty in the US military, then spent 15 years with a Fortune 100 company that you helped ascend to a Fortune 50 eventually leading international communications for a $16 billion business unit within that company. Mike, we hear it all the time. Storytelling is the most important skill in public relations or marketing. Argue with me.

Mike (03:44):

Well, Doug, as a very wise man once said on the intro to this show, without a strategic purpose, a story is a waste of time. Now, I said something similar in an article I wrote for PR Daily, A story without a communication strategy is Simply Entertainment. So I would argue that the most important skill for a communicator is to have a strategic mindset. Storytelling is an important tool in the toolkit, but unless the story is in service to a business strategy, then the story is meaningless.

Doug (04:21):

Do we lose that narrative? Sometimes the point that we're so eager to grow the story, develop the story, the beginning, the middle, the end, that it really has to drive toward the strategic narrative that we're trying to develop here?

Mike (04:37):

Yeah. Doug, what a great question, and I'd like to actually drill down a little bit deeper and go a little more granular for me. I would argue it's not just a question of aligning to the strategic narrative. They do absolutely 200%, but the comms strategy needs to align with and support the business strategy. And in my mind, that's the true essence of being a strategic communicator. It's understanding what the business drivers are and then figuring out how to bring a calm strategy to bear that moves a business strategy forward. Can I give you an example of that?

Doug (05:17):

Yeah, of Course.

Mike (05:17):

 Yeah. So recently when I was at a Fortune 50, we needed to convey an important message to the leadership of a multinational defense organization. We basically had to get them to agree in principle to an issue that was of strategic business importance to us. So being a good communicator, I built a compelling messaging architecture and a great story around that issue developed a press briefing for the president of the business unit On that topic, we engaged a bunch of reporters at the Paris Air Show about it. That was sort of the big right forum, and that's kind of your standard 1 0 1 stuff. But then the president of that business had an opportunity to give a private speech to the key leaders. These are either senior elected or appointed government officials. And I got a copy of the speech that he was going to give, and I rewrote the speech to include those key messages.

(06:21):

So that was 0.1. Second part, then I worked with my partners on the sales side, the business we call the business development to get, and this is a little old school, but it worked. Get a hard copy of that speech. Hand-delivered to the Secretary General of that organization's office and placed a physical copy in his inbox. And again, old school, but this is how I know it worked. About three days after the speech was delivered, the Secretary General of that organization gives an interview with the New York Times and practically word for word. One of the key points of his interview was the message from that speech that we had hand delivered, and that's how you align with the business objectives of an organization. That's how you use comms and storytelling to drive the business goals forward.

Doug (07:19):

To touch on that, why the repetitive factor, and in fact, not just digital repetition, but hard copy repetition was so valuable there. They heard the messaging within the speech, but then they had the hard copy of the messaging in their hand. Why that one two punch the jab and the hook? Why was that successful?

Mike (07:42):

Yeah, that's a great question. I mean, obviously, and this goes back, some of it is, again, it's your stuff. Repetition is key with any message. It's not enough to just say something. We've heard the numbers that people are bombarded with thousands of messages a day, and so that you really need to have that repetition in order to be sticky. That's part one. The other part of it, and again, this is why, and it worked for this audience, there is something I would say memorable about a physical thing. We live, we are physical creatures. A lot of the times our head lives in a digital world, but when you can see something, and even especially now, it's sort of rare to get things in hard copy digital. So physically delivering a hard copy, that's a little bit unusual these days. Maybe 20 years ago it wasn't, but it's sort of unusual. Thirdly, for this particular audience, it because I think just because it was so unusual, I mean, this is the Secretary general of an incredibly powerful, important, multinational intergovernmental organization. I am sure this man gets hundreds if not thousands of emails a day. So to have a physical copy show up in his office made something. And that goes to an important point is you have to understand your audience. There's not a right medium. It's all about what resonates with your particular audience.

Doug (09:35):

Okay, let me pick up on that. You talked about building your stories, building your messaging, aligning to the goals of the business, developing your comm strategy from that. But how do you also look at what your audience or your stakeholders want to hear from you, and how important is that in the messaging mix? Sometimes where the business wants to go is not where the audience wants you to take them.

Mike (10:01):

Yeah, such a good point. And the short answer is it's incredibly important. I want to go deep and philosophical for a moment and read you something from one of my favorite books, which is Yuval Noah Harari's masterpiece sapiens. It is an absolute great book, and I highly recommend know we talked about this before. I can't recommend this book enough. I'm not going to actually look down on the page. I wrote it out, so I'm looking it on my computer screen. But he writes, telling effective stories is not easy. The difficulty lies not in telling the story, but in convincing everyone else to believe it. Much of history revolves around this question, how does one convince millions of people to believe particular stories? So I would offer that. The way one does that is by understanding the needs and motivations of your audiences. And going back to that example that I just gave, you can think about one of their needs and the motivations and how you reach them.

(11:09):

But if you can understand that and know what makes your audience tick, then you are going to be able to develop an effective comm strategy and choose a story that resonates with them. So that's a little esoteric. Maybe I can give an example that will help folks understand if that's all right. I want to tell a story of two stories. When I was at a Fortune 100, the Department of Defense was selecting a contractor to develop and build a new radar for the army. And from the business standpoint, it would generate an estimated $40 billion of us in revenue for the winner over the program's 30 year life cycle. So not an inconsequential competition.

(12:02):

Two other companies were being considered, and my then employer had the best technical solution and was the only one who could deliver what the customer had asked for when they wanted it. So the other companies, they were focusing their efforts behind the scenes on sort of watering down the evaluation criteria, basically talking about publicly, Hey, our solution's good enough, and you don't need all this other stuff that we knew that the customer wanted. So they were telling one story. Instead of running a comms campaign focused on why our technology is the best and thumping our chest, that wasn't what the customer wanted to hear. I built a comm strategy that focused on telling the customer that they didn't have to settle, that they didn't have to compromise on capability or schedule. I told them a different story. I presented an alternate viewpoint. One viewpoint was, Hey, what we can give you good enough, the others, no, guys, you don't need to compromise.

(13:12):

And we told them a story that reminded them what the competition was really about. It wasn't about keeping American industry happy. It was about giving the US and its allies a solution that was light years more capable than what the Chinese and Russians were developing. And that could address the threats that the Department of Defense was considering. And how do you get that sort of a solution? You do that by running a tough competition without watering down the valuation criteria. So tying all that back down to Harari, two competing stories. But in the end, the customer rejected the story that it's okay to compromise, and they went with the story that they couldn't afford to compromise, and our solutions won. Now, first and foremost, there was a lot of brilliant engineers. That was important, right? The technology had to work, and they delivered that piece of technology. But we got to a place where that mattered because we took the time, understood the audience, understood what motivated them, and told a story that made sense to them.

Doug (14:32):

You and I, in preparing for this episode, we were conceptualizing what the opening grabber story off the top of the piece might be. And one idea that we had was Ronald Reagan at the Berlin Wall back in the eighties, the famous tear down this wall line. Walk me through why you think that's one of the best. It was a speech, but it is also some of the best storytelling that we've heard on a massive stage.

Mike (14:58):

Yeah, no, it's such a speech, and I mean, we were both little kids when that speech happened, but you just listened to that speech today, and I did, and I think you did as well. And I mean, I dunno about you, it gave me goosebumps. I mean, so think about this, right? Ronald Reagan didn't just show up in Berlin, and he wasn't like, Hey, I'm going to tell a story. I'm the great communicator. No, he went there with a number of audiences in mind and a very clearly defined business objective. He knew what the strategy, what the strategic objective was. So let's put this in context. He had the Soviet leaders. He was telegraphing American and Allied Resolve and commitment. He was projecting deterrents. I mean, at the time they were in negotiations with the Russians about, or excuse me, the Soviets, about some of the disarmament.

(16:00):

So that was important was to project that sort of deterrent capability. Then you had the people of Western Europe and strengthening their resolve and showing them the benefits of choosing freedom over communism and helping them understand American commitment. Because we look back at this time today and sort of like, yeah, of course the wall came down. Of course, the Soviet communism was defeated. But at the time, and again, we were both kids, but looking back at this, nobody knew what the actual outcome was going to be. So he had to strengthen the resolve of the Western Europeans. There were protests going on, people supporting communism.

Doug (16:47):

He makes mention of that right in speech too. He was not universally welcomed, not at all at the speech.

Mike (16:52):

 And then the third audience were the people of East Germany and also the folks in central Europe, the polls, all these other different audiences that were behind the Iron Curtain. And he had to show them. He had to message to them that, Hey, America hasn't forgotten about you, and there are benefits to you guys standing up and supporting freedom over communism. So all this surmises was going through his head and the head of his advisors, and at its core, this was really storytelling and service to strategy. There's a little bit of humor sprinkled throughout the speech, but the imagery and emotional connection was stunning and powerful.

Reagan's "Tear Down This Wall" Speech (17:41):

Behind me stands a wall that encircles the free sectors of this city, part of a vast system of barriers that divides the entire continent of Europe from the Baltic South. Those barriers cut across Germany in a gash of barbed wire, concrete dog runs and guard towers farther south. There may be no visible, no obvious wall, but the remain armed guards and checkpoints all the same. Yet it is here in Berlin where the wall emerges most clearly here, cutting across your city where the news photo and the television screen have imprinted this brutal division of a continent upon the mind of the world

Mike (18:30):

Right there. I mean, that's incredibly powerful imagery. Talking about just paints a picture. And then of course, there's the most famous line, which covers the elements of platonic storytelling that you talk about on another podcast in just three sentences, and he'll say it much better than me. So

Reagan's "Tear Down This Wall" Speech (18:53):

Mr. Gorbachev teared down this wall.

Doug (19:02):

Now that's a call to action right there. That's a beauty. Yeah. Yeah. So last question. Storytelling powerful must have a strategic purpose. How do we measure that? Our storytelling campaign is actually succeeded measurement, right? The unicorn of the comms industry. Yeah.

Mike (19:22):

Look, in comms, I think it's really easy to look at things like press hits and clicks and likes or whatever, and use that as a stand-in for success. And don't get me wrong, it's important to measure these sorts of things, but again, it goes back to my mind to that strategy and the business objective. It's whether or not you achieve your business objective. So I very recently had a situation, I did some work for a client, a tech startup, and we got some cover out of it, which was cool. And then a few weeks ago, the CEO of the company calls me up and he's like, Mike Holy. And if I said what he'd say, you'd have to bleep it. He said, holy cow, we just got a bunch of inbound leads because of the story you put on the street. And that to me is that to me is a real measurement of his success. For one, getting a call like that out of the blue from the CEO EO of the company, and then two, why did he call me? He called me because it drove forward the things that matter to him,

Doug (20:36):

And he knew it. He knew it.

Mike (20:38):

Yeah.

Doug (20:39):

That's awesome. I really appreciate your time today, Mike, and I've loved working with you going back and forth as we've set this episode up. Thanks for your time.

Mike (20:49):

Hey, thanks. I really appreciate the time and the opportunity to chat with you, Doug. I enjoyed it a lot.

Doug (20:58):

If you'd like to send a message to my guest, Mike Nachshen, we've got his LinkedIn info in the show notes, and if you reach out to him, just mention that you heard him here and more than willing to connect. Just make sure you mention stories and strategies. This podcast is a co-production of JGR Communications and Stories and Strategies podcasts. We're also on YouTube and YouTube music, full audio episodes, and we publish short video segments as well link in the show notes. Lastly, do us a favor forward this episode to one friend. Thanks for listening.