any brand that wants to forge or restore its reputation. When a pharmaceutical company, for example, conveys the wonder of curing a disease, or when an energy company chooses a new way to convey the joy of discovering how to power the world, both are sharing the best of what it is like to work there. They are offering pieces of their story to the world to be taken up and disseminated.
A set of self‐promotional talking points or the offer of a good deal bounces off the hard shell of skepticism that gets all of us through the day. But pieces of stories have a way of breaking through that shell to become tools that we use to make sense of our own lives.
To fully understand storytelling's power, think of those brands that are quite literally built out of stories – the personal brands of movie stars, musicians, and authors, and the corporate brands of major entertainment companies.
Why is Harry Potter capable of making grown men and women shed their normal state of consciousness and embrace wonder and delight? Because, by consuming J. K. Rowling's stories, many of us have effectively shared the minds and the emotions of her characters. We have lived in their world, and we have contributed our own imaginative resources to its construction. It isn't just Rowling's wonder and delight that we respond to when we read the Harry Potter books but our own as well.
Stories make information personal in a way that no other form is capable of. It's a peculiar quirk of our celebrity culture that when we chance to see an actor in person or ask an author to sign our book, we feel as if they should recognize us as an old friend. In a real way, we have actually known them for a long time, but to them we are total strangers. Such is the power of stories to evoke genuine emotion and goodwill once they are released into the world.
This power, even when employed to the smallest degree, is worth a thousand traditional PR plays pushed by TV talking heads or diffused through traditional outlets.
Strategies of Delight
Until now, I've focused on wisdom and wonder.
But the deployment of pure delight is a powerful strategic asset. Along with the quest for power and riches, the simple pursuit of delight has shaped history.
To see what I mean, let's consider a form of delight that is universal and consumed in discrete units, but which is by nature devoid of any messaging: food.
When asked how he planned to restore the international reputation of France, the great diplomat Charles‐Maurice de Talleyrand said, “I don't need secretaries as much as I need saucepans!”5
Talleyrand was famous for his understanding of how power and influence really work. He was an aristocrat who kept his fortune after the French revolution when most of his peers not only lost their fortunes but also their heads. And he was a politician who worked for every warring faction in France for over 60 years. And in 1814, he pulled off what is still one of the most amazing feats in the history of public relations.
That year, representatives from all over Europe were in Vienna to restore the international order that Napoleon and his French armies had wrecked in 12 years of war. When the post‐war government of France needed somebody to represent it in the aftermath, it booked Talleyrand. Think of him as one of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries' ultimate fixers.
Within months of setting up his new embassy, Talleyrand had dissipated much of the fear and mistrust then directed at France. He gained the trust of the leaders of the German‐speaking, English, and Russian alliance that had very recently been France's bitterest enemies. And he came to be seen by smaller nations and ordinary people as a champion of justice.
And he did it all with rich sauces, fine wine, and choice meats. He knew he couldn't best his opponents at the negotiating table outright, so he charmed them at the dining table first. His chef even named dishes after the diplomats they were buttering up, including Nesselrode pudding, named after the Russian ambassador, a rich dessert of cream and alcohol‐soaked currants still on the menu in Vienna today.
Like a skilled content strategist, Talleyrand looked deep into his organization, located sources of delight, and made good strategic use of them. Then as now, everybody found high French cooking irresistible, whatever their opinion of the French people.
By the end of the yearlong negotiations, everyone was fighting over invitations to the lavish dinner parties at the French embassy. Talleyrand understood that visceral, positive feelings experienced in the moment can rewrite the pathways of memory. To reset a conversation, he didn't need persuasive ideas or even any ideas at all. He just needed a mechanism to disseminate delight. This is a strategic insight that will never go stale.
Your company cannot and need not literally feed everybody it wants to influence. A steady diet of absorbing stories and useful information is enough. Even in our oversaturated, overcrowded media environment, there will always be room for another good story.
The creation of pure delight, devoid of actual content, is something that content strategists have actually managed to deploy today, with remarkable skill and inventiveness.
In partnership with Rémy Martin's cognac brand Louis XIII, John Malkovich made a film called The Movie You Will Never See. Written by Malkovich and directed by Robert Rodriguez, the film was locked in a specially made safe, along with a bottle of Louis XIII. The safe is programmed to open automatically in the year 2117, 100 years – not from the premiere but from the launch party. Three trailers, each imagining a different future, in a range from utopia to dystopia, were released on the Internet.
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