How to Create an Engaging Story Everywhere With Freud, Star Wars and Frameworks
Otherwise you will send your audience to zzzzz
"Salespeople are scumbags." I think that’s a pretty common belief. They persuade you to buy things you don't want, at prices you can't afford, by playing on your emotions. So, you can imagine my surprise when I applied for a job with ‘engineer’ in the title — which was actually in sales. Those darn sales people, they got me again. I was GUTTED when I understood this. Fortunately, in my role there was enough room for growth in a direction that resonated with me. I wanted to get caught in the weeds. Get more technical and involved. As time went on, I realised the position of privilege I was in — and it was my first genuine 'big boy job’ out of university — so I stuck around.
After a while, the hamster started running and the wheel started spinning. "Sales, sales, sales - I can do sales." I've always held this somewhat vaguely delusional belief that I can do anything to a ‘good enough’ standard. Bowling? Yeah, I can do it well enough. Sing? Give me time, I’d get decent. Computer science degree? I’m not great at maths but how hard can it be? If I dropped everything I was doing now and I had an adequate safety net, give me enough time and I can “make it” in any industry. That’s a genuine belief I have. DELUSIONAL? Probably. Though the ‘decent enough’ mindset has paid me dividends. I could do sales. I just needed time to prepare.
Fortunately for me, we had extensive training. Hours of workshopping, education on the product, value selling? Technical selling? Challenger selling!? So many variations of selling, I was being sold on the very notion of sales itself. The training didn’t stop there, it even went into niche skills, storytelling, limbic hooks (this is what business people call clickbait) and Jungian archetypes. Wait a second… one of those things is not quite like the others. Jungian archetypes by Carl Gustav Jung?
Jung was a Swiss psychiatrist and psychoanalyst who founded analytical psychology. He came up with the theory of Archetypes. A few of which you may recognise from ‘Classic Generic Story™’ - such as the hero, the trickster, or the wizard. When referring to a sales journey, the customer is the hero. When talking about a technical solution, the product is the wizard. The customer isn't necessarily a hero in the traditional sense. You know, raising their sword in the air and fighting a dragon. It can be an anxious CEO, a sleep-deprived mother, or a manager who can’t properly communicate with her execs. These were the heroes in our sales journeys. They were the people playing out the Jungian archetypes. The hero might even be the damn product itself.
Let’s take a beat. Who actually is Jung? What actually are his archetypes? And how did his heroes end up in my customer pitch deck? Well, the title was a limbic hook because Freud sells better. Jung was a student of Freud but their philosophies and beliefs began to differ. After a while, this difference in thought eventually formed a schism in their relationship. While Freud went deeper into his more controversial theories on individual development and sexy time, Jung took a different approach, focusing on different parts of psychology, the most famous of which pertained to storytelling.
These components are made up of things such as the collective unconsciousness - the belief that parts of the subconscious are hardwired into the brain, containing universal memories and ideas called archetypes. Archetypes, these are symbols, patterns, or motifs that recur in myths and art and dreams across cultures. You know, every culture has the concept of a mother. Every culture has the concept of a hero. The concept of tricksters. Or the famous holy baby ordained by a higher power. From Baby Jesus to Hercules to Krishna. Why do these all manifest in different cultures? What is the underlying force? And what does it mean for the fundamental human experience and emotion?
If you've never given this any thought before, you never notice it, but once you do these stories and common themes are everywhere and they leech into our lives in unforeseen ways. Untangling this is a massive boon for the development of an analytical framework to something as emotion-driven as storytelling.
Let me illustrate with an example. It starts in a Galaxy far, far away. Star Wars is the poster child for this. It makes use of the hero's journey. Star Wars, particularly the original trilogy, is a classic, classic, classic example of the hero's journey. The hero's journey is a narrative structure identified by Joseph Campbell, who was heavily influenced by Jung's work. And the story of Luke follows this pattern closely. He gets the call to adventure. He finds R2-D2 and the message from Princess Leia urging him to leave Tatooine. He refuses the call initially but he’s forced into a position where he can’t, he then meets guardians, mentors, helpers and so on and so forth.
I'm going to leave a picture below because I'm not inclined to explain all of the story, and many people have done a much more thorough analysis of the topic.
And then in that same story, there are a few archetypes that we come across. Luke Skywalker is clearly the hero. He's seeking adventure and self-discovery. Darth Vader is the shadow, representing the dark side force of Luke and his own potential for darkness. Obi-Wan Kenobi is a mentor. Han Solo is a trickster, and so on and so forth. Everyone's got a role to play. And how does this then integrate into a story?
The story is about Luke's individuation, his journey to becoming a whole, balanced individual. This involves embracing both the light side and the dark side of the Force. And this is symbolised by his internal and external conflict and ultimately his reconciliation with his dad. This does indeed sound quite Freud-influenced. Through these trials, Luke integrates different aspects of his personality. He matures and he becomes a true Jedi. Now, how this relates to product storytelling is a strange observation, but I think after some explanation, it makes perfect sense.
You get the essence of this story, right? These Jungian archetypes in this strange, mythical, psychological, quasi-biological goop. You create a narrative and swap out the names and details. Then you beat this formula to death. Apply it everywhere, with tweaks, of course. This occurs everywhere and is THE way to communicate to hearts and minds. Weirdly enough, some wizards in sales & marketing companies tapped into that collective unconsciousness.
They beat this formula to death to mould you into the perfect consumer. Salespeople don't want a cold, rational, calculated buyer on the end of their line. They want to tug on your heartstrings. They want to make you feel the NEED to purchase, rationality be damned. People are not rational actors. We are creatures of story and emotion. That anxious CEO, the stressed-out customer service agent. They are all heroes awaiting their story. They also happen to be great customers.
This was great for me, right? I had this knowledge prior to joining the company. I should be awesome at storytelling. I probably knew more about storytelling than 97% of the people that I worked with. I did the internal training. I dibble-dabble in Jungian psychology. I read a few Jungian books and familiarised myself with the hero's journey. They even introduced us to the simplified and in some ways more flexible version of the hero story called the story spine or the Pixar story spine. And with all of these notches on my belt, I was ready and equipped to be a master salesperson.
Imagine my absolute shock when I realised I sucked. Sure, my storytelling may have been great and seamlessly fit together when telling an actual story. And if I were to be able to pull it off in a product, it would be massively compelling, but you aren't working on a multimedia blockbuster. You're selling a product to customers who are likely impatient and want you to get to the damn chase. You can only make niche tech systems so sexy. So, what parts of your story can you trim? How can you contort your story spine to sell computer software and get to the emotive essence and value as quickly as possible? This was the challenge that I faced.
So, through research and through a further reduction of the story spine, I realised that the answer lay in setting the context, explaining the challenge, showing the solution, the value of the solution, and the result - an emotive outcome. And that is a reduction of the story for tech sales. This was the essence of product storytelling and I've used it time and time again to great results. And this product storytelling framework can be applied everywhere from interviewing to copywriting. Once you notice this theme, you notice it all the damn time.
Before creating slides, scripts, or screens we’re going to take the time to express our product narrative with 4 sentences. And each of these sentences will be based on one of the 4 foundational story pillars.
With these 4 sentences we can express any product narrative. For example…
It's the same thing, those same stories that everyone around you has grown up with and loves, but just designed for people with shorter attention spans that want solutions asap. This is a deeper explanation of the etymology of storytelling than 99% of people will ever need to know ever, but hey, welcome to the 1%. Now you can recognize this overarching story theme everywhere. You can even play with it. You can have an overarching story and then nest stories within that story. Mind blown.
My favourite example of this in the wild. When I realised this is a formula can be applied everywhere and anywhere, such as for tech interviews. Apply for a tech interview at a FAANG company or a tier 1 tech company, they tell you to use the STAR method. What is the STAR method?
Situation - Context, task - Challenge, action - Colution, response - Value & Outcome.
See the parallels? That is very, very similar in its nature to the product story spine that I mentioned earlier. Which is similar to the heroes journey. Which is similar to the archetypes. But rather than selling a product, you're selling yourself.
With this knowledge, you are better equipped to observe archetypes. People typically play to a few of them depending on the context. You can be a problem solving wizard and people will always come to you for advice (relationships, technology, etc). In a different social circle you’re the trickster, a wise crack always at the tip of your tongue. When with your younger coworkers you are the mentor. Everyone's got a bit of these archetypes within themselves to a degree and the process of integrating them to become a more holistic person is the story of every person's lives. It all boils down to the hero's journey and you are the hero of your own story.
Hopefully, this helps change your perspective a little on storytelling and has given some food for thought. Thanks for reading.
Credit to Gabe Sumners for the product marketing themed story spine.
Nice.