In this episode, Michael Bernzweig hosts Paul Furiga of Vendilli to discuss the power of storytelling in business, emphasizing the importance of the 'capital S story' and how AI is reshaping modern business practices. They explore how storytelling can enhance business connections and the role of AI in freeing humans from mundane tasks, allowing more focus on core competencies.
In this episode, Michael Bernzweig hosts Paul Furiga of Vendilli to discuss the power of storytelling in business, emphasizing the importance of the 'capital S story' and how AI is reshaping modern business practices. They explore how storytelling can enhance business connections and the role of AI in freeing humans from mundane tasks, allowing more focus on core competencies.
Takeaways
Sound bites
Chapters
Michael Bernzweig (00:06.157)
I hope everyone's enjoying the event so far. This next presentation is with Paul Peruga. He's Vendili's chief storyteller and crisis communication expert. He has guided brands like Bass, Pfizer, and Heinz to uncover and share their most valuable narrative, their capital S story. And with that, Paul, I'm going to hand the mic right over and we're looking forward to hearing your presentation.
Paul Furiga (00:32.125)
Awesome. Thank you, Michael. Thank you all for being here for this presentation. So let's talk about stories and why they're important in such a technical industry. What is it about stories that if I were to ask you in your mind to recall a memory that includes once upon a time? Generally, when I ask people that question, they recall a childhood memory and a childhood story. Why is that?
because stories stick. And that's just as true in business, maybe more so than it is in childhood stories.
If people love a story, research shows they're 55 % more likely to buy from you. And guess what? And this, this always stuns me. Even if somebody is not ready to buy what you do, if they know about you and they like your story, they're going to recommend you to somebody else. I don't care what the nature is of your business, how technical it is. Isn't this what we want? We want people to say,
you're shopping for whatever product or service. I know a company you should talk to. And the way they're going to remember your company is because of your story. But it goes beyond that. You know, a lot of times people will say to me, Paul, you know, Super Bowl commercials or Pepsi or Coke or whatever, they need stories. I don't need stories. I'm a B2B company. That is absolutely not true. Research from LinkedIn proves it. Guess what LinkedIn found in surveying
tens of thousands of LinkedIn members. Number one, the B2B buying decision is emotional. Think about it. The more technical and sophisticated your service is or product, the more people want that emotional connection. But guess what? Only 39 % of those surveyed said their companies were using storytelling. What does that tell you? That tells you you have a tremendous opportunity to tell your story. Ultimately,
Paul Furiga (02:42.487)
Business is not B2B or B2C, it's B2P. Now, where do I get this from? Kim Peterson was for a number of years, the global head of sales and marketing at Merck. Maybe you've seen their ships or their containers. Now, coming out of COVID, they decided to rebrand the company. Why? Because everything stopped during COVID, right? So they needed to get back out into the marketplace of ideas. They did an intensive study to determine how to rebrand.
And what they discovered is business to business sales is not some sort of boring endeavor. It's all about connecting with people the same way it is in the consumer marketplace. B2P, not B2B. Now, during our time together, I'm hoping that you have three takeaways. One, what is your organization's story? And as a leader, are you sharing that story?
Finally, what steps can you take to better share your story? Now, I'm not talking about just any story. As business leaders, we tell all kinds of stories. You need somebody to get something done by the end of the day. You have quarterly goals. You have annual goals. You're getting a new customer. Those are all stories. This is a different story. We call it the capital S story because it stands above all the other stories that we share as business leaders.
It answers four fundamental questions. Why somebody would buy from you, work for you, invest in you, or partner with you. Every other story we share as business leaders falls out of that capital S story.
Now, I've got a video here I'm not gonna not play for you from Simon Sinek. You can see there the title of it. I encourage you to go back and take a look at it. He wrote this great book called Start With Why. And this video is what got him going and later led him to write that book.
Paul Furiga (04:51.137)
Let's talk for a minute about types of capital S stories. The cynic video is all about people by why you do something, not what you do. What you do is a table stake. The why is the differentiator. So, okay, Paul, what are some examples of these capital S stories? Number one, and this is so true in this industry, it's your origin or your founders journey. Why did somebody start your company? What caused them to get up one day and say,
You know what? I can build a better mouse trap. Related to that, maybe it's a dream or a vision or a passion. There's a better way to do this, right? It's innovation. This is really going to be a game changer. Think of the world before SAS and the world after SAS. It's a coming of age in a product or a service, a company. And then maybe it's something accidental. I often think of 3M. When they invented Post-it notes, they were trying to invent a really sticky permanent adhesive.
They failed miserably and created an entire industry of products.
Okay, if those are examples of the capitalist story, where does this darn thing belong? The short answer is everywhere. And here's where so many technically oriented companies fail. They don't have that story on their homepage. It's not in their about page. It's not in their social media. If they do press releases, it's not in the press release. This boilerplate is a term for that paragraph at the end of the press release. It says about XYZ company. Hey, Mr. Google's looking for that.
Google and now AI search. That's how they're going to help connect potential prospects with your organization. Your story needs to be there. If you're doing advertising, digital or otherwise, your story belongs there. If you're selling, and I don't care if it's PDFs, I don't care if it's printed materials, I don't care if it's sales scripts that your team is using, where is your story? And finally, and not least,
Paul Furiga (06:56.609)
What about your talent communications? What story are you sharing to the people you have now on your team and the people you want to bring on on your team? What bigger issue are they looking for to satisfy their work life ambitions? Sinek wrote another story, another book, excuse me, his third is called The Infinite Game. And he talks in there about just cause companies. Think of Steve Jobs.
Steve Jobs, one of the many things he said was he wanted to put a dent in the universe. Gen Z and millennials, they're looking to be at companies that are putting a dent in the universe. Just cause companies. Your story is what communicates your just cause.
We've learned in our work in more than 20 years and 300 clients that there are critical elements to successfully sharing your capitalist story. Let's take a look at those. Number one is authenticity. And what the heck do I mean by that? Well, if we were in the real world together right now and we were to go get lunch somewhere and we saw this accident happen and you got across the intersection and I didn't, we saw the same thing, but you have a different perspective than I do.
Am I a liar and you're a truth teller? Am I the truth teller and you're the liar? No, it's a difference in perspective. And this is just as true in business. Whoever we're selling to, they want choice. But when you offer that choice, it has to be authentic. It's got to be rooted in truth. So it doesn't so much matter what your competitor says. It's what you say in your story compared
to what your competitor says. That is what people are looking for. So number one is authenticity. Number two, fluent storyteller. Richard Branson, founder of something like 400 companies named Virgin, right? He's the classic CEO. We know he's a storyteller, but is the CEO always the right storyteller for every story? Short answer, no. Maybe.
Paul Furiga (09:15.625)
especially in a technical industry, it's somebody on the technical team. If you're hiring, it's somebody in the HR team. As the company grows, it might be somebody in finance or administration. Everybody needs to be on the same page sharing their appropriate version of the story. The example I often give is in healthcare. If God forbid I needed some sort of an operation, I'm not going to talk to the CEO of the hospital about who's going to do
the operation, I'm going to talk to the caregivers. And there are corollaries to that in a technical industry like ours. Third, and perhaps critically important, a good story engages the audiences that you want to reach most. In my book, Finding Your Capitalist Story, I have this description of the scientific basis for stories. Stories, it's not foo-foo, it's not just marketing.
Dr. Yuri Hasson at Princeton University about 10 years ago took a young woman, put her inside a functional MRI like you see on the screen, had her tell her worst prom story, measured her brainwaves. Then he got test subjects to slide into the tube and listen to the same story. Do you know what they learned? The brain patterns of the storyteller and the story audience matched. They synced up.
This is why we leave a concert and say, gee, I wish it never would have ended. This is why we watch 40 different versions of the same story in the Marvel comic universe films, right? Our brains like to engage with the storyteller. This is just as true in business when we're selling. And this is how we do it. OK, you're not going to put people in an MRI machine. Well, maybe you will. I don't know.
But we're looking for these sorts of measures of engagement, spikes in social interaction, reviews, customers, referrals. Okay, let's talk about the science for a few minutes because again, I think this is critically important. We talked about CINIC briefly and Dr. Hanson, there's more.
Paul Furiga (11:30.059)
Other tap roots for the capitalist story, psychology, Carl Jung, it's World War I. He's in Switzerland practicing. In World War I as World War II, people are fleeing the fighting elsewhere in Europe to Switzerland. People lay down on his couch. Jung discovers that regardless of economic attainment, country of origin, language, people are telling the same stories. This leads him to develop the concept of the collective unconscious. The idea that
We are born with archetypal stories in our brains. We can use this and we must in business. In a similar fashion, Joseph Campbell, the mythologist, discovered the ultimate story as he saw it, although I believe there are many other narratives that work in business, called the hero's journey. George Lucas, when he sat down to map out the Star Wars films, sat with Joseph Campbell. The Luke Skywalker story,
is the hero's journey.
We have the power, according to Campbell, who studied religions and stories around the world, to uncover, develop, and share our own story. And when we do, we can create results. Now, every story has an archetype. OK, what's an archetype? Let's just call it a story model. Think about David and Goliath. If we saw each other next month and you said, Paul, I heard you got a new client, and I just went through all the features and benefits, I'd bore you to tears.
But if I told you that this story isn't the underdog story, you'd know right away what I was talking
Paul Furiga (13:08.801)
Now there's not just one type of hero. You can see here, I've got several different variations. We're not going to spend time on all this today. I just want you to understand that there's not just one kind of hero. And if we were all the same kind of hero, there'd be no differentiation. So find your hero. And how do you do that? By aligning story types with your people. The capitalist stories of great organizations come
from the people inside the organization. These people are the real heroes. I've got here on the screen a very common tool that we use and that's used in psychology and other fields. It's an archetype wheel. There are 12 basic families that we draw from to identify who your heroes are in your story.
Now you may be asking yourself as we get to the end of our presentation time here, what's the difference between a capitalist story and a brand story? Well, brand story speaks only to customers. Doesn't speak to talent, doesn't speak to investors, doesn't speak to partners. And those are audiences that are important in this industry. Look, you don't have to be Steve Jobs or have some dramatic founding in order to uncover, develop and share your story.
Now, if you don't control marketing or branding, you can share your version of the story with those folks and help them understand that if you're looking to drive results, you got to start with the story. Yes, this really will help you recruit talent. We did it coming out of COVID when it was very hard to find talent. Now, finally, what's like the first step you can take to make this real? Number one, look at your elevator speech.
When you identify your capitalist story, get that story in your elevator speech. Look for the people in your company who are great storytellers to share it with them. You may not need to redo your entire story in our brief time together today. We'll just hit the highlights. You decide. Just look for clarity and alignment. And then finally, here are some suggestions on how to keep the story concept alive. Town halls, success stories that show your mission and action in selling.
Paul Furiga (15:30.143)
or clients. Make sure your onboarding, marketing and hiring are aligned with your core story. It really is about your culture.
I love this. have a lot of technical minded people in the industry. So 63 % of what and 5 % of what this is from Chip and Dan Heath's course. They teach at Stanford in the business school. They did a survey of final projects of their students one year and what they discovered was this 63 % of the attendees remembered stories and only 5 % remembered statistics. So there is statistics to prove the power.
of stories. And I want to say thanks for engaging with the presentation. Michael, I'm going to stop sharing right now so that we can have a bit of
Michael Bernzweig (16:23.897)
Paul, that was great and we really appreciate that presentation. And coming right up after, we will have a Q &A session. So for everybody that's listening, if you have some questions or thoughts that came to mind while you were listening to Paul's presentation, type them into the Q &A and we'll get to as many as we can just after the break.