What The Cat in the Hat can teach us about brand storytelling (yep, really)
Remember being small and eagerly awaiting your bedtime story? Snuggled under a duvet feeling safe, warm and sleepy as you were regaled with tales from The Cat in the Hat?
Maybe you don’t (after all I’ve just given you a pretty specific memory to recall. Unlike me, you may not have been raised on a literary diet of the tales of an anthropomorphic cat). But I bet those two sentences created a picture in your mind, and perhaps even triggered an emotion or two.
Words are powerful. And when you throw a bunch of them together to tell a story, even more so.
Since the beginning of time we’ve used stories to communicate, educate and inspire. So it’s no wonder brands want to use them, since these are all the things they want to do.
But in our noisy, cluttered world where the average attention span given to any form of advertising is milliseconds, if the story isn’t good, the moment is lost.
So how do you use storytelling to get your stuff noticed? Here are my top three tips — and just to tie this story nicely together, I’m going to use examples from The Cat in the Hat to make my points (because this is my blog and my story, so I can totally do that).
Go against the grain
Why are The Cat in the Hat stories so famous? Because they’re weird and different. When Theodor Seuss Geisel, otherwise known as Dr. Seuss, published his first The Cat in the Hat book in the ‘50s, it was the perfect antidote to all the boring, predictable and downright vanilla children’s books of the time. "Write me a story that first-graders can't put down!” an exasperated educational director asked him over dinner. Seuss well and truly fulfilled his brief.
Don’t be afraid to stand out. Going against the status-quo or trying something out of the ordinary is a sure-fire way to get noticed.
Create the feels
Oh my gosh, are these books an emotional rollercoaster or what? How is this mythical creature both annoying as hell yet amusing at the same time? Why am I eagerly anticipating whatever havoc he’s going to wreak next?
The emotional journey Dr. Seuss’s stories took me on are what enchanted me when I heard them as a kid, and they’re what I remember about them today. I remember how I felt when they were read to me. It’s worth remembering here that old adage — people will often forget what you said, but not how you made them feel.
It’s the reason I ask brands, before we get going with any of the actual words on a page, what they want people to feel when they see what they're offering. What do they want people to remember?
Keep it short, sweet and on repeat
Now I love an 80,000-word page-turner as much as the next person who well, loves words. But as a copywriter the majority of my briefs demand brevity, and rightly so. In brand storytelling, whether we’re talking straplines, emails, web copy or blogs, getting your point across in as few words as possible is pretty much always the name of the game. As is getting it across using EVERYDAY LANGUAGE — and I’m emphasising this point because I spend a great deal of my time knocking long, dry and overused words out of copy (particularly when editing press releases — and that’s a whole other topic for another blog).
Repetition is also your friend, and not just because Google rewards us for using the same keywords on repeat. One of the best ways to write persuasively, and to get your story to stick, is by using repetition. Again. Over and over. One more time. The more your story is heard, the more it will be remembered.
Back to Dr. Seuss, who illustrates all of the above beautifully. He wrote the first The Cat in the Hat book using just 220 unique and simple words — all suitable for novice readers — and repeated them over and over to create — and ingrain in his reader’s minds — an unforgettable story.
So there you have it — proof that The Cat in the Hat can teach us a thing or two about brand storytelling. And on that note this story has gone on long enough. Just one last tip from me — if you didn’t experience the magic of these books as a kid, I urge you to hunt them down. Skip the movie though, it’s cat-astrophic (sorry, I couldn’t resist).