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Discovery Channel

Be A Better Brand Manager: Know The Narrative and When to Disrupt It

As a brand manager, you’re well aware of how difficult it is to capture your customer’s attention in the current super-saturated messaging environment.  The ubiquity of smartphones and tablet computers means our buyers are always ‘plugged in’, consuming the content they’ve chosen for themselves; CNN reports that adult Americans are spending at least 8 hours of every day staring at a screen.

What can you do to stand out in that environment?

We think that the folks at the Discovery Channel might have a clue. Check out this commercial:

Know The Narrative and When to Disrupt It

In two days, the official Discovery Channel Youtube video has been viewed more than 30,000 times. What is it about this particular commercial that has captured the public’s imagination?

The spot is a variation on a classic story telling device, the Bait-and-Switch. The Bait-and-Switch is a narrative device where viewers are led to believe they should expect one thing, only to experience something completely different.

Traditionally, a Bait-and-Switch leads the viewer in with content they believe to be of high value, only to deliver content of lower value. But in this case, Discovery Channel, demonstrating a superior understanding of what their customers truly enjoy, lead the viewer to expect a heartwarming tale of a rehabilitated seal and delivered a massive shark having a snack.

High value content was followed by higher value content. A story that the viewer felt they ‘should’ care about, in order to be viewed as a good person under prevailing cultural norms, was replaced with a ‘guilty pleasure’ story that they truly enjoyed.

The experience of this unusual Bait-and-Switch is novel enough to make the viewer actually pay attention to what they’re watching. The commercial shocked the viewer to another level of awareness, forcing them to examine their perceptions from a new perspective.

If you’d like to use the same technique to connect with your customers, there are two things you need to know: what narratives your customer expects to encounter in the course of their day, and what narratives your customer would like to encounter during the course of the day. This requires significant psychological insight. A nuanced understanding of your customer’s life experiences and the factors that influence their worldview is essential. You need to know what they truly enjoy, and what they feel socially or morally obligated to enjoy. The juxtaposition of the two is a powerful attention getter.

Be A Better Brand Manager: The Essentials

  • Familiarize yourself with universal narratives, and the stories that are most relevant to your best customers.
  • Maintain an awareness of the media your customers are consuming, and what tales they’re being told. You can’t provide something outside of the norm if you don’t know what the norm is.
  • Understanding the social and cultural pressures that dictate how your customers feel they should behave makes it easier to craft messaging that will attract their attention.