Storytelling: Bewitching the Modern Mind PDF

| STORYTELLING: BEWITCHING THE MODERN MIND ——_———&—___— CHRISTIAN SALMON TRANSLATED BY DAVID MACEY Vv VERSO London e New York  Contents Preface to the E...

| STORYTELLING: BEWITCHING THE MODERN MIND ——_———&—___— CHRISTIAN SALMON TRANSLATED BY DAVID MACEY Vv VERSO London e New York  Contents Preface to the English-Language Edition Acknowledgments Introduction: The Magic of Narrative, or, the Art of Telling Stories The Storytelling Revival —Narrative as Instrument of Control — “Stories That Really Tell Us What America Can and Should Be About”—A Worrying Proliferation From Logo to Story 13 Brands in Crisis — Beneath the Swoosh, the Sweatshops — What's in a Name? — The Brand ts a Story — The “Narrative World” of Brands — The Dream Soctety The Invention of Storytelling Management roy A Story For Our Times — The Stlence of the Start-Ups —A History of Silence — “Don’t Keep Quiet: Tell Stories” — Management Theorists and the “Narrative Turn” — Telling Stortes About Work — The Magical Fables of Capitalism s Gurus — Gurus, Purveyors ofManagerial Fashion — Shakespeare on Management The New “Fiction Economy” 53 India’s Call Centers and the Globalization of Minds — The Souls of the Outsourced — The “Fictionalization” of Workplace Relations — Emotional Capitalism's New Authority Model — Fictions About Companies or Fictional Companies — The Destructuring Effects of the Apologia for Permanent Change — Storytelling ’s Response The Mutant Companies of New-Age Capitalism 69 Managing Removals at Renault — Computer-Asststed Storytelling — “Storytelling Companies” — Enron: A Fabulous Story From Wall Street—Stories: The Financial Manager‘s Best Currency Turning Politics Into a Story 81 Ashley's Story —A 9/11 Family — “They Produce a Narrative, We Produce a Litany” —Power Through Narrative —The Great Communicator Reagan, ano his Disciples Clinton and Sarkozy — Postmodern Prestoents — Watergate and the Coming of the Spin Doctors — Creating a Counter-Reality — Scheherazade s Strategy Telling War Stories 103 Virtual Warfare in Baghdad —From Cold War to Fake War— The Issue of “Realism” — “Do We Have the Right Story?” —The “Story Drive” Project — “Weapons ofMass Distraction” — War: A Counter-Narrative — Hollywood and the Pentagon Work Together —2A4: Fiction Normalizes States ofEmergency The Propaganda Empire “We're An Empire... And We Create Our Own Reality” —From Propaganda to Infotainment —Fox News: A Mutation in the History of the Media — The Lie Industry —A Magician at Headquarters — From Uncle Ben's to Uncle Sam — Storytelling ad Propaganda — “Fire in the Mind” Afterword: Obama in Fabula Stortes Degree Xerox — Hillary Clinton's “Cojones” — Sister Sarah and Sexy Palin — Obamas Magic Square — Politics’ “Second Life” —Obama‘s Narrator — The Politics of Signa —A Strategtst Appeals to the American Unconscious Notes 161  Introduction: The Magic of Narrative, or, the Art of Telling Stories _ On the streets of a war-torn town, a group of children gathered near a football pitch warn you that there are mines in the area. A woman accuses you of murdering her husband. A man is approaching on a donkey cart: is this the individual your commanding officer suspects has been smuggling explosives? The strange lettering of the Arabic graffiti on the walls means nothing to you. How are you going to react? You have five minutes left. Your radio reminds you to act fast. You remember your mission: “Trust no one and nothing. Don’t believe any- thing or anyone. But let them know you are there and on your guard.” This is not the screenplay for a war film. It is a video game used to train American troops to fight in Iraq. It was developed by the Institute for Creative Technologies, a research center at the University of Southern California founded by the Pentagon in 1999. Its mission is to make Hollywood's expertise available to the Pentagon so as to develop new training methods. When it was set up, for the Army Secretary Louis Caldera made no secret of the new institute’s ambitions: “This will revo- lutionize the way the Army trains its soldiers.” To turn to a very different situation: “ ‘Stories are for children,’ he said, laughing at my suggestion that we should start the session by reading a children’s book,” recalls business consultant Diana Hartely: The people in the room went quiet and lowered their heads, looking tense and embarrassed. This arrogant manager had been provoking me throughout the morning session. I was at a summer school being run by one of world’s biggest manufacturers of semi-conductors. STORYTELLING Everyone in the room was at least a director, and the guy who did not want to listen to a story was the company’s number five. I took a deep breath, walked forward confidently and placed a chair in front of the class in the way that a schoolteacher sits facing her class. I began to read the story of Harold and the Purple Crayon in a sing-song voice, artic- ulating every word and stopping at the bottom of every page to show the picture to my class of leaders. I watched them as I did so, and I began to see that their expressions softened because they were listen- ing to the story not with their intellect but with their inner child. Their inner child, the one who used to believe in the magic of possible worlds, was beginning to come to life; I began to see innocent smiles and looks. Our hero Harold was taking them back to a time in their lives when anything was possible. Even the skeptical executive had calmed down. There was more color in their cheeks, and their faces looked both younger and inspired. It had taken them a few minutes to relax, to believe, like children, that they too could be Harold as he drew his path through the obstacles with thick strokes of fat purple crayon. Now that they had calmed down, the class was ready to accept the idea that change could come about without conflict, personality clashes or tension. These high-level executives were pre- pared to believe, without any PowerPoint projections, without any graphics and without any pictures, that it simply was possible to play together and to create something that was both innovatory and brilliant.” We have here two types of exercise: military training and a company training session. The stories are not addressed to the same audience and do not have the same objectives. The first is addressed to American troops serving in Iraq, and the second to the executives of a multina- tional. One trains soldiers to deal with unknown threats in a situation of asymmetrical warfare against terrorism, and the other trains managers to adapt to the unexpected, “the one thing every manager can be certain of in a globalized world.” The purpose of the ES5 video game (Every Soldier Isa Sensor) is to trigger rapid and autonomous responses in a hostile envi- ronment. In order to do so, it uses the technology of interactive video games. The purpose of leadership training courses is simply to use the magic of narrative to get people to accept “the idea that sudden changes within the company can come about without conflict, personality clashes or  INTRODUCTION tension.” The video game teaches troops to repel the enemy; the training course teaches executives to welcome change. What do command and leadership have in common? What do war and the management of a company have in common? Although they are chosen from sectors that could not be further removed from one another, these two exercises use the same “storytelling” techniques that emerged in the United States in the mid 1990s. They now take increasingly sophisticated forms in both the world of management and that of polit- ical communications. They mobilize very different ways of using narrative, from the oral tales told by griots or traditional storytellers to “digital storytelling,” which immerse us in rears and tightly scripted virtual worlds. So both managers and military men should tell themselves stories... but to what end? Education and training? But why rely on stories when discipline and expertise previously played that role in, respectively, the army and the world of business? Why should two institutions that are so obedient to the reality principle suddenly begin to obey the rules of efficacious fictions and useful stories? And how long have they been doing so? The Storytelling Revival “In recent years, storytelling has been promoted in surprising places,” writes the American sociologist Francesca Polletta in her major study of storytelling in politics: Managers are now urged to tell stories to motivate workers and doctors are trained to listen to the stories their patients tell. Reporters have rallied around a movement for narrative journalism and psychol- ogists around a movement for narrative therapy. Every year, tens of thousands of people visit the International Storytelling Center in Jonesborough, Tennessee, or flock to one of the more than two hundred storytelling festivals held around the country. And a quick scan of any bookstore reveals scores of popular books on the art of storytelling as a route to spirituality, a strategy toy grant seekers, a mode of conflict resolution, and a weight-loss plan.” STORYTELLING Long regarded as a form of communication reserved for children and as a marginal leisure activity to be analyzed in literary studies (linguistics, rhetoric, textual grammar, narratology), since the mid 1990s storytelling has enjoyed a surprising success in the United States that has been described as a triumph, a renaissance or a “revival.” It is a form of discourse that has come to dominate all sectors of society and that tran- scends political, cultural, or professional divisions, and it lends credence to the idea of what researchers in the social sciences call the “narrative turn.” It has subsequently been likened to the dawn of a new “narrative” age. But is there really anything new about this? “The essence of American presidential leadership, and the secret of presidential success, is story- telling,” writes Evan Cornog, who teaches journalism at Columbia University, in an essay that re-examines the history of American presi- dencies from George Washington to George W. Bush through the prism of storytelling: From the earliest days of the American republic to the present, those seeking the nation’s highest office have had to tell persuasive stories — about the nation, about its problems, and, most of all, about themselves —to those who have the power to elect them. Once a president is in office, the ability to tell the right story, and to change the story as nec- essary, is crucial to the success of his administration. And once a president has left office, he often spends his remaining years working to ensure that the story as he sees it is the one accepted by history. Without a good story, there is no power, and no glory.” Our perception of US history leaves us with a great difficulty distin- guishing between true and false, and between what is real and what is fictional. Remember how President Ronald Reagan would sometimes evoke an episode from some old war film as though it were part of the actual history of the United States... That history is cluttered with fic- tions and legends; witness the often-cited line from John Ford’s film The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance: “When legend becomes truth, print the legend.” Gilles Deleuze, on the other hand, thought that the superiority of American literature had to do with a certain relationship with the real, with space, and with the idea of the frontier and of conquest. All its  INTRODUCTION great narratives —how the West was won, the legends of the far North, flights to the South ~are about crossing borders: “Everything is depar- ture, becoming, passage, leap, daemon, relationship with the outside. They create a new Earth.” This narrative construction of the nation was further reinforced by the influx of immigrants throughout the twen- tieth century. For a long time, America represented much more than a destination on a map and was magnified by Hollywood’s images of a “narrative horizon” to which emigrants from all over the world flocked. It was a country where anything was possible. Everyone could write their story on a blank page and start a new life. It was both a nation anda narration. y Many other cultural features testify to the undeniable vitality of the American narrative: the power of the novel from Mark Twain to Don DeLillo, the power of Hollywood movies ever since the studio system was established, the wealth of the folklore transmitted by oral stories and folk songs in the 1950s, the institutionalization of writers’ workshops in the universities from the 1960s onwards (which is so alien to the roman- tic notion of inspiration or the eminently French vision of the lonely, misunderstood genius), or the increase in the number of storytelling fes- tivals, which have mushroomed all over the country ever since the Jonesborough National Storytelling Festival was established in 1972. And yet it would be a mistake to confuse this tradition with the contemporary triumph of storytelling. In an article entitled “Not The Same Old Story,” Lov Angeles Times staff writer Lynn Smith stresses the novel character of the phenomenon, which transcends disciplinary frontiers and sectors of activity: From cavemen to scholars, people have been drawn to fire pits, water coolers, theatres and grave sites to share stories... But since the postmodern literary movement of the 1960s swept out of academia and into the wider culture, narrative thinking has seeped into other fields. Historians, lawyers, physicians, economists and psychologists have all rediscovered the power of stories to frame reality, and story- telling has come to rival logic as a way to understand legal cases, geography, illness or war. Stories have become so pervasive, critics fear they have become a dangerous replacement for facts and reasoned argument... Persuasive stories can be spun out of false memories or into propaganda. People deceive themselves with their own stories. A STORYTELLING story that provides a reassuring explanation of events can also mislead by leaving out contradictions and complexities... “Before, it was ‘That’s only a story, give me the facts,’ adds Paul Costello, co-founder of the small Center for Narrative Studies in Washington, DC, which was formed six years ago to track the spreading use and practice of narrative. Now, he said, more people are realizing that “stories have real effects that have got to be looked at seriously..% Narrative as Instrument of Control The success of the narrative approach first became apparent in the field of the human sciences. From about 1995 onwards, this development was described as “the narrativist turn,” and it soon spread to the social sci- ences. In the 1980s, the economist Deirdre N. McCloskey was already defending the idea that economics is essentially a narrative discipline: “It is no accident that the novel and economic science were born at the same time.” And the physicist Steven Weinberg was claiming that convincing stories made it possible to channel millions of dollars into research. For his part, Jerome Brunner asserts that “law lives on narrative,” while law professor Anthony G. Amsterdam claims that “the narrative presenta- tion of events pervades legal adjudication.” In 2006, a colloquium in Finland made it possible to take stock of the extent of the phenomenon. The theme was “The Traveling Concept of Narrative,” and it brought together participants from different disci- plines who were interested in the narrative approach. After a centuries- old tradition of travel stories, it is now the very concept of narrative that has begun to drift from one scientific continent to another: from psychol- ogy to education, from the social sciences to political science, from medical research to law and theology or the cognitive sciences. In 2000, Brian Richardson observed, “Now, narrative is everywhere.” Five years later, James Phelan warned us about the need to be alert to “narrative imperialism.” It is thanks to this shift that storytelling has been able to emerge as a technology of communications, control, and power. The narrativist turn of the mid 1990s in the social sciences coincided with the Internet explo- sion and the advances in the new information and communications technologies that created the preconditions for the “storytelling revival” and that allowed it to spread so rapidly. NGOs, government agencies,  INTRODUCTION and big companies increasingly discovered the effectiveness of storytell- ing. In 2006, the American management consultant Lori Silverman noted that NASA, Verizon, Nike, and Land’s End all regarded storytell- ing as the most effective approach to business. Popularized by the highly effective lobbying of new gurus, storytelling management is now regarded as something decision-makers cannot do without, no matter whether they are in politics, economics, telecommunications, the universities, or diplomacy. If you wish to bring commercial negotiations to a successful conclu- sion, get rival factions to sign a peace treaty, launch a new product, get a team to accept a major change (including its own firing), design a “serious” video game, or treat GIs suffering from postwar trauma, story- telling is regarded as a panacea. Pedagogues use it as a teaching technique, and psychologists use it as a way of treating traumas. It pro- vides an answer to the crisis of meaning in organizations, and it is a propaganda tool. It is an immersion mechanism, a tool for profiling indi- viduals, a technique for visualizing information, and a powerful way of spreading disinformation. “I suppose,” writes Peter Brooks, a British narratologist who has taught in the United States for a long time, “that literary critics interested in the workings of narrative and the pervasive presence of ‘narrativity’ in culture ought to be content that their subject of study appears to have colonized large realms of discourse both popular and academic. The problem, however, is that the very promiscuity of the idea of narrative may have rendered the concept useless.”"” The rise of storytelling in fact looks like a Pyrrhic victory and may even have trivialized the very concept of narrative and brought about a deliberate confusion between true narrative and the mere exchange of stories, between eye-witness accounts and fiction, between spontaneous narrativity (oral or written) and annual reports. The instrumental use of narrative for the purposes of management and control has, for instance, resulted in denunciations of the fictional contract (which allows us to distinguish between reality and fiction and to suspend our disbelief for the duration of the story) because it transforms readers into guinea pigs and what management calls “tracked experiences,” or, in other words, behaviors that are subject to experimental protocols. STORYTELLING “Stories That Really Tell Us What America Can and Should Be About” I first heard of the storytelling revival during the winter of 2001. It was March, and I was in the small town of Ithaca, New York. I had been invited by Cornell University to introduce the International Parliament of Writers’ “Cities of Asylum” program. After a day of meetings, Anne Berger, who teaches French literature at Cornell and who was the Parliament's US correspondent, invited me to her home for dinner with two friends: Philip Lewis, Professor of French Literature and Dean of Cornell’s College of Arts and Sciences, and his wife Catherine Porter, one of the main translators of “French Theory” in the United States. Philip, an amiable bearded man in his fifties, greeted us wearing an apron and took us into the kitchen, where he was finishing preparing dinner, with a big spoon in one hand and the latest issue of the Chronicle ofHigher Education in the other. The Chronicle is the academics’ in-house journal and a real institution in academic life. Our host was enthusiastically brandishing the latest issue in a kitchen filled with the aroma of oranges and tarragon. It was like being in a novel by David Lodge. His enthusiasm was stimulated by an article by Peter Brooks, the academic we have already mentioned. “Stories Abounding” analyzed a recent speech by George W. Bush, who had just been elected to the White House. In it, he used the word “story” no fewer that ten times! Academics are always pleased to discover that their research topic has emerged from their piles of dusty books and been applied to current events. They like nothing so much as noticing that what they were study- ing in solitude has suddenly emerged into the broad light of day. The article begins by citing the first sentence of Roland Barthes’ famous essay “Introduction to the Structural Analysis of Narrative”: “The narra- tives of the world are numberless...” The essay gave birth to the new discipline Tzvetan Todorov called “narratology,” and which has had con- siderable influence in the United States.'” Barthes’ essay goes on: Under this almost infinite diversity of forms, narrative is present in every age, in every place, in every society; it begins with the very history of mankind and there nowhere is or has been a people without narrative. All classes, all human groups, have their narrative, enjoy- ment of which is very often shared by men with very different, even opposing, cultural backgrounds. Caring nothing for the division  INTRODUCTION between good and bad literature, narrative is international, trans- historical, transcultural: it is simply there, like life itself.’ Peter Brooks comments: But Barthes never predicted the coming of a US president who would introduce members of his cabinet with the phrase: “Each person has got their own story that is so unique: stories really explain what America can and should be about.” And more simply (in presenting Secretary of State Colin Powell), “A great American story.” And simpler still (in presenting Transportation Secretary Norman Y. Mineta), “I love his story.” And sure enough, in his brief inaugural address, Bush... starting with “We have a place, all of us, in a long story—a story we continue, but whose end we will not see,” and ending thus: “This story goes on.” Again, one has the impression that oe is Bush’s embracing category for making sense of the world. We laughed and sat down at the table. It was the autumn of 2001, or shortly before 9/11, and it was still possible to laugh at George W. Bush in all innocence. Since then, we have had wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib, and jokes about Bush Jr. no longer have the same flavor. ; How could Roland Barthes’ idea that narrative is one of the great cate- gories of knowledge that we use to understand and organize the world come to dominate political subculture, management methods, and adver- tising? What are we to think of the new vulgate that tells us that all discourses — political, ideological, or cultural —should adopt a narrative form? By way of explanation, Brooks stressed that TV series were having a growing impact on the lives of Americans, and even on his aca- demic colleagues. He cited the example of friends who would rather watch The West Wing than CNN news. According to Brooks, both politi- cal communications and journalism “overused” the notion of narrative. Two months later, Loft Story triumphed on French television. Big Brother was already a hit in most European countries.” And after 9/11, the United States succumbed to a narrative fever that was to find expres- sion in everything from the archaic form of oral stories and folk songs to the technologies of digital storytelling (webcams, blogs, interactive STORYTELLING television). In the reality TV studics, as on video game consoles, the screens of mobile phones and computers, and from bedrooms to cars, reality is now caught in a narrative net that filters perceptions and stimu- lates useful emotions. The great narratives that punctuate human history —from Homer to Tolstoy and from Sophocles to Shakespeare —told of universal myths and transmitted the lessons learned by past generations. They passed on lessons in wisdom that were the fruit of cumulative experience. Storytell- ing goes in the opposite direction: it tacks artificial narratives on to reality, blocks exchanges, and saturates symbolic space with its series and stories. It does not talk about past experience. It shapes behaviors and channels flows of emotion. Far from being the “course of recogni- tion” that Paul Ricoeur detected in narrative activity,” storytelling establishes narrative systems that lead individuals to identify with models and to conform to protocols. A Worrying Proliferation The aim of this book is to retrace this history by analyzing the unprece- dented development of this instrumental use of narrative. Where did it begin? How are we to explain its rise in the United States and then in Europe, and in activities that were previously governed by rational argument or scientific discourse? Who are the agents of its production? What is at stake in its symbolic construction, and what are its figures? What obscure paths have allowed it to spread from the central appara- tuses of power to the most individual practices? Is it a top-down process, or does it obey a logic of contagion that allows it to spread from one sector to another? To what extent is it legitimized by the narrative approach in the social sciences? What role does technology or ideology play in its proliferation? Thanks to the Internet, we now enjoy an abundance of information that was inaccessible ten years ago. In the time it took to write this book, the number of times the word “storytelling” turned up on the Internet increased threefold. It is being used more often by the day and has moved from institutional sites (companies, consultants, universities) to the main American newspapers, and to the webzines and blogs that constitute new spaces from which it cari spread still further. These obser- vations are not purely methodological —it was the Web that allowed me  INTRODUCTION to conduct my survey by taking a critical look at the incredible diversity of its documentary resources. They are an integral part of the phenome- non we are studying, which would be unthinkable without the incessant noise of its statements and discourses. I examine these new uses of narrative in seven chapters that are so many stages in a journey through the virtual world of storytelling, with its writing machines, its tracking and control systems, its narrative spirals, its formats and its networks. In order to do so, I studied the emotion-producing industries that give us collective fables. They include, of course, Hollywood and Disney, but also Nike, Coca-Cola, Adobe, and Microsoft, Xerox’s factories and the glass towers of the World Bank, which is where the first experiment in storytelling manage- ment was carried out. I have also had to decipher the discourse of the management gurus and griots, which stimulate useful affects and spread, thanks to their performativity, the “stories of the heroes and heroines who make success possible.””” I have analyzed the websites of the media consultancies who sell the dream society in which work will be directed by stories and emotions, and in which we will buy not just commodities but also the stories they tell. And I have explored the other side of the dream society, the “non-fictional” reality of the sweatshops of Latin America where the labor of children is exploited, and the Indian call centers where young recruits learn to “become American” by watching TV series. I have also looked at the activities of the White House’s spin doctors, who claim to be able to use storytelling to create political reali- ties that are always new, and at the aforementioned Institute for Creative Technologies in Los Angeles. The first chapter deals with marketing. It describes how the technolo- gies that make it possible to sell commodities were, over a period of some fifteen years, displaced from product to logo, and then from logo to story. The brand image that dominated marketing in the 1980s was replaced by the “brand story” from 1995 onwards. This change implies the appear- ance of a new lexicon in which “audience” replaces “consumers” and “narrative sequences” replace advertising “campaigns.” Chapter 2 traces the invention of storytelling management in the 1990s, charged with using shared narrative to mobilize emotions. This discourse is addressed primarily to managers; its function is to transform the virtues of autonomy and responsibility, leadership and innovation, and flexibility and adaptability into narratives. STORYTELLING Chapter 3 identifies the three constituent elements of the neo-manage- ment of the first decade of the twenty-first century: 1) the injunction to change; 2) the management of emotions, which goes hand in hand with the constitution of capitalism's new “subject” —a consumer, wage-earner or manager —who is defined as a “suffering self” and an emotional self; 3) the use of stories to manage that emotional ego. Chapter 4 looks at the link between these new mobilizing techniques and the appearance of a new form of labor organization that is mutant, centralized, and nomadic. Its ideal is adaptation to a changing and unpredictable environment, and the adaptation of the quest for profit to ever shorter cycles. Chapter 5 is devoted to storytelling’s hold over political discourses in the United States. It evokes the trauma of Watergate, the executive's obsessions with controlling the media, and the invention of spin doctors under Ronald Reagan and of story spinners under Clinton. It also looks at how, under George W. Bush, Karl Rove's “Scheherazade strategy” made storytelling the key to winning and exercising power. Chapter 6 analyzes the growing convergence between the Pentagon and Hollywood, which led to the establishment of the Institute for Cre- ative Technologies in 1999. This was a production studio that brought together army experts and Hollywood's best scriptwriters. Within five years it became the main producer of video games designed to recruit and train military personnel. Chapter 7 reveals, finally, how, from September 11, 2001 onwards, American diplomacy adopted a marketing logic, even going so far as to recruit “branding” specialists for diplomatic positions, whose job is to “sell America to the world as a brand.” The art of narrative—which, ever since it emerged, has recounted humanity's experience by shedding light on it—has become, like story- telling, an instrument that allows the state to lie and to control public opinion. Behind the brands and the TV series, and in the shadows ofvic- torious election campaigns from Bush to Sarkozy, as well as in those of military campaigns in Iraq and elsewhere, there are dedicated storytell- ing technicians. The empire has confiscated narrative. This book tells the incredible story of how it has hijacked the imaginary.  | From Logo to Story In 2000, Canadian journalist Naomi Klein wrote in her book No Logo: “The astronomical growth in the wealth and cultural influence of multi- national corporations over the last fifteen years can arguably be traced ~ back to a single, seemingly innocuous idea developed by management theorists in the mid-1980s: that successful corporations must primarily produce brands, as opposed to products.”' Ten years later, the same theorists had changed their minds; corporations must produce stories, as opposed to brands. According to Seth Godin, an American innovator in viral marketing, the new marketing is “about telling stories, not selling commercials.” And according to Laurence Vincent, the author of Legendary Brands, “Legend- ary brands are based on narrative construction, and the narrative they tell is the basis of their empathetic consumer affinity.”” For his part, William Ryan, the man who transformed Apple’s image when the iMac was launched, asserts that we should “Forget traditional positioning and brand-centric approaches. We're now in the ‘Age of the Narrative’ where the biggest challenge facing companies is how to tell their story in the most compelling, consistent, and credible way possible —both inter- nally and externally.” So what happened in the space of ten years? Why does marketing now recommend the brand story rather than the brand image? Have logos lost their aura? How can we explain why the companies we described as postmodern or postindustrial suddenly abandoned the path of branding, which made them so successful in the 1990s, and began to explore the uncharted realm of pre-modern myths and fabulous stories? The aura of a brand used to come from the product; people who liked the Ford brand drove Ford cars all their lives. Singer owed its prestige to the sewing machine, which was both a piece of furniture and a tool that STORYTELLING was handed down from one generation to the next. “By the end of the 1940s,” Naomi Klein writes, “there was a burgeoning awareness that a brand wasn’t just a mascot or a catchphrase or a picture painted on the label of a company’s product; the company as a whole could have a brand identity or a “corporate consciousness,” as this ephemeral quality was termed at the time.” By the beginning of the 1980s, General Motors’ advertisements were already telling “stories about the people who drove its cars — the preacher, the pharmacist or the country doctor who, thanks to his trusty GM, arrives ‘at the bedside of a dying child’ just in time ‘to bring it back to life.’”° But the advertising still focused on the product, its uses and its qualities, whereas companies like Nike, Microsoft, and, later, Tommy Hilfiger and Intel were already turning away from prod- ucts and producing brand-images rather than objects. Brands in Crtsts Nothing, apparently, had changed at the beginning of the new millen- nium: the number of brands registered in the United States was constantly increasing (140,000 new trade marks in 2003 — 100,000 more than in 1983). Big companies were still spending billions of dollars on sponsorship, and David Foster Wallace’s joke in his novel Jnfinite Jest about an America in which corporations would sponsor entire years — the Year of the Whopper, the Year of the Depend Adult Undergar- ment’ —no longer seemed far-fetched. “In the past decade, corporations looking to navigate an ever more competitive marketplace have embraced the gospel of branding with new- found fervor,” wrote James Surowiecki in a demystifying article on “The Decline of Brands” in November 2004: The brand value of companies like Coca-Cola and IBM is routinely calculated at tens ofbillions of dollars, and brands had come to be seen as the ultimate long-term asset—economic agents capable of with- standing turbulence and generating profits for decades... Even as companies have spent enormous amounts of time and energy intro- ducing new brands and defending established ones, Americans have become less loyal A  FROM LOGO TO STORY According to the retail-tracking firm NPD Group, nearly half those who described themselves as highly loyal to a brand were no longer loyal a year later. Because consumers were more promiscuous, established brands were vulnerable, and new ones had a real chance of succeeding. One index of this vulnerability was that the brands that had been the symbol of the multinationals’ prosperity in the 1990s had suddenly lost their prestige and commercial power. Nokia, the brand ranked sixth in the world in 2002, saw its sales collapse the following year and suffered a loss of $6 billion. Krispy Kreme, described as “hottest brand” by Fortune magazine in 2003, and with an estimated value of $30 billion, was dethroned by Atkins in 2004 ott “Paradoxical,” “incomprehensible” and “unpredictable” were the words that marketers have used most often to describe consumer behavior since the beginning of the millennium. “Just ten years ago,” according to the September 18, 2006, issue of the French business paper Les Echos, “socioprofessional categories were enough to identify consumers” habits and even their desires. Alas. The way our modern societies are developing demonstrates the obsolescence of that approach by the day. "1! At the same time, the director of studies for the opinion-polling firm IPSOS stated: “We are addressing consumers who are no longer under the brands’ spell; they have become experts... and that makes them difficult to handle.”” For his part, Rémy Sansaloni, head of market research and documentation at TNS/Média Intelligence and author of a book entitled The Neo-consumer: How Consumers Are Regaining their Power, took the view that “Consumers are reacting to the anarchic development of pseudo-innovations, promotions right, left and center, and the way mass marketing is standardizing supply, by making themselves scarce.” The birth of new media, and the huge opportunities for “viral” adver- tising opened up by the Internet, have put an end to the unchallenged power of advertising and television. The era of brand advertising is coming to an end. More and more death notices are being posted. According to the authors ofthe bestselling The Fall ofAdvertising, “Adver- tising has lost its power... Advertising has no credit with consumers, who are increasingly sceptical of its claims.”"" And according to former Coca-Cola marketing director Sergio Zyman, writing in 2002, “Adver- tising, as you know it, is dead... It doesn’t work, it’s a colossal waste of money, and if you don’t wise up it could end up destroying... your 15 brand.” STORYTELLING Beneath the Swoosh, the Sweatshops “At the beginning of October 2003, the population of Vienna was intrigued to find that a strange container had taken up residence in one of the city’s main squares,” the Geneva-based newspaper Le Courrier reported on October 31, 2003. The container, which bore the legend “Nikeground. Rethinking Space,” informed the population that the square had been bought by Nike, and that it was therefore going to be renamed “Nikeplatz.” A red swoosh—the stylized comma used as a logo by the sports gear firm—measuring 18 meters by 36—would be flown over Vienna. “Hostesses, all dressed in Nike, explained to visitors that the legendary brand would be present all over Europe: over the next few years, Nikesquares, Nikestreets, Piazzanikes and Nikestrafes would flourish in all the great capitals of the world.” Nike was forced to react. “This operation is a fraud; we have nothing to do with it. It is a violation of copyright,” explained a spokesperson for the company. It was soon discovered that a mischievous artists’ collec- tive with the unlikely name of 0100101110101101.org was behind the operation. It explained on its website that its goal was to “produce a col- lective hallucination that could change the way the Viennese saw their city.” Nike’s ire provoked some amused reactions from the impish artists, reported Le Courrier: “‘Where is the famous Nike spirit? I expected to be dealing with sportspeople and not a bunch of boring lawyers,’ explained a spokesman for the collective.”"° Nike lodged a complaint and, in a thirty-page document sent to the Austrian Ministry of Justice, demanded the immediate removal of the installations —real and virtual —in the name of brand protection. One is reminded of Naomi Klein’s ironic comment: “Branding... is a balloon economy: it inflates with astonishing rapidity but it is full of hot air. It shouldn't be surprising that this formula has bred armies of pin-wielding critics, eager to burst the corporate balloon.””” By the end of the 1990s, anti-brand movements were spreading rapidly. Groups of activists and artists like the “Reclaim the Streets” movement began to challenge the way the brands were taking over public space. The “labeling” of all human activity (commercial and otherwise, eco- nomic and cultural), the way humanitarian NGOs and ecological struggles were being commercialized by branding, and the logos’ tyranny over the whole of social life, were met with a wave of increasingly  FROM LOGO TO STORY virulent protests. This was a paradoxical phenomenon: the more a brand identified with transgressive value, the more protests it generated. That is what happened to Nike. From 1995 onwards, in light of many studies carried out in Asia, Africa, and Latin America, public opinion in the industrialized countries began to learn about the working conditions of the men and women who make the divine garments and the flying sneakers. “In China, the vast majority of women workers are paid much less than the legal minimum wage,’ the Berne Declaration (a Swiss NGO campaigning for fair trade) stated in 2002. “On average, they work twelve hours a day and up to seven days a week, in violation of both Chinese legislation and Nike’s code. The situation is similar in Vietnam and Indonesia.” Growing numbers of NGO campaigns in the United States, Canada, Australia, and Europe described working conditions in these sweatshops. In California, Nike was taken to court and charged with misleading advertising. Michael Moore's film The Big One, in which Nike’s Chairman and CEO Phillip Knight justifies the child labor of fourteen-year-olds, had a devastating effect on the swoosh brand. Speaking in Brussels at a conference on the growing power of anti-corporate groups, Peter Verhille of the PR firm Entente International admitted that “one of the major strengths of the pressure groups... is their ability to exploit the instruments of the telecommunications revolution. Their agile use of global tools such as the Internet reduces the advantage that corporate budgets once provided.” The anti-Nike movement's campaigns were revealing globalization’s black holes: they shed light on the invisible links between the brands and their sub-contractors, between the marketing agencies and the under- ground workshops, between the footballs used by the athletes at the 2008 World Cup and the hands ofthe children who made them. Beneath Nike’s swoosh, the sweatshops. On May 12, 1998, Phillip Knight told a press conference at the National Press Club in Washington that the company was taking initiatives “to further improve factory working conditions worldwide and provide increased opportunities for people who manufacture Nike products,” and admitted that Nike had become “synonymous with slave wages, forced overtime, and arbitrary abuse.” These measures could, at best, put an end to the scandal of the sweat- shops. Was Nike about to commit itselfto a new labor policy? But would that be enough to restore the brand’s magic, or at least to appear to do STORYTELLING so? The reason why demonstrations and artistic performances had succeeded in undermining Nike’s swoosh was that the image was no longer enough. The brand had to be based upon something less volatile than a slogan, an elegant logo, or an eye-catching commercial. What's in a Name? Theorists of branding were summoned to the brand’s bedside. MTV's founder Tom Freston had already issued a warning in 1998: “You can beat a brand to death.””’ Everyone was agreed about one thing: brands were sick. Serious questions were being asked about their future: “It can take 100 years to build up a good brand and 30 days to knock it down,” complained John Hancock Mutual Life Insurance president in January 1999.” Branding evangelist Tom Peters wondered: “How much is enough? Nobody knows for sure. It’s pure art. Leverage is good. Too much leverage is bad.” Kevin Roberts, CEO of the Saatchi and Saatchi advertising agency and author of Lovemarks agreed: “Brands have run out of juice. They’re dead.” Nike was a victim of its own excessive fame, and Wall Street com- mented that it had “outswooshed itself.””” So can a brand’s fame plateau, and then begin to depreciate and lose its influence? According to James Surowiecki, brands do indeed wear out: “They're becoming nothing more than shadows. You wouldn't expect your shadow to protect you or show you the way.” The firms decided to go back to basics. The role of marketing is to sell, and that objective can be obtained in various differ- ent ways: through aggressive advertising or material inducements, directly or indirectly with advertisements that have a subliminal influence, but also by involving the consumer in a long-term emotional relation- ship. That is the brand’s role: to “involve” the consumer. That is why brands are effective, and why they are mysterious. In the famous passage on commodity fetishism in Capital, Marx writes: “If commodities could speak, they would say this: our use-value may interest men, but it does not belong to us as objects. What does belong to us as objects, however, is our value.”” What was for Marx no more than a rhetorical hypothesis has become a reality: brands have begun to speak. And “when these brands speak, consumers listen intently. When these brands act, consumers follow... These brands are not just market- ; i é 1 7p, 028 ing constructs: they are figures in the consumer's life.  FROM LOGO TO STORY In the 1990s, brands began to express themselves through dazzling logos —Apple’s apple, Nike's swoosh, the oil company’s shell, McDonald’s golden arches ~and all kinds of pictograms. The product was dissolved into the brand. Within a decade, the logo, even more so than money, had become the sign of wealth. And the brand became a pure value that shim- mered in the sky of the stock exchanges. James Suroweicki made the point that Marketers aren’t completely deceived (or being deceiving) when they argue that consumers make emotional bonds with brands, but those connections are increasingly tenuous... Gurus talk about building an image to create a halo over a company’s products. But these days, the only sure way to keep a brand strong is to keep on wheeling out new products, which will in turn cast the halo. (The iPod has made a lot more people interested in Apple than Apple made people interested in the iPod).”” “What's ina name?” asked Shakespeare in Romeo and Juliet. “That which we call a rose/By any other name would smell as sweet.” Ashraf Ramzy —a marketing consultant whose clients include Nissan, Canon, and KLM~—and Alicia Korten asked the same question of brands in 2006.°° What’s in a brand? An image? A reputation? What is the unique and indefinable thing that defines a company for its clients and that makes it different from its competitors? Is there such a thing as a brand essence? Or does its aura develop from familiarity with the brand and its market because we have seen the advertising campaigns or seen the product on the supermarket shelves? Does it emerge from ferocious battles with its competitors? Some saw brands as images that were as abstract and eternal as possible. They were signs or signifiers, not signifieds. Others put the emphasis on their historical nature. In the almost metaphysical debates that were born of the realization that the prescriptive power of brands had been exhausted, the latter view prevailed and cleverly exploited the wave of protests about the social realities that lay behind the logos. Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello have clearly demonstrated that the “spirit of capitalism” renews itself by inte- grating its opponents’ criticisms: “To maintain its powers of attraction, capitalism therefore has to draw upon resources external to itself, beliefs which, at a given moment in time, possess considerable powers of per- STORYTELLING suasion.”” The vocabulary and spirit of the management of the 1990s were, for example, imbued with the demands of May ’68’s students as they protested against what they saw as an over-materialist society, with the movement's values (imagination, autonomy, authenticity), and even some of its slogans, such as the premonitory and over-familiar “Object, hide yourself,” or the question which, thirty years after the event, had become a marketing cliché: “Are you consumers or participants?” By the end of the 1990s, Nike no longer made anyone dream. Its name, slogan, and products had become bogged down in a shameful narrative that demonized its divine brand. No-logo activists had unexpected answers to the questions the marketing people were asking themselves: beneath the smooth logos of the brands one could see the women workers in Indonesia who assembled Nike’s sneakers, the child-slaves of Honduras who made sports gear for the Wal-Mart distribution chain, or the young women in Haiti who made “Pocahontas” pajamas for Disney, who were so exhausted that they had to feed their babies sugared water. Stories of suffering and exploitation. In June 1996, Jife magazine published photographs of Pakistani children making footballs bearing Nike’s logo. The pictures were seen all over the world. Brands concealed stories, and they were ugly stories. If those stories were to be done away with, and if the brands had to be saved, edifying stories had to be made up as a matter of urgency. And what better way to do that than to call on the services of the protesters? In August 1999, Amanda Tucker, the director of the ILO’s anti-child- labor program, was recruited by Nike. At the same time, Nike commis- sioned a report from some American academics. Throughout the 1990s, David M. Boje, who was one of the pioneers of “organizational story- telling,” had been involved in anti- Nike campaigns and, together with his students, had done theoretical work that deconstructed the Nike brand. According to Boje, companies were storytelling organizations. They were sites for multiple narratives and for a dialogue between stories that either contradicted or complemented one another. They were under- mined from within by issues that were narrative as well as economic, financial, or industrial. David Boje took his inspiration from Roland Barthes’ narratology as well as Guy Debord's thesis on the society of the spectacle; he also referred to the Russian semiologist Mikhail Bakhtin’s theories about the dialogic or polyphonic nature of narrative. Using all these inputs, Boje developed the paradigm for a new postmodern 20  FROM LOGO TO STORY organization that would constantly mutate and would communicate both internally and externally thanks to alternating strategies of narration and counter-narration. The exploitation stories that had demystified the Nike brand had to be challenged by other narratives or counter-narratives. The brand was no longer self-sufficient and had to become a vector for stories. If it reformulated its labor policy and made certain ecological commitments, explained Boje, Nike could create a new identity for itself “just in time.” Nike was not in the process of improving its moral standing, but just changing its story.” The Brand Is a Story From the beginning of the millennium onwards, those who ran the big American corporations therefore embarked upon ambitious projects to reconstruct their brands as narratives. The branding theorists who advised them converted to storytelling. Ashraf Ramzy, for instance, defines himself as a “mythmaker.” In 2002, he opened a strategy consul- tancy in Amsterdam and called it ‘Narrativity Strategy & Story B.V.’ His credo is: “People do not buy products; they buy the stories those products represent. Nor do they buy brands; they buy into the myths and archetypes these brands symbolize.”” He gives several examples, including whisky producer Chivas Brothers. By the late 1990s, the brand had begun to lose its prestige. Chivas Regal’s international mar- keting manager, Han Zantingh, explained: “Chivas was a whisky your father drank, something you gave as a gift but wouldn't drink yourself. The brand was known but completely not relevant... We wanted to support and nourish our brand essence: rich and generous. The original Chivas Brothers ultimately made a rich and generous blend because they themselves had a rich and generous attitude [towards] life.” The best way to nourish the brand was to use a good story. Chivas’ marketers therefore decided to re-write its history. A journalist was hired to tell the story of its glory days. The result was “The Chivas Legend,” which con- sists of twelve episodes from the centuries-old story of a twelve-year-old whisky. The story begins when Chivas was granted a royal warrant by the Queen during a visit to Balmoral in the nineteenth century. Chivas Brothers became royal suppliers to the throne. It continues with the 21 STORYTELLING story of the first malt, produced by the oldest distilleries in the High- lands: they were built in 1786. Then we reach the 1950s, when the brand’s success in the United States resonated with the spirit of the times— Dean Martin, Sammy Davis Jr., and Frank Sinatra. All these ‘richly evocative’ stories merge into one: The Chivas Legend, which now circulates in bars and discotheques, passed on by storytellers, just as stories were passed on in the good old days. They are now called “brand ambassadors.” Zantingh concludes: “By creating 7)he Chivas Legend, we reconnected our heritage and our audience. It not only stopped the decline of our market share in a brutally competitive arena, it reversed the trend. Our sales volume is now growing at double-digit rates.”” According to storytelling management’s guru Steve Denning, “A brand is essentially a relationship.”” This relationship may be tenuous and fragile, and may mean simply that the consumer is vaguely familiar with the brand name, or it may be long term. The paradox of modern marketing is in fact that it must develop consumer loyalty at a time when buying behaviors have become changeable, labile, and unpredictable. It has to bring fickle consumers back to the fold of the brand, and encourage them to commit themselves to a long-term emotional rela- tionship. “Say it with stories,” suggests Brand Advocate, a “relational marketing agency” that makes “three-minute minifilms” telling stories featuring the target clients. “No one has ever denied the power of stories,” asserted the French business magazine L’Entreprise when it reported this experiment.” For today’s marketers, making a brand famous or familiar to a mass of anonymous consumers is no longer enough; they have to create a unique emotional relationship between a brand and those who are loyal to it. This is relational marketing. “The job of amarketer today is to aggregate people. It’s not about eyeballs. It’s about engagement,” states Larry Weber, a marketing consultant who specializes in the new media. For that to happen, the brand must rediscover a strong and coherent identity that speaks to consumers as well as to the company’s collaborators— employees, shareholders, supphers, investors—and condense all the elements that go to make up the company into a coherent story: its history, the nature of the products its makes, the quality of its customer- care, labor relations, and its relationship with the environment. According to Ashraf Ramzy, Levi Strauss Signature’s CEO Scott Laporta took up this challenge when he had to relaunch a brand that was 22  FROM LOGO TO STORY losing its target customers: “We were a company that sold riveted jeans to gold miners. Yet our company was no longer targeting working-class heroes,” explained Laporta.”’ How could anyone sell a brand to the working class, when Levi Strauss was not present in discount chains like Wal-Mart or Target? Levi Strauss’s marketers went out to collect stories from the chains’ customers. A young woman called Heidi, who lived in a tract house in Pueblo, Colorado, told them that she was willing to drive sixty miles to buy a brand, not for herself (she did not wear Levis) but for her kids. Marketing director Michael Perman asked her why these brands were so important to her. She said that “the stuff at Wal-Mart” was “for other people,” meaning “the people on welfare,” the poor, the unemployed, and retired people. “What a profound moment for us. She wanted a brand - that respected her. This had value. She was willing to go sixty miles for this. She thought the retail representation [in the value channel] was disrespectful to her. What a profound opportunity if we could provide her with something that would bring her respect.” “The story of a working-class woman named Heidi brought the company back to its roots and inspired the creation and launch of the Levi Strauss Signature brand,” explained Laporta.” The example of Levi Strauss shows that storytelling is not just an effective way of attracting consumers and winning their loyalty. Marketers use this tool to understand what consumers think of the brand. Les Echos journalist Sophie Peters remarked in September 2006 that “traditional surveys have reached their limits.” Tired of being asked about anything and everything, and of endless questionnaires, the people being surveyed were reluctant to answer the interviewers’ questions, even when they were paid to do so. The marketers’ new weapon is “con- sumer insight.” This new approach has become standard for those industrialists who install cameras in private homes or who are so “bold as to send their workers to interview consumers in their own homes.” Neuromarketing goes still further; it uses the new techniques of medical imaging to observe consumers’ brain activity and subjects them to different stimuli or narrative schemata. Michel Reynard notes that at TNS Sofres, observation has been developed to the point of paranoia." 23 STORYTELLING The “Narrative World” of Brands In less than fifteen years, marketing has moved from products to logos, and then from logos to stories, from brand image to brand story. So much so that the title of Naomi Klein’s fine book, which had become syn- onymous with resistance to the tyranny of brands, could now be seen as neomarketing’s injunction: “No logo: stories.” It is not as though commodities and brands have disappeared. They are still there, as present as ever, but they have lost their status as objects or “reified” images. They talk to us and captivate us by telling us stories that fit in with our expectations and worldviews. When they are used on the Web, they transform us into storytellers. We spread their stories. Good stories are so fascinating that we are encouraged to tell them again. Barbara B. Stern, a professor in Rutgers University’s Department of Marketing, has shown that literary forms such as the ballad, the epic, metaphor, and irony have a growing influence on marketing. “What branding really is, is a story attached to a product. When you have a product that’s just like another product, there are any number of ways to compete. The stupid way is to lower prices. The smart way is to change the value of the product by telling a story about it.” It has become a commonplace to speak of the fragmentation of values, the loss of points of reference and the shattering of codes of behavior: con- sumers are no longer attracted to products, or even lifestyles, but they are attracted to “narrative worlds.” In times of economic crisis, when nostalgia marketing invokes the recurrent memory of some golden age, it mobilizes worlds that rely heavily on narratives. One brand of furniture, for instance, markets its “Bogart Collection” to celebrate “the return to all the style and elegance of Hollywood’s most romantic age,” while its Ernest Hemingway Collection is supposedly the embodiment of the “reputation and respect” inspired by the author and “his” line of furniture.” Given this proliferation of signs, neomarketing explains, consumers are looking for stories that allow them to reconstruct coherent worlds. It is now estimated that consumers in the industrialized countries are exposed to some 3,000 commercials every day. Brands that do not want to be swamped by this tide of advertising have to make themselves stand out, as Christian Budtz explains in his Storytelling: Branding in Practice: “Does your company have an original story to tell? A story that is so honest, captivating and unique, that we are willing to pay a price 24  FROM LOGO TO STORY premium to become part of it? Brands must build on an honest, authentic story that appeals to consumers’ personal values.”™ Not everyone endorses this naive justification for the recourse to stories. As the title of Seth Godin’s book puts it so cynically: “all marketers are liars.” He contends that “marketers lie to consumers because con- sumers demand it. Marketers tell the stories, and consumers believe them.” He goes on: There are new mothers who believe that happiness lies in the next new educational product for their infant, and there are bodybuilders who believe that the next nutritional supplement will provide them with the shortcut to a perfect body. There are environmentalists who are certain that the next scientific innovation will be mankind’s last, and xenophobes who know for sure that black helicopters from the United Nations are due to arrive tomorrow. Each of these groups wants to hear stories that support its worldview. Each group... sees itself as near the center, not on the fringe, and each group very much wants to be catered for.”° Disney, for example, came up with the idea of marketing educational videos entitled Baby Einstein. They were designed to stimulate the cogni- tive abilities of newborns and were supposed to give them a competitive edge over other babies or even transform them into “little Einsteins.” The videos, which are produced by a division of Disney, were wildly success- ful and made $14 million for the company, even though they were “virtually useless.” The explanation is simple: they were aimed not so much at infants as at their mothers and were in keeping with the legiti- mate intellectual ambitions they had for their children. By buying these “educational videos,” they were buying a “success story” for their newborn babies and were thus complicit in the company’s storytelling: “Stories let us lie to ourselves. And those lies satisfy our ideas. It’s the story, not the good or the service you actually sell, that pleases the con- sumer.”” Godin also gives the example of ethical investment, “which won't appeal to everyone.” But by merging two apparently contradic- tory ideas, it is possible to create a story to which many consumers will listen. The Acumen Fund 25 STORYTELLING envisions an organization that will take the best of the nonprofit world and blend it with the best elements of capitalism... They are choosing to tell a story to those dsatisfied with the traditional stories charities would like them to believe. They are reaching entrepreneurs looking for a different, more efficient philanthropic alternative, as well as foundations that are eager to make a name for themselves by funding organizations with a non-traditional approach to philanthropy. As Godin remarks with glee, all sorts of oxymorons now become possible: Non-donation Philanthropy. Return-on-Philanthropy. Social Capital Dividends.” “The words and images you use to tell a story are powerful tools. When those words or images conflict, you've created an oxymoron. Jumbo shrimp and military intelligence are the clichés, but there are countless success stories that were built around oxymorons.””” They make it possible to reach groups of consumers who are often over- looked. There are more and more of them, and they are trying to reconcile contradictory desires. That is a good definition of “buyer's neurosis,” which may be triggered by Starbucks’ soy-based decaf or “adventure cruises” in Lapland. Oxymorons destabilize our incredulity or skepticism reflexes and have a surprise effect that intrigues, seduces, and captivates us. This is what every narrative theorist since Coleridge calls “the temporary suspension of disbelief.” More generally, marketers are being invited to reform their vocabu- lary. According to Laurence Vincent, they must abandon the lexicon of traditional marketing and becomes storytellers. They must stop thinking in terms of “strategic plans” and see brands as stories, and “advertising campaigns” as “narrative sequences”: “Instead of strategic plans, they need to think of their brand myth or narrative. Instead of consumers, they need to think of audiences. Instead of spokespeople, sponsors, and products, they need to think of characters in a larger story. Instead of retail environments, they need to think of narrative settings.”” The Dream Society The ambitions of twenty-first-century marketing do not, however, stop at the supermarket door: they extend to the world itself. Its ambition is no longer simply to promote the benefits of the consumer society; it seeks to “produce” a new society and a new world. It makes no secret of 26  FROM LOGO TO STORY its messianic nature: “Hundreds of thousands of Sudanese have died because of bad marketing. Religions thrive or fade away because of the marketing choices they make.”” For Seth Godin, it is very simple: “If marketers could tell a better story—taking your medicine or sending peacekeepers where they are needed —we would all benefit.” The Danish futurologist Ralph Jensen, director of the Copenhagen Institute for Future Studies and author of The Dream Soctety, looks even further into the future. In 2001, he founded Dream Company Ltd and runs its “Imagination” division.” Its mission is to persuade most of the companies in the world that we are making the transition from one society to another. Between now and 2020, the next major stage in the development of society will, he argues, be the “dream era.” In the “dream society,” all products will tell consumers a story: “The Dream Society traces ‘the way in which a consumer culture like ours tells stories through the products we buy: clothes, transportation, leisure-products, vacations, homes. In the dream society, our work will be driven by stories and emotions.” For his part, the French designer Philippe Starck is no longer satisfied with furnishing interiors with objects; he wants to give “more happiness”: “Within ten years, the functional objects in our home will be replaced by non-material services. When that happens, our home will be full of nothing but sentimental things.””” The idea that being invaded by sentimental things is not necessarily an attractive prospect, especially if those sentimental things are reified forms of the consumer society, is endorsed by the analysis of Georges Lewi, who teaches at the Haute Ecole de Commerce top business school and who, in 1998, justified the way our contemporaries have become trapped in the mythical world of the commodity in these terms: “Today’s consumers need to believe in their brands in the same way that the Greeks believed in their myths.” Establishing a parallel between brands and myths, he argues that the mechanisms governing the Microsoft saga are the same as those behind the Apollo myth. The Intel myth is a sort of Dionysian miracle, while Bouygues apparently has something in common with Hephaestus. From this perspective, brands become myths when they begin to resonate with consumers’ beliefs. According to Lewi, there are three stages in the life cycle of abrand: a heroic period in which it stands out because it is different; a phase of wisdom, when it becomes confident; and a mythical phase in which it acquires conscious- ness. “The resurgence of myths within our contemporary society,” claims 27 STORYTELLING Lewi, “is particularly obvious in periods of globalized insecurity, which stimulate our need to seek out the truth and the meaning of life, as well as our thirst for magic and mystery.” Witness the commercial success of the books of J. R. R. Tolkien and J. K. Rowling in the West: “They are in fact stories and tales that draw on our heritage of fairy tales and that speak to our globalized imaginary and at the same time give us a feeling of belonging.” This feeling of belonging involves, however, a certain “mind- formatting,” as Scott Rosenberg explained in an article in the webzine Salon in 1998. Storytelling is, he wrote, “The apotheosis of the ideology of marketing.... It transfers promotional thinking from the company level to the personal level, forcing the most private relationships and transactions into a template shaped by the business world.”” For Tom Peters, the author of the famous 1997 article “The Brand Called You,” this development was inevitable. He argues that we are being called upon to be our own consumers. American Express’s campaign slogan, “My life, my card,” for instance, associates the use of the credit card with memorable episodes in our lives to such an extent that using the card becomes one such episode. The goal of storytelling marketing is not just to persuade consumers to buy a product but to plunge them into a narrative world, to involve them in a credible story. It is no longer a matter of seducing or convincing consumers; the point is to produce a belief-effect. The goal is no longer to stimulate demand, but to offer a life-story that provides certain inte- grated behavioral models. The act of buying something actually becomes part of the narrative. No matter whether you are young or old, unem- ployed or working, in good health or ill with cancer, “you are the story” and you are its hero. Neomarketing brings about a subtle semantic shift: it transforms consumption into amateur dramatics. Pick a part, and we will supply the stage set and the costumes. Consumption becomes the only way of relating to the world. Brands are given the powers we once sought in myths or drugs: break on through to the other side, experience a weightless self, get high, take a trip; it used to be Icarus or LSD, and now it is Nike or Adidas. Sneakers defy the law of gravity. Skiing, surfing, and skating give us access to the supernatural. “Nike president cum sneaker shaman” Tom Clarke explains that “the inspiration of sports allows us to rebirth ourselves constantly.””” 28  FROM LOGO TO STORY Brands are vectors for “worlds”: they lead us into a fictional story, a world that has been scripted and developed by “experimental market- ing” agencies whose ambition is no longer to meet or even to create needs, but to make “worldviews” converge. The use of universal Jungian archetypes in international marketing should, in theory, allow the same marketing strategies to be used all over the world. To take one striking example: according to a study carried out in 2003 by Booz Allen, 9/11 did not change the way American brands such as Nike, Kraft, Motorola, Exxon-Mobil, Ford, Coca-Cola, or Pepsi are perceived in Muslim countries.” Quite the contrary. There is more hostility towards American brands in the United Kingdom or China than in Muslim countries. According to the authors, the explanation for this surprising finding is that the narrative of an American global brand is “understood foremost as global, not American.” The other reason is that, ever since the 1990s, multinationals have been making an effort to understand “the local narrative” and to integrate the narrative codes of Muslim countries into their global narratives. Storytelling marketing is, by its own admission, an attempt to synchronize “worldviews” that may well be antagonistic in political or religious terms, but which can be reconciled on the great stage of the world market. The exercise of consuming then becomes an exercise in global communications or even communion: “Blasphemous as it may seem, the same logic that drives the Holy Communion in the Catholic Church drives consumer behavior in the market place. Through consuming American symbols, we become part of and empowered by the most powerful Archetype and Myth ofall times: the American Dream.”” Marketing's adoption of storytelling therefore goes far beyond a mere shift in the way brands are promoted. Storytelling implies a “worldview” and projects it on to the whole of society. According to Stephen Denning, it is not just a marketing tool but a managerial “discipline.” Denning was one of the first to begin to experiment with storytelling techniques in the mid 1990s. For that is where it all began... 29  2 The Invention of Storytelling Management On June 12, 2005, Steve Jobs, the legendary boss of Apple computers, addressed the students of Stanford University: “I am honored to be with you at your commencement from one of the finest universities in the ~ world. I never graduated from college. Truth be told, this is the closest I've ever gotten to a college graduation. Today I want to tell you three stories from my life. That’s it. No big deal. Just three stories.”" A Story For Our Times The first story was the Bildungsroman of Apple’s founder: the story of a poor kid who was left to his own devices and who, more or less by acci- dent, enrolled in a typography course (it was thanks to this training that the Mac became the first personal computer to have a bitmap font). The second wasa story of love and loss: the legend of how the first Macintosh was created in his parents’ garage and then, over the next ten years, the success story of Apple and Jobs’ meeting with his future wife, with whom he would start a family. But, no sooner had he won than he was the hero excluded from his own success. He had to leave the company he had founded. The third is a story of death and resurrection: Steve Jobs miraculously survived a diagnosis of pancreatic cancer. At the end of his story, the hero recovers his health and wins back the company he founded and which he will lead to new success. Steve Jobs ended his short story with the advice he had read in a chil- dren’s magazine as a boy: “Stay hungry, stay foolish.” There was, of course, nothing spontaneous about this performance. When he told his stories, Apple’s boss was conforming to the norms established by story- telling’s intrusion into the spheres of management ten years earlier. That is a different story, and it is one worth telling. 31 STORYTELLING It is a story for our times. It is an edifying story, with the stars of the new economy in the leading roles: Steve Jobs, Richard Branson, Bill Gates, and many others, directors of the World Bank, IBM, Xerox, and the gurus who preach “capitalism with soul.” It is a true story that tells us of “lean” multinationals that turned away from production to develop daring screenplays that made their shares soar on the Stock Exchanges, of international organizations on which the health of millions of people in Africa depends, and whose directors sometimes have difficulty commu- nicating from one office to another. It is a story that tells of “battles with organizational monsters” in glass towers in New York, where hyper- motivated managers try to persuade their colleagues to accept “daring transformations” and to transform profoundly their perception of both themselves and their company. They are, explains French management consultant Dominique Christian, “stories of miraculous strategic virtu- osity and heroic turnarounds... Stories of the heroes and heroines who make success possible.”” They are stories that celebrate the “knowing firm” whose object is no longer just to produce commodities, but to share knowledge, to circulate information, and to manage emotions. This is also the story of the invention of storytelling management. This new school of management emerged in the United States in the 1990s, and it recommends bringing storytellers and griots into companies. There are many new lessons to be learned: thinking, acting, networking, managing distance, forming nomadic teams, mastering the information overload, adapting to the speed of real-time business... There are innovations that lead to “e-transformations” and stubborn prejudices that cost companies millions of dollars. PowerPoint presentations, checklists, and boring arguments have had their day. Make way for storytelling! According to Steve Denning, a former World Bank director and now one of the new management's most active gurus, it is easy to explain the success of storytelling in the mid 1990s: “The origin of my interest in organizational storytelling was simple: nothing else worked.” The Silence of the Start-Ups What is the common factor linking the explosion that destroyed the Challenger space shuttle, the crisis at the New York Times, and the financial scandals at Enron, Tyco Electronics, WorldCom, and Health-South? 32  THE INVENTION OF STORYTELLING MANAGEMENT According to the Concours Group and Vitalsmarts, a group of consul- tants specializing in crisis management, these organizations, which experienced serious difficulties in 2003, were all part of the same “culture of silence.” According to Vitalsmart’s President Joseph Grenny, all these failures could have been avoided if these organizations had paid atten- tion to one crucial attribute of their cultures: “the way in which they manage crucial conversations.”° Another study by the same group of consultants, published in Febru- ary 2007 and entitled Silence Falls, hammers home the same point. Some 1,000 directors from 40 or so companies were surveyed, and the study looked at 2,200 industrial projects in sectors as diverse as the pharma- ceutical industry, financial and banking services, government agencies, and consumer products. It reached the surprising conclusion that “orga- ~ nizational silence” is the cause of 80 percent of failed business programs and projects.” “Ts silence killing your company?” asked Harvard Professor of Lead- ership Leslie A. Perlow in March 2003, after spending some time immersed in the world of start-ups, the mutant companies that expanded so rapidly thanks to the Internet explosion.’ It all began when Netscape was floated on the Stock Exchange in 1995 and lasted until the dotcoms collapsed from April 2000 onwards. Perlow spent nineteen months in a start-up founded by three students and studied it as though she was “an anthropologist studying a foreign culture.” She was able to observe the company’s life cycle, from its successful launch ~after a few months, its value was estimated at $125 million —until its final bankruptcy. Accord- ing to her, the reasons for the failure of so many start-ups were not purely financial or the result of the sudden bursting of a speculative bubble related to computer technology and telecommunications. The reasons also had to be sought in the silence of their directors, their inabil- ity to communicate with partners, in the things that were left unsaid and in unresolved conflicts: “Our research shows that silence is not only ubiquitous and expected in organizations but extremely costly to both the firm and the individual,” and that its effects can range from simple misunderstandings to the bankruptcy of the organizations concerned. In companies that made a cult of communications and whose essential task was to facilitate the exchange of information on the Internet, collaborators at all levels of the hierarchy proved to be incapable of communicating with one another, of dealing with disagreement, and 33 STORYTELLING of handling conflict. A worrying “silence” was undermining the dot- coms from within. It was the stock-market spiral that that swept them away, but there was also an internal spiral. Following the German sociol- ogist Elisabeth Noelle-Neumann, Perlow described it as a “spiral of silence”: Silence is associated with many virtues: modesty, respect for others, prudence, decorum. Thanks to deeply ingrained rules of etiquette, people silence themselves to avoid embarrassment, confrontation, and other perceived dangers. The social virtues of silence are reinforced by our survival instincts... The need for quiet submission is exaggerated by today’s difficult economy where millions of people have lost their jobs and many more worry that they might.” Extending her study to other sectors, she concluded that silencing con- flicts was a universal problem in companies, whatever their size or form, and that employees had great difficulty in identifying this dangerous syn- drome before it had disastrous effects. “Our interviews with senior executives and employees ranging from small businesses to Fortune 500 corporations reveal that silence can exact a high psychological price on individuals, generating feelings of humiliation, pernicious anger, resent- ment, and the like, that, if unexpressed, contaminate every interaction, shut down curiosity and undermine productivity.” Along the way, she found that everyone had a story to tell at every level of the organizations’ hierarchies. A History of Silence Why is neo-management interested in what workers have to say? Could they have discovered that silence at work is a new source of waste, like slack periods, absenteeism, and sabotage? Do these worries concern all categories of wage-earners and all sectors of activity? The history of this odd couple —silence and work —needs to be written. The silence of the craftsman concentrating on his task is deliberate and sovereign. Silence can be enforced by the disciplines imposed by a foreman or by the noise of machinery. The silence of factories and workshops can block the expression of complaints and demands, and the transmission of skills. There is a link between fear and silence. 34  THE INVENTION OF STORYTELLING MANAGEMENT Bernard Girard, who has written a history of management theories, reminds us that, as early as the eighteenth century, Mandeville had noted that the silence of the British, as opposed to the noise made by the French, gave the British workforce a competitive advantage: “The silence that reigns in English factories and the way they do business, promptly and keeping their appointments, impresses all visitors.”'’ The way the factories were organized was based on a military model. The mil- itary schools, which had been turned into industrial schools run by former officers, introduced military discipline into the world of produc- tion: their pupils wore uniforms, were recruited into battalions that drilled in the factory yard, were woken by the sound of drums and were forced to be silent in the workshops... At the end of the century, we will see them again in Henri Fayol’s projects. On visiting an English factory in 1859, Louis Reybaud noted: “Two things strike one more than anything else: the small number of people employed and the silence that reigns.” Forty years earlier, Charles Dupin wrote: “When one enters these establishments, one is struck by the general order they exhibit. The workers are busily active, almost always in silence.”"» Without retracing the history of management here,“ we will simply recall that silence at work became the rule when the factory emerged: many different labor forces were brought together in the same place and subjected to a very hierarchical discipline in which verbal exchanges inside the factory were strictly controlled. The same interdiction applied to the women who worked in shops and offices. In 1898, one sales assistant told La Fronde newspaper: This is our lot: we must accept wages that are not enough to live on, and keep silent; we have to stand, which becomes unbearable after a few hours, and keep silent. After an exhausting day, we must stay awake when and how our masters wish us to remain awake, and keep silent. We must put up with the improper remarks of passers-by, the crude suggestions of our bosses, and keep silent. When we are ill, we must put ona pleasant face and keep silent. We must keep silent, keep silent if we do not want to be dismissed. Le Pére Peinard, for its part, commented: “There poor women could not be e. ° ° wl5 more silent if you sewed their lips up. “In the cigarette factories of about 1870,” writes Marie- Victoire Louis, 35 STORYTELLING women workers did not have the right to speak or smile. The same applied in the Galeries Lafayette in 1914, when they were also forbidden to address each other with the familiar tw. In the Parlerie in Périgueux in 1925, there was a complete ban on talking, and also on singing: “The women have to work all day long in an absolute silence that is broken only by the noise of the objects they need to perform their tasks.” In Discipline and Punish, Michel Foucault traces how the silence of workers spread from military schools to industrial schools, from bar- racks to workshops and factories, from armies to prisons. It spread throughout the disciplinary society like a lava flow. Foucault lists its instruments and techniques, but also its rites and codes: the internal reg- ulations of workshops, barracks, and schools, which codified the right to speech, ritualized its written or oral forms, and authorized or banned its expression. This enforced silence is a basic element of the early manage- ment theories of Ford and Fayol. It spreads to the Fordist factory. In the twentieth century, the speech of workers, which was described as chatter or gossip, was seen as a distraction, a relaxation of discipline or even a form of passive “resistance”: workers who talked were suspected of plotting stoppages and strikes. Work on the assembly line reduces the workplace to silence; the noise of the machines replaces the talk of the workers. In direct contrast, strikes and factory occupations were, throughout the twentieth century, identified with speech, and any return to work was seen as a return to compulsory silence. From the Industrial Revolution onwards, silence was one of the arsenal of measures that gave managers control over their labor force. And the same silence still reigns in many places. In the outsourced work- shops of Indonesia, China, and Brazil, as in the factories of the developed countries, on assembly lines and in sweatshops, workers’ ability to speak is still subject to a discretionary power. And not only there: as we have seen, silence also reigns in start-ups and dotcoms, in the offices ofinsur- ance companies and in boards ofdirectors, behind the screens of Silicon Valley's computer firms and in the glass towers of financial giants like Enron and WorldCom, where pension funds build up and evaporate. “Dont Keep Quiet: Tell Stories” But does this silence always have the same meaning? Of course not. Ever since the 1990s, management theorists have been forced to deal with the 36  THE INVENTION OF STORYTELLING MANAGEMENT question of what they call “organizational silence” or “systematic silence.” As Elizabeth Wolfe Morrison and Frances J. Milliken explain: We argue that there are powerful forces in many organizations that cause widespread withholding of information about potential problems or issues by employees. We refer to this collective-level phenomenon as “organizational silence.” In our model we identify contextual vari- ables that create conditions conducive to silence and explore the collective sense-making dynamic that can create the shared perception that speaking up is unwise. We also discuss some of the negative con- sequences of systemic silence, especially for organizations’ ability to change and develop in the context of pluralism.'® When Enron collapsed in 2003, the world of management had to explain, to its great embarrassment, that one of the new economy’s flagships was nothing more than a mirage or a financial fiction: this bankruptcy showed that silence could lead to phenomena of collective blindness. Within the space of a few months, millions of retired people lost every- thing they had. The company’s directors were indicted for having lied to their employees and shareholders. According to Californian academic David Boje, “Enron made the narrative bluff that Washington politi- cians and Wall Street analysts would not be able to distinguish between fiction and reality.””” Hence, in contrast, the new virtues that are attributed to those who break the silence. In 2002, three women were named as Time magazine's “personalities of the year.” Their exploits were described as “whistle- blowing.” All three had chosen to break the law of silence that reigned in their organization. Cynthia Cooper, vice-president of WorldCom, had pointed out to her board ofdirectors that the irregularities in its accounts amounted to $4 billion. Enron’s vice-president Sherron Watkins had alerted her CEO Ken Lay shortly before the company went bankrupt. FBI agent Colleen Rowley had handed her superiors a file on Zachariah Moussaoui who, before 9/11, had denounced the inadequacies of the American secret services in an eleven-page report. Why are company employees being asked to break the silence, when they have been forced to remain silent for so long? How are they be con- vinced that what was once a proof of loyalty and discipline has now become an obstacle to change and innovation? Does this hold out the 37 STORYTELLING promise of a new social democracy? Whatever the reason, there has been a complete reversal: according to the neo-management gurus, employees should not be forced to keep silent. On the contrary, they should be encouraged to break the silence, to speak out, and to tell their stories. Whatever their age, competence, skills, and responsibilities, they all have “a story to tell.” And the organization is interested in those stories. Management theorists’ change of attitude with respect to silence within organizations began in the 1980s. As early as 1984, James March and Gujme Sevon had recognized the merits of gossip. In a co-authored study of storytelling techniques in business, Nicole Giroux describes gossip as a form of narration that conveys information. According to this view, this elementary way of swapping stories “helps to maintain the system by communicating its rules and values and by disseminating the organization’s traditions and history. The educational virtues of story- wld.. telling have also been identified in a study of the “memorable messages” retained by newcomers to the company. As Nicole Giroux explains, the power of narration lies in its ability to capture “complex experiences” that combine the senses, reason, emotions, and the imagination into a dense résumé that can be reconstructed on the basis of any part of it.”” Between 1987 and 1990, the industrialist anthropologist Julian Orr carried out a series of studies of the workers responsible for repairing photocopiers at Xerox. Theirs was a small world oftechnical documenta- tion, machines, and technicians who could mobilize phenomena and explain them in complex words, but there were also repairmen and main- tenance staff, who did not have those skills. Orr demonstrated that swapping stories was central to the diagnostic process. In this world, the process of collective narration gradually led to a shared diagnosis of the situation. When it comes to storytelling management, David Boje is, however, the precursor with his 1991 study of storytelling performance in an office-supply firm. The analysis of 12 hours of taped interviews allowed him to identify eleven scenarios. Boje found that the narrative activity of a group or organization does not take the form of structured narratives that are passed on by narrators to passive listeners. People tell their stories in fragments and are constantly interrupted by colleagues who add elements drawn from their own experience. The outcome is a collec- tive form of narration. It is polyphonic but it is also discontinuous and made up of interwoven fragments, of histories that are talked about 38  THE INVENTION OF STORYTELLING MANAGEMENT and swapped. They can sometimes be contradictory, but the company becomes a storytelling organization whose stories can be listened to, reg- ulated, and, of course, controlled. Silent firms like Enron or WorldCom are contrasted with the symmetrical model of a firm that is talkative and voluble, and that tells stories.” Management Theorists and the “Narrative Turn” As Thierry Boudés, who teaches at the Ecole Supérieure de Commerce explains, “the ‘narrative turn’ of the 1990s came about because manage- ment researchers made the simple discovery that companies are microcosms in which lots of stories are produced and circulated.”” The canteen, for example, is the classic site for this spontaneous production ‘of narrative. But narration is also a central part of a company’s activity, from reports on visits to clients to recruitment interviews (after all, a CV is simply a form of autobiographical story). “Storytelling management” is nothing more than attempt to control the way these stories evolve. Rather than putting up with the flow of the stories that are anarchi- cally