Start With the Story

Tom Nixon (00:01.644)
Well, Curtis, I will see your cowboy hat and raise you a baseball cap, a fair weather fan, Tigers supporting ball cap. And if you’re listening and not watching, then I’m wearing a Detroit Tigers ball cap. And there’s a good reason for that, Curtis.

Curtis Hays (00:19.601)
Well, I know the series was tied. When’s the game? Is it today? Are they playing today? It was yesterday.

Tom Nixon (00:25.55)
Uh, it was literally yesterday. late breaking news, the tigers have advanced beyond the wild card round into the divisional series, the American league divisional series. And not only am I here in support of our beloved Detroit tigers, cause we’re hometown kids as is our guests today, at least originally, but I feel like they tell, did tell a great story this summer. It started out as a Cinderella story. They went on this amazing run.

couldn’t be beaten and then it turned into something of a tragedy and they allowed Cleveland to come from 15 and a half games back in an historic upset. But my friends there was a twist ending when push came to shove. It was our beloved Tigers that ousted the Cleveland Guardians and we move on and so who doesn’t love a great story, right?

Curtis Hays (01:18.181)
You know what would make that story even better? Our guest is actually in Chicago to see a Tigers Cubs World Series. It’s the Cubs won last night, they’re wild card and they’re advancing. So how cool would that be?

Kristian A Alomá, PhD (01:18.53)
it’s.

Kristian A Alomá, PhD (01:27.43)
Well.

Tom Nixon (01:33.358)
Ooooo!

Kristian A Alomá, PhD (01:33.938)
That would be another chapter I would like to read. That would bring a number of my family members together in potentially controversial ways, I imagine. So, because I do have half my in-laws in the Detroit area rooting on the Tigers, which I hear can sometimes be a painful experience and sometimes a really delightful experience. And of course I’m here in Chicago and we’re on the North side, so we’re Cubs fans when we’re rooting for the baseball.

Tom Nixon (01:36.94)
Haha!

Kristian A Alomá, PhD (02:03.919)
teams around here. yeah, I mean, think it would be an interesting crossover.

Curtis Hays (02:10.384)
It sure would.

Tom Nixon (02:10.529)
Well, we we love crossover stories. Well, that voice you’re hearing is our guest today. Curtis, you and he have met and have mutual friends. Why don’t you introduce formally our guest today?

Curtis Hays (02:21.199)
Yeah, I’m happy to welcome Christian Aloma to the show. Christian and I go back a few years. I was lucky enough to be part of the project and team to launch your Threadline website. Did some of the SEO and analytics on the backend through our dear friend, Yvonne, who still develops for us and many of our clients and colleagues know Yvonne. Yeah.

Kristian A Alomá, PhD (02:28.668)
Yeah.

Kristian A Alomá, PhD (02:35.943)
That’s right.

Kristian A Alomá, PhD (02:45.671)
Adore her. Adorable.

Curtis Hays (02:48.455)
And just recently we had Will Leach on the show and through similar connection had met Will and brought him on and side note, I was talking to Will and said, man, do you know Christian? He’s like, of course I do. I was like, I got to get him on the show. And so I looked up on your LinkedIn profile and here you’ve got a book, Start With Story.

Kristian A Alomá, PhD (03:13.393)
Yep.

Curtis Hays (03:13.655)
And I know my good friend Tom here loves a good story and he loves writing stories. So I was like, we got to bring Christian on and let’s talk about storytelling. So welcome to the show.

Kristian A Alomá, PhD (03:24.305)
Thank you. I’m happy to be here, excited to be here and talk about stories. And what I love about it is there are so many different angles to talking about story, right? From writing about it, hearing them. I really focus on like the psychology of them and how that lands from a branding perspective overall. So excited to chat.

Curtis Hays (03:45.487)
Really close to Will then too, right? Like Will’s all about the psychology side as well. So I’m sure when you guys met, you know, you really connected on a…

Tom Nixon (03:45.601)
As are we, you know.

Kristian A Alomá, PhD (03:50.213)
Yeah, I mean…

Oh, absolutely. Absolutely. I philosophically, marketingly, Will and I are cousins in the industry, essentially, right? We follow the same sort of social sciences. We believe in the same kinds of principles. So when Will and I get together, we make a pretty solid team kind of ranting about the power of these kinds of insights.

Tom Nixon (04:16.59)
Absolutely. When Curtis made the email introduction between us. I think I told you I’m like, my right in my wheelhouse. We are preaching from the same hymnal. One of the hymnals, by the way, is the start with the story. Start with story brand building in a narrative economy. That’s the full name of the book. So obviously storytelling has been a key theme for this season. Curtis keep coming back to it. And you and I offline have had these conversations.

Kristian A Alomá, PhD (04:34.727)
Yeah. Yep.

Tom Nixon (04:44.962)
why this is now becoming so much more important even than it ever was. And I think it has to do with this notion of narrative economy. Explain what you mean by a narrative economy and why brands and marketers should know what that is and market to it.

Kristian A Alomá, PhD (04:53.19)
Yeah.

Kristian A Alomá, PhD (04:59.033)
Absolutely. So, you know, I fell into this sort of deeper study of story through my dissertation program. My PhD is in psychology and I was studying consumer identity. And when you study consumer identity, what you ultimately sort of start to kind of fall into are these principles of story, of narrative, of narrative psychology specifically, which is a field of psychology that tries to sort of help us understand how we understand ourselves. Right. And

And what it essentially has sort of concluded is that people create, tell, consume, craft stories to make sense of their lives, make sense of the things they do, who they are, you know, the relationships they have. so it was through that that I started to realize consumers do the same thing. And when you started to get deep into it and when you looked at the broader sort of, you know, psychology of consumer behavior, what you realized was people don’t just buy things because

you know, the attributes, the features, the data on that thing suggests it’s going to solve that problem for me. Right. Now those things should be there and the best products have those things. But what we saw is that people would make choices because of the stories they could tell about themselves as they own that thing. Right. And I would, would, tell people all the time, I buy Apple computers. I’m a Mac boy. I love, I’m an Apple fan boy, all these sorts of things.

Whenever I buy a new one, I feel a little bit more creative. Now, I don’t do anything differently than if I were to own a Samsung, right? But I feel creative. I feel cooler, even though now they’re probably basically the mainstream in a lot of scenarios. But I feel different when I own it I’m using it, right? And that’s how people sort of engage. And so I always say, you know, today the economy isn’t just about exchange of resources. It’s about the opportunity.

to exchange my resources for the ability to tell a story about myself. And that’s at the heart of the narrative economy. And that’s where I think the best brands win is when they do sort of create either platforms or artifacts or contexts in which someone can tell a story about themselves. And maybe they won’t tell that story to anyone else. They’ll just tell that story to themselves and say, I’m a generous person because I give to this charity or I’m a confident person because I do this. I’m a creative person because I own this.

Kristian A Alomá, PhD (07:21.458)
I’m an eco-friendly person because I bought this kind of car, right? So that’s the kinds of things that we look at and we understand of not just storytelling as a communication perspective, but what are the stories I get to think because I own this thing?

Tom Nixon (07:36.46)
Yeah, well said. Absolutely. I’m also a Mac nut too. So we probably tell the same story to ourselves. I’m way cooler in my story than I am in real life. But I just as you were talking, something just dawned on me like this whole season. Curtis has been enamored with this concept of storytelling. And I’m like, well, that’s great. He’s a convert. But why does this guy who’s so right brained or he’s got this engineering mindset? Why is he like embracing this so much? And I just figured out we now have had the second person come on the show.

Kristian A Alomá, PhD (07:42.381)
Yeah.

Tom Nixon (08:04.962)
with a psychology background to talk about storytelling in. That’s got to be why because there’s science to it. Curtis loves science and data.

Kristian A Alomá, PhD (08:12.826)
Yeah, yeah.

Curtis Hays (08:12.953)
I do love a little psychology as well. Yep, yep.

Kristian A Alomá, PhD (08:16.698)
Well, and it’s absolutely true. you know what I find? Because I think the stereotype is you’re either data driven or your story or creative driven or emotion driven, right? And what I think is really important is that I think most folks that actually do love data and love sharing data with others realize if that data isn’t situated in some sort of story, the audience won’t understand it. And that’s why I always tell folks like the best stories have data.

And if your data doesn’t have story, your audience is going to make up some meaning about it. And so you’ve got to kind of craft those stories and tell those stories to help them shape it.

Tom Nixon (08:54.22)
Yeah. And I would take that one step further. Could us get your thought on this is data as data is just a bunch of numbers on a page. What the data tells a story and the job of an analyst is to say, what is this? What story is this data trying to tell us? And does it have a happy ending or do we need to re engineer it like we did with the Tiger season? Right. Is it data telling you a story if you’re out there looking for it?

Curtis Hays (09:13.894)
Right.

Well, the reason I got into this industry because what I saw my colleagues doing or competitors doing were delivering reports to clients that only had the data in it that told the story they wanted to tell. So this is sort of making sense to me now, right? So yeah, we would cherry pick metrics so that when you went to present to a client, everything looked like it was going hunky dory.

Kristian A Alomá, PhD (09:40.4)
Yeah.

Curtis Hays (09:41.052)
But what I saw and what I believed was how does that help that client grow? How do we learn from things that aren’t doing well so that we can improve and get better? So I sought to tell truth and I felt like truth was hidden in the intersection between the marketing data and the sales data. So that was really where I, that was my story. was like, can we connect these numbers here and these numbers here and tell a complete story using the data? What I’ve come to learn in

Kristian A Alomá, PhD (09:59.877)
Hmm

Kristian A Alomá, PhD (10:08.496)
Yeah.

Curtis Hays (10:10.917)
these conversations in the podcast and learning from Tom and a lot of his mentors is the marketing aspect to communicating. I would say one of the biggest light bulbs for me was to realize that I always thought branding was a function of marketing. Like marketing was the parent thing and you did branding as a function of it. Create logo, create colors, those types of things. Realized brand actually sat on top of marketing.

Kristian A Alomá, PhD (10:30.31)
Mmm.

Kristian A Alomá, PhD (10:37.307)
Yeah.

Curtis Hays (10:40.935)
And once I realized that it was like, okay, we have to tell the story before we can come up with ad copy. We have to understand actually why people buy before we can make any of these other decisions. And so, you know, lot of what you described, Christian, sounds a lot of what you talk about, Thomas, the why how what, the, do I want to say? It’s what was life like before? What’s life like now? And what’s life like?

Kristian A Alomá, PhD (10:49.296)
Yeah.

Curtis Hays (11:09.879)
after and what you’re saying differently than I think we’ve heard anyone else say Christian is that we tell these stories to ourselves maybe even if they aren’t true which is sometimes is a conversation with that we’ll have with our daughters of like what’s the story is that truth or are you telling yourself that story because you want to believe it or maybe it isn’t good to believe the story you’re telling yourself if you’re really getting to the psychology of it right

Kristian A Alomá, PhD (11:22.212)
Mmm.

Kristian A Alomá, PhD (11:31.525)
Yeah.

Kristian A Alomá, PhD (11:38.704)
Well, I mean, that’s where I think the field began was ultimately in clinical therapy, which was the stories that we tell ourselves and how we position ourselves in those stories can affect our mental health. Right. And you’ll see this a lot with, you know, like health care patients, right. Health care cancer survivors, other sort of really significant heartbreaking diseases and whether they see themselves as

kind of the victim of the disease or a survivor of the disease or whether they see themselves as sort of at the center of that story or the disease at the center of that story. And that kind of framing and the way that they tell that story has a huge impact then on mental health. see when people reframe those stories like PTSD rates go down, mental health rates go up. know, a lot of therapy is ultimately about reframing the way the stories you’ve created about your

essentially. Now, I think to your point, and I think it’s a really good one, which is, we telling ourselves true stories? And that is a big conversation to have, of course. You know, we often look at it as like there are all of these sort of factual elements around you in the context of your life. And the question is, how are you interpreting those? And that’s the story you’re telling. Now, true or not true is sort of a gray space when you think of it that way, because it’s more of

based on this happening, this happening, this happening, I understand myself as having succeeded in this scenario, whereas someone else might look at that and say, well, you kind of failed, but depending on the frameworks that they have, right? And so it’s a really sort of interesting thing. And I think the best stories do and should have those factual anchors to them. But then the way we interpret that data or the way we interpret those facts as far as what we do with that can be very subjective.

Curtis Hays (13:31.739)
To show I know a little bit about psychology, that sounds a little bit like internal or external locus of control. Yes.

Tom Nixon (13:31.81)
Yeah.

Kristian A Alomá, PhD (13:37.836)
It absolutely is. Yeah, that’s that’s exactly it. And so, so, that’s that’s sort of is what happens. And I think your point you made about branding and marketing, you know, like the American Marketing Association is still called the American Marketing Association, right? It’s not the American Branding Association, unfortunately. But I often sort of think of branding almost as kind of it’s an esoteric concept. think we call it branding and we have roles and jobs that are focused on branding. But

Tom Nixon (13:39.542)
Mmm. God.

Kristian A Alomá, PhD (14:07.193)
For me, like the brand is the relationship that you create with the customer, right? So it’s all of those things. It’s kind of the context that marketing sits on top of. And in some cases, you can have a brand even if you’ve done no marketing at all, right? Like it’s the people will create a story about you that makes sense of who you are and what you do, whether you like it or not. One of my favorite examples is Radio Shack. If we want to date ourselves here.

Tom Nixon (14:34.894)
You

Kristian A Alomá, PhD (14:34.937)
bit, right? We all remember going to Radio Shack and buying computer components. Radio Shack at one of its rebrands, right, had the slogan, you’ve got questions, we’ve got answers, right? They were trying to put out this story that they were the resource for the tech geeks like myself. But for those of us that went, especially in the 90s and things like that, where the technology was really booming and the staff at Radio Shack were basically 17 year olds that were kind of moving in and out.

depending on their college sort of schedule, they couldn’t train those folks to know enough about all that technology. So you’d go to Radio Shack with questions and they rarely had answers, right? And so Radio Shack really kind of put out this story that they couldn’t support. Like they didn’t have the data, they didn’t have the design, they didn’t have the structure to actually back that story up and the brand starts to fall apart essentially.

Tom Nixon (15:12.974)
you

Tom Nixon (15:27.118)
Yeah, and I actually proposed a new tagline for them at the time. They didn’t take it, but it was Radio Shack. The place to go when you need a $6 patch cord.

Curtis Hays (15:27.409)
Mm-hmm.

Kristian A Alomá, PhD (15:38.47)
Exactly. Yeah. Or eventually became a cell phone store, basically.

Tom Nixon (15:42.637)
Yeah, that was the true story, but unfortunately they didn’t embrace it. Well, let’s talk about the framework because you mentioned frameworks a minute ago. And we had a few episodes on ago. We had a client of ours that had gone through the story brand framework, right? So not to be confused with the brand story framework that essentially is the process of putting the customer as the hero, right? Where else from the hero’s journey? Talk through what your framework is and how it can be applied to tell the story that a brand should be telling about itself.

Kristian A Alomá, PhD (15:50.138)
Yeah.

Kristian A Alomá, PhD (15:56.27)
yeah, yeah.

Kristian A Alomá, PhD (16:04.282)
Mm-hmm.

Kristian A Alomá, PhD (16:11.587)
Yeah, yeah. So the framework is probably cliche enough. It’s the story framework. And I use the acronym story to sort of help set it up. But it basically sort of maps out all the key elements of a successful story, of a story that needs to be there. And what I loved about your Tiger stories, you kind of hit on all those elements. mean, every story should hit on these elements, right? So it begins with the S in the story framework, which is the struggle, right?

as an organization need to identify some struggle that exists that you hope to solve or address, right? Some problems, some need, whatever it is. And so you’ve always got to have it. There always has to be that struggle for the Tigers, right? It was the fact that they started so strong and then everything kind of started feeling like it was falling apart. That was the struggle that we were sort of seeing overall. The T in story is for the tool or technology that you use or that you want to use to address that struggle, right? So

If you’re Apple computers, it’s about design and innovation overall, right? If you’re an airline, it’s about efficient, comfortable travel, whatever it might be, right? Whatever it is you want to apply that will address that problem. Now, in some cases, that’s very proprietary. In some cases, it’s just a thing that we think we can do better than anyone else. It’s the same thing, but we do it better overall. Now, the O in story is the objective.

And this is sometimes reinterpreted as like what your organization’s mission is, but essentially it’s, here’s a problem, here’s a tool that we think can address that problem. Now this is our objective, is to apply that tool to that problem and help customers accomplish X, Y, and Z, right? And then that sort of is really the kind of rational structural elements of the story. Now, as we move then to the R and the Y, we start to get into the benefits and the emotional sort of…

power of the story, which is R is the reward that they get. And that’s, if you’ve tried to, if you want to quit smoking and you start a smoking cessation product, the reward is that you’re going to start reducing the number of cigarettes that you’re smoking, for example, right? It tends to be a much more sort of data driven element of the story. This is where data does really need to kind of exist in the stories. You want to have some evidence that what you’re doing is going to have an impact.

Kristian A Alomá, PhD (18:33.008)
and a very sort of measurable, seeable, countable impact, if you can, in some cases. And then finally, the why is what I call yearning, or I sometimes call it the glorious future, but GF just didn’t fit the structure, if you will. the yearning or the glorious future is then, what is the emotional benefit? What do you hope changes as a result? And in some cases, it’s often articulated as sort of the opposite of the struggle, right? If the struggle is trying to figure out how to get my kids to

Tom Nixon (18:44.206)
Stargift.

Kristian A Alomá, PhD (19:02.446)
you know, stay on top of their homework. The glorious future is that my kids finish their homework before I even asked them. Right. Kind of thing. And whatever the company has done to get me from that point to that point. Fantastic. I’m going to hire them and I’m going to pay them all the money I have to get these kids through high school, essentially. Right. And so that glorious future is typically like very ambitious. It’s very emotionally worded. It’s where you sort of bring it all together. And so when you have all of those elements, you have essentially the complete elements of a story because every story needs

A hero, which is going to be inherent in the audience you’re serving and the organization that you are. Every story has a struggle or a tension that needs to be overcome in some cases, right? I think it was the guy who came up with story brand and blanking on his name right now. I have all his books. Thank you. One of his early books, I think it was a thousand miles and something like that. Overall, he had the metaphor where nobody pays money to watch a guy save money for a Volvo. It’s a boring movie. There’s no tension. There’s no struggle. Right.

Tom Nixon (19:45.698)
Donald Miller, Donald Miller.

Kristian A Alomá, PhD (20:01.763)
You go to watch a movie like Independence Day or You’ve Got Mail where things are at risk, right? Things get lost. There’s a challenge, whatever the world could end and you want to see them overcome that struggle. So it has that sort of struggle, that tension. And then there’s always some resolution, some outcome. Now in the fictional world, in the literary world, those endings don’t always have to be very happy.

Of course, right? They can be very sad, very depressing, very bad endings. In the corporate world, you typically want a happy ending for your customers, right? So we really sort of focus on that glorious ending, if you will. And you have that, you’ve got the elements of a story. If you have the data in it, the story becomes credible and believable. If you have the tool or technology defined and the objective defined, it’s very clear what role you play in that story. And that ultimately is your business. And that’s the way your customers are going to be thinking about your business. And if you don’t define that,

then they’ll define it however they want, right? And so you’ve got to define it in order to sort of help shape that perception or what we might sometimes call positioning or placement in the mind, for example.

Tom Nixon (21:08.13)
Yeah, what I love about this, Curtis. So we’ve had a number of guests on everyone’s bringing a different framework, whether it’s the funnel driven storytelling, our why, how, what their story brand and our brand story. If you hit on this just a minute ago, they all agree. There’s all there’s commonality, which you just broke it down, which is a three act play. What was life life like before you this problem was solved for you? Tell me about a time when you just said, I can’t live like this anymore. I got to find a better way.

Kristian A Alomá, PhD (21:24.9)
for sure.

Tom Nixon (21:36.76)
Tell me about the journey act two is what where’d you go looking for the solution? How are you going to resolve this? How are you going to find your happy ending? And then act three is now tell me about now that you found my client, right? Tell me what life’s like Ben and what would you tell the next person about that struggle that you went through? It’s everything that we just talked through and it’s what you hit on earlier. Now this should all seem very familiar to you, Curtis.

Curtis Hays (21:59.592)
It is very familiar. Yeah. We had a client this morning ask me to do, we’re going to do customer surveys, well, interviews with one of the clients we’re working on right now. And they sent me a message, what questions are you going to ask? And I was like, well, that’s sort of difficult to tell you because in the interview, that’s the arc we want to get and how we maybe get to that arc isn’t going to be three direct questions. So.

Kristian A Alomá, PhD (22:17.817)
Yeah.

Kristian A Alomá, PhD (22:26.232)
Yeah. Yeah.

Curtis Hays (22:27.789)
So that’s where I realized, that interview part comes in is you can’t necessarily turn this into a survey. You can get good results and good data from CSAT and customer sentiment and those types of things online. But if you really want to understand that transformation, you kind of have to, I don’t know, you describe it, Tom, because you do the interviews of like, you when you get somebody on the phone and they start talking.

Kristian A Alomá, PhD (22:37.06)
Sure.

Curtis Hays (22:52.315)
They might tell you that story in five minutes. You might be on the phone with them for 45 minutes while they take you through that journey and you want that whole input.

Kristian A Alomá, PhD (23:00.984)
For sure.

Tom Nixon (23:01.826)
Yeah. I recently talked to one of our clients, three clients, all in one day in every interview was different, even though the map was the exact same because they said something that I could hear their voice quiver. And I knew that that was a scab to pick at, right? But it was totally different than the other one because what I’m trying to get to at the end of the day of these interviews, Christian is like the authentic story, not like don’t send me a bunch of testimonials from your favorite clients to tell you how wonderful you are.

Kristian A Alomá, PhD (23:14.862)
Yeah.

Tom Nixon (23:28.748)
That doesn’t help me at all. It doesn’t help the next prospects. No one’s going to believe it. Tell me the story and allow me to tell that story to your next prospect. And so I’m no expert, but I know there’s science behind this. I have in my note something I can try to read called Psychobiographical Research. Hey, I did it. But there’s science behind what I’m trying to do as an amateur, but I need I can’t give you a list of questions. I don’t know what the questions will be.

Kristian A Alomá, PhD (23:37.038)
Yeah.

Kristian A Alomá, PhD (23:44.942)
There is science behind it, yeah, in fact.

Kristian A Alomá, PhD (23:53.24)
Yeah, yeah. And I think that’s the right way to think about it, right? I mean, we do this work at my company day in, day out, right? Our core service is conducting interviews with customers to collect those stories. And I think you’re both sort of in the right mindset in that of like, what are the questions is the wrong question. It’s really what stories do we want to try to get and how do we get

to those stories. And that can be sometimes very direct or very sort of circuitous, if you will. And we even, when I do guides, and obviously, you always ask questions in conversations, but we design our guides for those conversations as much as we can without questions. They’re all prompts. It’s tell me about the time this happened. Tell me about when you first learned about this product. Tell me about when you recommended it to a friend. Tell me about when you decided this was the one that you love.

We get them to tell those stories and the power of it, to your point, the science behind it really is when you get folks reflecting on experiences from their past, telling those stories, and we’ll do this in the interviews and I encourage you all to do it as well, is we don’t just ask them to tell me the story. We try to get them to say, okay, well, where are you? What’s going on, right? Who’s with you? What are you saying? Sometimes it’s like, what do you see? What’s the temperature like? What’s going on?

The reason is what some of the research shows us is the more you can immerse them in that story again, right? Bring up those details, refresh that. The more they will start to re-experience the original emotions of that moment again. And if they’re doing that in an interview, then that’s prime picking for insights, right? To your point, you’ll hear that quiver in the voice. You’ll hear those emotional words come out that’ll tell you, I need to figure out why he said…

this makes me feel like a king on top of the world, then you’re gonna go dig into that and you’re gonna be able to explore that.

Tom Nixon (25:47.47)
That’s so profound.

Curtis Hays (25:49.0)
And so there’s a word that comes to mind, Tom, and the word is empathy. That you as the interviewer need to be able to express empathy so that, almost like a psychologist would, right? Allow that person to open up to tell you the rest of that story, to really get out what you need to get out of them, right?

Tom Nixon (26:05.251)
Yeah.

Kristian A Alomá, PhD (26:09.081)
Yeah.

Tom Nixon (26:10.766)
And I can’t. That’s exactly right. And I can’t tell somebody in advance what I’m going to be empathetic for because I haven’t heard the story yet. Right. So I can’t. Right. Exactly. Yeah. I’m going to feel sorry for them when they say this. Well, what if they don’t say that? Well, then too bad for them. Move on to the next one. I have a great homework assignment for our listeners and viewers. And maybe you’ve already done this, but for whatever reason, my wife and I are big in a dateline. Like we just.

Kristian A Alomá, PhD (26:19.869)
Yeah, yeah, that’s sort of the antithesis of empathy in many regards.

Tom Nixon (26:39.244)
We don’t have a thing for the macabre, but something about Dateline just lets us turn our brain off.

Curtis Hays (26:43.109)
Aren’t those the stories where the husband murders the wife or the wife murders the husband and

Tom Nixon (26:47.406)
Maybe that’s something there’s something to that. I will look into that. I’ll report it to the police and get back to you. No, but so to the therapy point, there is a stark difference. We’ve figured out over the years between a Keith Morrison episode and literally anyone else because not only does Keith Morrison interview the person way better than anyone else, he tells a story and wraps it in a compelling narrative that I want to watch, which doesn’t feel like I’m reading about a murder on the nightly news. It feels like

Curtis Hays (26:49.668)
Maybe there’s something there.

Kristian A Alomá, PhD (26:51.811)
That’s for another therapist at another time, I’m sure.

Kristian A Alomá, PhD (27:03.083)
Mmm.

Kristian A Alomá, PhD (27:12.023)
Yeah.

Tom Nixon (27:17.592)
there’s more to it. So if any Daylight fans out there, please comment and let us know whether you ever notice that or please go on.

Kristian A Alomá, PhD (27:24.228)
If Dateline is listening, comment. Let them know. You appreciate it, right? mean…

Tom Nixon (27:27.468)
Yes, exactly. Keith Morrison. We’d love to have you on the podcast. I’ll come on your podcast. No, because that means I’ll be dead. Okay, so moving on to I just gave you a real world example that I think fans of Dateline could relate to. Are there real world examples of, know, we tend to use big brands as examples, not because we represent big brands, but because now you can see kind how they’re doing it. You mentioned Apple. Great example. What other case study or example comes to mind?

Kristian A Alomá, PhD (27:38.808)
Yeah.

Kristian A Alomá, PhD (27:54.404)
Yeah, I mean, some of my favorite right now include there’s there’s a women’s intimate apparel, underwear, bras brand named Lulalu. And one of the things I love is I sort of studied this brand that I discovered basically through and with my wife was they have very clearly sort of focused on a type of hero within the audience. So it’s not all women. It’s

women with smaller who require smaller bra sizes essentially. Right. And and they have focused on the struggle of that most traditional bras that you’d get it like the traditional sort of lingerie stores are not designed for you. And so they’re not going to fit. They’re going to gap. They’re going to rub. going to they’re just going to feel wrong. And and so they’ve said they design for those models. Right. The A Cup, the double A Cup, that sort of thing in an effort to make those women feel comfortable and confident.

And they’ve taken that all the way to it’s not just about making bras anymore. Right. It’s about empowering women. It’s about helping them feel confident in their body, helping them feel confident in who they are. And they have a community now around that. Right. How many bra brands have like an empowered community that are sharing stories with each other about, you know, just essentially sort of life as a woman in the world. And so that’s that’s one of one of my favorite examples. You know, we’re seeing a lot.

I won’t dig into too many of the details we’ve seen in the past recent history. Of course, a couple of brands make some major faux pas out in the world from their efforts to rebrand and then unbranding themselves back to their old brand and things like that. whenever we see stuff like that, I think the biggest sort of issue that we find is they have disconnected from the consumer’s story and are really just focusing on theirs. one of the sort of

Tom Nixon (29:32.243)
Mm-hmm.

Tom Nixon (29:47.79)
Good and agree more.

Kristian A Alomá, PhD (29:49.571)
I’m sure we’ll come back to this as we go through it. One of the things I always tell folks about branding is your brand is not the hero of the story. If your brand is the hero of the story, a customer is going to look at that and go, there’s no room for me, right? I don’t belong there. It’s about them. But when you make space to allow the audience to be the hero, then they want to adopt that story. They fit into that story. And it’s a really sort of interesting thing that happens. I call it the hero’s paradox, which is

Tom Nixon (30:03.832)
Okay.

Kristian A Alomá, PhD (30:16.904)
When you do that, when you make them the hero, because they start to become so attached to you as part of that story, you start to look like a hero to them. And that’s what you want. You want to be named the hero. You don’t want to claim hero status. And that’s, think, what makes Powerful.

Tom Nixon (30:31.882)
Absolutely. Absolutely. Yeah, for sure. I will. That’ll be one of our shorts for sure. I wanted to ask you kind of one final thing before we move on to final thoughts, and that is as you’re talking about this and I’m just going back because I’m starting to think about who are some of the brands that I admire. I feel like we got really good at this, maybe starting in the 60s when the real world.

Curtis Hays (30:35.004)
We got to pause there Tom and comment on that.

Curtis Hays (30:41.608)
You

Tom Nixon (31:00.77)
Don Draper’s of the world. We’re asking companies to think of themselves as a storyteller through the seventies and eighties. And I’m thinking about like, I don’t know when it went away, but I feel like we’ve gotten to a place now where everything feels transactional. And I sit and watch the Superbowl for example. And I have all this nostalgia for these commercials that used to entertain me. And now I’m like, well, there’s nothing to watch. What am I even going to talk about on Monday morning? So are we at this turning point where we need to turn the needle back?

Kristian A Alomá, PhD (31:04.619)
Yeah.

Kristian A Alomá, PhD (31:12.738)
Mm-hmm.

Tom Nixon (31:28.91)
towards narrative and away from transactional. Don’t you feel like that’s there’s too much noise otherwise?

Kristian A Alomá, PhD (31:34.306)
I agree completely. I think, you know, I think a lot of what has happened has has in some cases just been sort of the natural, I think, cadence of a capitalistic society, which I’m I think there’s good to capitalism. But I think there’s this sort of draw towards this. What can we produce by the next quarter? How do we get as much money out of the wallets of our customers as quickly as we can?

So that when we get on that shareholder call, when we go to report out what our sort of finances are, we have the rosiest picture that we can paint, right? That is really at the heart of just like growth focused, only sort of sales oriented, basically branding and business building, right? Now there’s a role for that, but what’s powerful about story, and in some cases what’s really hard

hard about taking a narrative approach to this stuff is it’s a little bit slower, but it’s a much longer bird in that, you know, I think I don’t know when it’s happened, but we’ve stopped talking about lifetime value of customers, right? We talk about what we can get by the next quarter. When you build these kinds of relationships that these sort of stories allow, you create a relationship with a customer that is like

Tom Nixon (32:36.364)
Mm.

Kristian A Alomá, PhD (32:56.066)
True loyalty. And I think we look at loyalty as like, they buy us a lot. Loyalty really is they are willing to sacrifice resources to maintain this relationship, right? Whether that’s a deal with another brand, whether it’s just the option of something that on paper looks better, right? Loyalty is I’m willing to forgive. I’m willing to sacrifice. I’m willing to sort of conceive things because I believe this brand cares about me as much as I have.

through my life cared about it. That’s lifetime value. So it’s hard to sort of build a narrative strategy, brand strategy, and then come back to the next quarter and say, look how much of an impact it did. Because you might not see a ton of that until you start looking at lifetime value. And you start looking at that. So that’s where I think we need to shift is going back to what we trying to, what kind of legacies are we trying to build as businesses? What kind of, how do we want to last? How do we want to be known, you know, for the long term?

Tom Nixon (33:39.311)
In your talk.

Curtis Hays (33:50.408)
Mm-hmm.

Tom Nixon (33:53.24)
That’s the light bulb that went off for you, Curtis, when not too long ago, you had so many inbound calls saying we need to do lead gen. We need more leads. We need more sales. And eventually you got to a point where you said, on a second. And you asked that question. That’s not the problem you’re trying to solve. What are you really trying to accomplish here to the point about legacy?

Curtis Hays (34:13.98)
Right. Right. When you’ve worked with three other agencies and then you’re coming to me thinking that I’m going to push some buttons in the ad platforms, it’s going to make sales actually happen for you. It’s just not true. And I can tell you from experience that it’s not true. There’s something inherently wrong, which is what you said earlier, Christian, which is the hero problem. That in most cases, these companies see themselves as the hero.

and they are just not connecting with our audiences because it’s all me, me, me, me. Look how great my product or service is. Do you guys remember Kellgon? I mean, Kellgon take me away. So, and like, we’ll say it in, or I’ll say it in the house, like Stephanie’s having a rough day.

Kristian A Alomá, PhD (34:54.646)
gosh, yeah.

Tom Nixon (34:55.64)
Well, yeah, take me away.

Kristian A Alomá, PhD (34:57.794)
A lot of people still remember Calgon because of how well they did it.

Curtis Hays (35:07.368)
and you know, whatever and she expresses it and I just say, Kellgon, take me away, which is just like, hey, go take a break. You know what, if you need to go have a bath, you want to go in the corner and read, go for a run. It’s you time, right? And growing up in the 80s with soap operas on and that commercial being on all the time, right? It was like ingrained in my head of like, yeah, mom’s busy and she stressed out at the end of a day.

Kristian A Alomá, PhD (35:35.98)
Yeah.

Curtis Hays (35:36.424)
And so they sort of turned that mom into a hero with this luxury product that just sort of made it all worth it kind of a thing. Right?

Kristian A Alomá, PhD (35:46.05)
Right. And the idea was mom could escape. Say again?

Tom Nixon (35:46.127)
They told that story in 15 seconds. They told that story of 15 seconds, Christian, right? They told that story in 15 seconds. There was the struggle, the, my God, these kids in this house and everything. And then there’s the aspiration, get me away from here. And then there was the GF or the Y, right? Which is the bath. You believed it as a viewer, even if I wasn’t in the target market, I’m like, I get what that product does.

Kristian A Alomá, PhD (35:54.392)
my gosh, it was amazing.

Curtis Hays (36:05.16)
Yep.

Kristian A Alomá, PhD (36:07.106)
Oh my gosh. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Because the story was it takes you away. Right. Like you can escape all of this. And I remember the campaigns. Right. I watched soap operas after school with my mom. And and and it was like there would be in that bathtub and all of a sudden the bathroom would disappear and they’re out like in some field somewhere. Right. Doing whatever. And and and and people still remember that they haven’t played that tagline for almost 30 years.

Right. But we still say Calgon taking me away. It was one of the strongest sort of narratives that a brand could

Curtis Hays (36:38.812)
They didn’t talk about like what components were in that soap and how your skin felt afterwards and like all of these other technical feature benefits stuff. They told a story and made you feel something that you brought you to humanity and made you feel empathetic. And that’s…

Kristian A Alomá, PhD (36:46.622)
Right. Right.

Kristian A Alomá, PhD (36:50.944)
Yeah, yeah.

Kristian A Alomá, PhD (36:57.024)
Yeah. You might remember more recently, there was that Volkswagen campaign where the little kid was wearing the Darth Vader costume and he goes up to the car and he’s like trying to use the force to turn the car on. And right, you don’t see the car driving. You don’t really see the inside of car. They don’t talk about the features of the car. The kids doing that. The dad’s in the kitchen, hits the auto ignite button. All of a sudden you feel like the coolest dad in the world. Right. Like that was the story. They understood.

Curtis Hays (37:06.428)
Yes. Yep.

Kristian A Alomá, PhD (37:26.902)
This isn’t really about A to B, right? Every car is about A to B. This car is about how do you feel as a dad? How do you feel as a parent? How do you feel in these situations? Now compare that to I think it was years ago, Fancy Feast, the cat food company. They had a campaign and it would say it showed the cat, you know, coming up in the evening. Of course, they would talk about the ingredients and all this stuff in it. And the tagline was maybe it’s love. Maybe it’s Fancy Feast. Now,

As a cat owner, and I’m not a cat owner, but I’ve owned pets. Can you imagine someone coming up to you you go, your cat doesn’t actually love you, it’s us, right? Like, where do you fit into that story? Like you want to reject that as much as possible. You’re probably being like, no, it’s entirely love. And maybe it’s the other brand that I want to buy now that supports me in that love, right? So, you know, the way we sort of position those consumers in these stories, I think really can make or break their relationship to us.

Tom Nixon (38:16.194)
Yeah.

Tom Nixon (38:26.744)
for sure. All right. Well, it’s time for final thoughts or hot takes. You decide which category you choose from. I will go first. My hot take is that Apple used to be the masters of this and they no longer are. And I think in part, I’m just timing it to when Mr. Jobs passed away. I don’t know if that’s the reason. So no offense to Mr. Cook, but I’m giving you another homework assignment. If you don’t want to watch Dateline, go back in Google, the 2013 iPhone commercial called misunderstood.

And that’s the one where the boy is seemingly not paying attention to anything going on at family Christmas because he’s not on his phone all day. It watched that story that it tells and tell me you didn’t get a little teary eyed by the end of it. So that’s my hot take. Yep. Um, who wants to go next? Curtis, do you have a final thought or a hot take?

Kristian A Alomá, PhD (38:56.575)
Mmm.

Kristian A Alomá, PhD (39:01.346)
beautiful camping.

Kristian A Alomá, PhD (39:08.065)
Beautiful camp. Yeah.

Curtis Hays (39:14.482)
Well, there’s a similar story, is, isn’t there, was it Chevy that did one or something where the grandpa has Alzheimer’s or maybe somebody passed away and they hop in the truck and they do a final drive around town on Christmas, you know? I think, grandpa does have Alzheimer’s. They get him in the truck and he’s starting to remember as they drive around town. That was my high school. I met your grandmother there.

Kristian A Alomá, PhD (39:29.153)
Mmm.

Curtis Hays (39:40.828)
and his memories coming back to you. And how do you not like tear up in it? And it has nothing to do with the car, like you said, Christian, nothing to do with point A to point B. It’s all about, man, we’ve all been there. Maybe the last Christmas I’m gonna spend with grandma or grandpa. It chokes me up just to start thinking about it, right?

Tom Nixon (39:56.995)
Yeah, it just for the devil advocate that would say, you know, and then C-suite say, well, how does that sell cars? We’ve just told a great story, but we’ve reminded people that the Chevy brand has been around for decades, right? And it’s something that we all feel. It’s as American as apple pie. I’m quoting another campaign. Anyways, Christian final thought hot day.

Kristian A Alomá, PhD (39:57.376)
Damn.

Curtis Hays (40:11.463)
Right. well, it’s what Mark Schaeffer keeps talking about, which is humanity, which is in this world of technology and AI and all this, that I think this is your opportunity as a brand to insert humanity into your brand to differentiate. And if you can do that through empathy and actually make somebody feel something, how powerful is that to set you apart from your competitors? So that’s my final thought is don’t talk about you. Find a way to actually…

trigger some level of emotion in your customer.

Kristian A Alomá, PhD (40:40.075)
Well, yeah.

Tom Nixon (40:42.286)
I’ve converted this data scientist Christian. I’ve converted him. What would you what do you leave listeners with? What I’d like to hear from you you don’t mind, unless you have something that you’ve been dying to say is what does a company who now says, okay, I’m converted. What’s the first thing that they need to do? What’s the first step to get on this path to telling better stories about the hero, not yourself?

Curtis Hays (40:45.225)
Hahaha

Kristian A Alomá, PhD (40:45.759)
I love it. I love it. We should all hug after this.

Kristian A Alomá, PhD (40:53.227)
Yeah, yeah.

Kristian A Alomá, PhD (41:04.907)
Good question. So the first thing that they need to do, think, you know, I was going to maybe mention this, but I think this then now fits is I think a lot of organizations, especially well-established organizations, they will hide and get embarrassed of their legacies. Now, some legacies maybe you should be embarrassed about, depending on how far back they go and what they were involved in. But I think a lot of folks think that if I talk about how long I’ve been around our history,

We’re going to look outdated. We’re going to look old. We’re going to look like, OK, boomer type of thing. Right. But I think to your point, when when it comes to sort of creating and crafting that authentic story, that human story, those stories prove that you deserve the story you have today, that you can tell today. And so I often say, hey, look at your history. Try to sort of identify what those major narrative threads are. Right. You know, it’s it’s probably not

just about making cards or it’s probably not just about, you know, solving this sort of what seemed like a really simple problem at the time for moms, right? Like the whole idea of like cake mix, for example, right? Started with all the sort of ideas of like how we can make it easy to make cake mix, but then they took away the joys of baking essentially. And so they had to take ingredients out. So it felt like you were baking again.

Go back to what those threads are, those real core narrative threads that you had that’s probably more about how do we create more time for mom? How do we create connections around dinner tables? How do we create opportunities for people to see the world? How do we expose people to ideas? How do we create deeper relationships between folks? Those become your narrative. And I often tell folks there’s a difference between the way I define it.

narrative and story. Your narrative is the skeleton. Your narrative is the core big idea that your organization stands for. The story is how you talk about that. And so, you know, my example is often like love always wins is a narrative. It’s a core big idea. That story can be told with Shrek, with the notebook and with you’ve got mail. Right. So you’ve got one big narrative that can be told in three different ways to three different audiences.

Kristian A Alomá, PhD (43:24.969)
and connect with them in the language they speak, in the context that they’re in, in the life that they’re in. So I always say, go back to your own stories, try to identify what those big ideas are, and then start listening to your customer stories and figure out where you fit into their story today. And it’s the organizations that do that, I think, because as you all know, we talked a little bit about it. I think when branding really had, I think it’s sort of cognitive revolution.

if you will, where we started talking about emotion during the Mad Men days, things like that, and being something more, we had this sort of emphasis on emotion. think organizations were all like, well, what’s our emotion? We have to stand for some emotion. The problem is none of us have one emotion all the time, right? So if you stand for confidence, great, I don’t need that anymore. Where do you fit into my life now? But when you stand for story and for the relationship in that story with the audience, those stories evolve with the consumer.

Right? So that, yeah, you started looking for, you know, diapers for infants. And now we’re talking about how to help your kid kind of find independence as a toddler, as a five year old. Right. You follow them in that journey to what is sort of the natural life of that relationship and sometimes even beyond where they become ambassadors for you, essentially. So so that’s that would be sort of my recommendation, I guess, is to start with your own story. Find those core narrative kind of nuggets, those big ideas.

Tom Nixon (44:42.243)
Yeah.

Kristian A Alomá, PhD (44:50.939)
and start listening to your consumer story to see where you fit in and how those two things can.

Tom Nixon (44:56.094)
Exactly. I hoping you would say that because that’s what I thought you would say, which is final thought for me. If you want to hear a good story, talk to a customer. Cool. Speaking of good story, so I will remind the listeners and the viewers that you are all listening or watching this podcast in the future. And by now, the Detroit Tigers have either already eliminated Seattle and moved on. Maybe they’ve already won this whole world series and they beat Chicago in game seventh with a ninth inning two out home run by Torkelson.

Kristian A Alomá, PhD (45:05.265)
always. Always.

Tom Nixon (45:25.198)
If that’s the case, I don’t want to hear it. Don’t spoil the ending. See you next time. Bullhorns, Bullseyes.

Kristian A Alomá, PhD (45:31.286)
Take care.