The B2B attention challenge : How to tell great stories in a complex world

Welcome to Attention Matters, the newsletter from Storythings which gives you practical insights and tools to grow your audiences’ attention.

This is the second in our five part series looking at common business problems that you can solve with your B2B content strategy:

1: We work in a sector that is incredibly important, but overlooked
2: We work in a sector that is complex and often misunderstood
3: We are well established in our sector, but need to shift attitudes to our brand/positioning
4: We work in a sector that is diffuse and unconnected
5: We work in an emerging sector that hasn’t developed its own languages or rhythms yet

We’re building this into a resource that you can come back to when you are facing these problems in your own B2B content strategy, and we’d love to know more about what you’d like us to include in the resources. Send me an email if you have any suggestions - we’d like to make this series as practical and useful as possible!

And thank you to everyone who got in touch about Storythings content format audits and consultations. If you’re interested in us helping you with your content strategy and production, our content audit is a fast, cheap and effective way to start - details in the promo box below!

The Message:

If you work in a complex sector, the golden rule is ‘show, don’t tell’.

Over the last 13 years, we’ve worked with a lot of people who say to us that their sectors are complex and hard to understand, even for people working in those sectors. Sometimes its because the work is technically complex and cutting edge, or the work focuses on long term global change, or a particular story might be politically and socially sensitive.

Complex stories bring with them more barriers than usual to getting our audiences’ attention. As storytellers, we’re not only up against the everyday battle for attention in a crowded digital ecosystem, we’ve also got to somehow find an entry point for an audience that makes this complex story accessible and welcoming.

The instinct for most clients is to move into explainer mode - to commission content that leans heavily into facts and data. After all, you are the experts on your issues, so it makes sense that you are the best people to explain everything.

The trouble is, explainers only work when people are already actively interested in your stories. They are a side quest to the main story - they provide valuable context, but are not the thing that will grab and hold attention in the first place. To do that, you need to dial back on being a teacher, and start from a more human perspective.

The Quote:

When I was thinking of examples to illustrate the best way to tell complex stories, I immediately thought of Jon Ronson’s Things Fell Apart, an incredible podcast series looking at the root causes of the culture wars that have shaped society and culture in the last few decades. The level of complexity in the stories is huge, stretching across decades, across the globe, and touching on some of the most contentious and politically sensitive subjects in today’s society. When he set out to make the series, he had a really complex problem - how can he tell the stories of the culture wars without becoming part of the same problem?

“When the BBC asked me if I wanted to make a series about the culture wars, my first thought was maybe I could try and solve that mystery. But how to make a series about the culture wars that didn’t become a culture war? I didn’t want to pour gasoline on any fires. I don’t enjoy scrapping with people. So I figured the best way would be to go back in time and find the origin moments, the pebbles thrown in the pond.”

Jon Ronson - from his Substack post How To Find Stories

This is a simple, but really important insight - his ambition with the series was not to be an explainer, not to try and ‘solve the mystery’, but to go back and find origin moments, the personal, intimate and deeply human events that rippled out like ‘pebbles thrown in the pond’ to affect our culture and society. By stepping away from ‘explainer mode’ and looking for the deep roots of the complexity he was trying to explain, he was following one of the golden rules of great storytelling - show, don’t tell.

The Insight

Things Fall Apart is an extreme example of complex storytelling, but the lesson applies to any of us trying to tell stories in a complex environment. We often start from where we are now, in the middle of the complexity, but the reality is that all complexity comes from simpler roots. At the heart of every complex story there are small, human, moments that will help your audiences empathise and identify with your world. The way into a complex story is not through facts, but through emotion.

Our world is very complex, but we don’t make it easier to understand by explaining away the complexity. Instead we have to help people relate to that complexity through human actions and relationships. The Jon Ronson quote above is a really important insight - we might find complexity difficult to engage with in abstract subjects, but we absolutely love exploring complexity when it comes to other humans. Your audience will find it easier to connect to the messy complexity of other people, and their actions and decisions will help them understand a wider picture, like the ‘pebbles in the pond’ Ronson describes.

The Action

Whenever we are asked by a client to help them tell a complex story, there are three things we do.

The first thing is to look for the people at the heart of the story. This can often mean working with other partners that are closer to the ground than our client. When Experian came to us wanting to tell the complex stories of how people in developing economies were struggling to get bank accounts, we used our global talent networks to find local film makers like Liseth Yarlequé in Peru, to find people’s stories that would illustrate the issue.

Secondly, you need to use their voices to tell their own stories. Compelling stories have protagonists, not subjects. This means the people at the centre of the story need to talk about their own actions and decisions, not be described second hand as if their lives were out of their own control. A subject is someone that a story happens to; a protagonist is someone who affects the story through their actions. Too often, organisations describe complex situations from the perspective of data or processes, not people. Data should never be the protagonist in your story.

Thirdly, complex stories need to be immersive - you need to make the audience feel like they are in the middle of something as it is happening, so they have a visceral sense of the complexity and nuance of the situation. You can do this with great photography or video, or evocative sound design in a podcast, or just really great narrative writing. Here’s one of my favourite examples - we produced a series for Gates Foundation on the likely causes and impact of a global pandemic in 2017 (I know, the timing was just a few years out!). In one episode, the author, journalist Simon Parkin, had to explain how zoonoses - the transmission of viruses between species - causes mutations to viruses that can make them more dangerous.

Here’s the first paragraph from a World Health Organisation description of Zoonoses:

“A zoonosis is an infectious disease that has jumped from a non-human animal to humans. Zoonotic pathogens may be bacterial, viral or parasitic, or may involve unconventional agents and can spread to humans through direct contact or through food, water or the environment. They represent a major public health problem around the world due to our close relationship with animals in agriculture, as companions and in the natural environment. Zoonoses can also cause disruptions in the production and trade of animal products for food and other uses.”

And here’s the first paragraph from Simon Parkin’s article for our series:

“In 2011 Ron Fouchier took a pipette in one hand, a ferret in the other, and squeezed a few drops of liquid into the creature’s quivering nostril. This was a routine procedure for Fouchier, one of the world’s leading virologists at the Erasmus Medical Center in Rotterdam. He had spent his career studying the ways in which deadly viruses mutate as they pass between animals and people. Nevertheless, as he squeezed the pipette, he could not have anticipated the fallout from his actions.”

Ok, so that might not be the fairest of comparisons - the WHO piece is aiming to be factual and objective, and our piece is more narrative journalism. But if you’re trying to engage an audience, the immersive narrative of Parkin’s article is far more likely to work. You can drive audiences to explainers once they are interested in the story, but to get them interested, you need something immersive.

You need to show, not tell.

What Do You Think?

We’re really enjoying writing this series - it gives us an opportunity to look back through many of the projects we’ve produced for clients over the years, and pull out some interesting lessons and insights. But we know the collective knowledge of our many thousands of subscribers is even more impressive, so we’d love to know how you are using immersive, human, stories to explain complex issues in your work.

What is the project or story that really helped you understand a complex issue? Share it with us by hitting reply and we’ll feature you in the next newsletter.

If you found this valuable, we’d love to hear from you! Please reply to this email to get in touch, or share the article on Linkedin tagging Storythings.

See you next time!