Individually Wrapped

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The heart of the E+S methodology, Carr explains, is the “envisioning” session, where the consultants tease out the narrative strands that may be woven together into a compelling company or product “story.” A story that’s transformative to the client, to be sure, but also transformative to the target consumers. Because stories do compel people to act.

The resort giant Intrawest has sold $10-billion worth of real estate at developments like Storied Places since E+S helped them envision themselves out of what E+S co-founder Jake Chalmers calls the “real estate deal business” and into the “experience business.” For American spirits giant Brown-Forman, which found itself with an excess of wine on its hands from South Africa (a country with lingering consumer-image problems in the U.S.), E+S envisioned a story to move that wine. It’s titled “Eleven Tongues,” a narrative inspired by the 11 official languages of South Africa and designed (not subtly, but not without elegance, either) to blow away the consumer memory of apartheid with a breath of fresh, multicultural air.

Explaining how stories create consumer behaviour is more difficult, but after looking at many corporate stories, one trend did stand out for me. In promising a product-driven transformation, corporate storytelling invariably deploys the language of spiritualism. You won’t find E+S promoting a real estate development in Santa Fe using the words “God” or “church.” But watch the movie they created, called “The Light of Inspiration,” and the sensation is like being lowered into a warm bath of quasi-spirituality. Aboriginal carvings drift onscreen while pan flutes play and a sage baritone intones: You see farther, more deeply, more completely… Each new day is a beam of sunlight from the creator… Later, the words Native, Catholic and New Age Spirituality appear, the text scrolling across the images like an ecumenical screensaver.

E+S is far from alone here. I Googled “corporate storytelling” and could hardly find a practitioner who does not make use of aboriginal imagery from somewhere. You’ll find sun masks and loons and Nazca Lines and cave paintings of people dancing around primal fires. It’s the visual language of deeper meaning – regardless of whether any such deeper meaning could be thought to exist in the products and services these images now serve to market. “People are looking for things that will touch them emotionally, that will help them connect,” Carr says. “If it’s objects they’re connecting to, I suppose it does say something sad about us, but it’s also telling,” she admits.

I agree. It tells us how these consumer stories succeed in providing the human connection that seems to be missing in so many Internet-driven lives these days. The last great forces that managed to connect us – which in North America come down to the assertion of religious, political and individual freedoms – seem to have grown quiet of late. Perhaps we take them for granted, but they seem, in any case, to have lessened in their ability to bind us. It is sad, pitiful even, that so many would look to replace them with shopping, where meaning and connection are offered only by proxy: in the form of a ski hill promising magic, a wine offering absolution for historical sins, an adobe structure in the New Mexico desert that just might have intrinsic spiritual power.

I step out of the offices of E+S feeling exhilarated. This kind of thing happens to me after lively discussion with intelligent people, which is what I’ve just enjoyed. It likewise happens after a bit of practical human business – in this case, the highly refined strategies we develop to sell things – seems to crack open and reveal something of concern to the human heart.

But the more important reason for uplift is an epiphany I’m having, right here. In one of those seemingly fated symmetries of human experience, I realize that the E+S facility in West Vancouver is built on the exact site of the gas station where my cousin long ago parked his Charger. I’m maybe a metre away from where that early brand promise was extended and rejected, seagulls still gliding in the breeze over the marina opposite. And with apologies to Orange Crush, which I have enjoyed numerous times over the years, it is intensely satisfying to think that my story of that day, with all of its nostalgically hazy details (Charger or Thunderbird? Cousin or a family friend?) might have worked a little transformative magic of its own on me, so long ago. I never got the puka shells, but I made a tribal choice and I’m sticking with it. 

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