# 92: Selling and Choosing (Life) Stories
Story behind the Passage
Around Christmas and New Year’s, German TV stations show these old movies and series. You can even watch famous fairy tales by the Grimm Brothers. It is funny how they continue showing them. I bet, there must be a good reason for this. Partly, this content probably counts as “cultural capital” by now. Furthermore, people probably do watch these shows simply because they have done so for ten or more times already.
I am one of them.
I just watched an old hospital series from the 1980s. It was like the German predecessor of “Emergency Room.” The show really became legendary. It staged many famous German actors. And I guess, the only reason why you turn on these old shows is because you remember the pleasure they gave you in the past. Media scientists would call this “uses and gratifications.” Whatever you want to call it, I do think that these stored memories of watching something stick with you. No, you cannot replicate them in the present. But you know this in advance. You still turn on the TV and you remember how you did the same thing ten, twenty, or even forty years ago.
This déjà vue made me choose Eakin’s book today. Eakin is a well-known life writing researcher. Living Autobiographically is about how we create identity by telling stories about our lives. Since you know how deeply I am into stories, you also know that I fully agree with this. Our lives are stories and we write a new chapter or at least a page every day. Hence, the idea that the stories you tell yourself basically become your life is not strange at all.
I dealt with Eakin in depth in my research on autobiographies. But now, I am thinking through his work again from a different lens. What I am interested in now is how you can create memories for customers with your products and services. A movie or any other media content really is just a product. If you as a customer choose it again — you buy it — based on stored memories from your own life, what does this say about the impact products have on your life story? Is it not so true that every company really sells stories, no matter if you are selling bread, plumbing services, or healthcare? Is it not always the case that the story you sell only has value if it becomes a memory in the life of the customer?
My Learnings
“Life-course decisions, moreover, present themselves of choices of story lines, and they imply choices of identity as well.” I do think that companies still underestimate the power of stories. Even though there is so much talk about “storytelling,” if you really take to heart this line and many others in Eakin’s book, you get a sense of what the term STORY actually means. It is not something you just tell or listen to. If story means life, then story means everything.
Yes, you might go like: “Come on, this is way over the top.” No, I do not think so. I can only speak for myself but I definitely made the decision at some point of my life to choose story over anything else. This choice-making relates to this concept of “story models” which Eakin mentions in the passage. Of course, you never know exactly how something will turn out when you make a certain choice but there are usually examples, prototypes, that help you make a decision.
Let us just take the easy example of going on vacation. For sure, the images in the catalogue or the online ad look different than what you will find when you get there. The hotel looks different than in the pictures; the beach looks different, etc. Still, the images create a “story model” and a particular “story line” that make it easier for you to tell yourself a story about your future vacation in your mind. The temporary aspect is actually important here: Even before you buy and do something, you start telling tales of the future. This makes it easier to decide on going to the Caribbean or going to Norway for your winter vacation because in one story you are lying at the beach, in the other story, you are walking in the snow.
Of course, what I am describing here sounds like Marketing 101. But again, for me, there is much more meaning in this and I usually experience that companies, especially young businesses, do not get how important it is to write stories with and for the client that will stick — that will become memories that will never leave the human hard drive. The remarkable thing is, I think, it does not matter at all if it is a “big or a small” memory. Stories that become life memories escape any of this judgement. They cannot be measured objectively.
Just take the example of visiting a bakery in the neighborhood where you grew up. As a kid, maybe your average purchase there amounted to less than a Euro/USD. But the ritual of going there on a certain day of the week, maybe, or with particular friends of yours stuck. For sure, you had conversations there and you met new people. All these things are tiny, unimportant, meaningless, as some people might call them. But for you, they became part of your childhood. They cannot be erased. And you will feel sad if you return one day and the bakery is gone.
But the stories that you experienced there, they cannot be erased.
What Eakin says about choice making therefore is important. Whenever you return to the bakery, you decide you want a particular story to continue in your life. The same holds true for any product you choose. If companies realize this, then they also understand, at least ideally, how important the human factor is amongst all the data you can collect. There are so many details that you can offer as a company that will severely influence the story that your client is writing/creating for his own life by visiting your store or ordering your product. Every tiny aspect matters and you cannot know in advance what this will be, neither can you predict it. It is as individual as the life of any of your customers.
The only thing that every company, even every single entrepreneur, can do, is pay attention to the (life) stories of clients. There are many things that businesses can mess up because they are out of their control. But there is one thing that is completely irresponsible if they mess it up. That thing is not storytelling, it is story listening. The only way that you can get a sense of how to offer stories for your customers that are so valuable that they stick is by listening to what clients say. You need to read between the lines of these stories. This is all. The rest will follow automatically. You do not need big data analysis for this or an army of marketing folks.
And remember that creating these memories involves a huge responsibility. As Eakin states, choosing a story is choosing “to live a particular kind of life and become the person predicated by that life.” If you really care for your customers, then you better take that seriously. You do not want to mess up the life story of anybody, right? But you always have the chance of becoming the Steven Spielberg of your clients and of the movies they write for themselves and the images they see in their heads. If they start smiling or are moved to tears when these images traverse their inner eyes — you got it all right.
Reflection Questions
1) Do you make purchase decisions based on how they contribute to your life story?
2) What is an outstanding customer experience that you remember? What made it exceptional?
3) What can you personally do to improve the client’s ‘story’ with your company?