The four Cs of brand storytelling: Context

Why do people go to the movies? Read books? Watch TV? To escape. To be transported out of their mundane lives and into a story.

If your brand tells a compelling enough story, there's no reason it can't offer a similar journey out of the mundane to employees and customers. And an evocative context is the first step.

"A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away..." Got a picture of where you are? Some indication of the world you're in? That's context.

So is "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times..."

Context defines a place, a time, a situation. Context is the frame into which the picture of your brand fits. It helps us understand the reason your brand came into existence. Something is happening, somewhere, and your brand is addressing it in some way. Marketing folks might look at this and think "that's a situation analysis," and a situation analysis can certainly contain elements of context, but most situation analyses I've seen run down the rabbit hole of markets, audiences, products, competitors -- all pretty sterile concepts that may get bean counters excited, but not anybody else.

Context invites us into the story. Those few words that open Star Wars tell us that we're entering a world that's both alien and familiar -- a world that is remote from us, yet reminiscent of something we've seen before ("Once upon a time..."), and it may be a world not that different from our own.

The opening lines of A Tale of Two Cities are even more evocative. They immediately create a feeling of tension and brilliantly play off of the geographical polarity in the title to prepare us to be immersed in world of emotional polarity as well.

What both examples do is transport us. That's the primary function of context -- to pull us away from ourselves and help us engage in a different world.

That, friends, is imagination. What does it have to do with marketing?

Well, if your marketing is focused on producing incremental widget sales or incremental clicks, not much.

But if you expect your marketing to create the foundation for dramatic gains -- in performance, in market share, in sales -- you will have to inspire people. You will have to kindle their imaginations. You will have to transport them.

And it all begins with context.