Originally Broadcast on iMediaConnection

As marketers, we’ve told persuasive stories as all stories have naturally been created, and listened to: beginning, middle, end. This has translated to the marketing funnel model quite literally as: consideration, preference, purchase. It’s a linear narrative, and with the linear media we were limited to using, telling stories and understanding consumer discourse the same way fits well. Aristotle articulated it in Poetics 350 years before the common era.

This luxury of creating simple narratives to sell down a funnel is fading away.

You won’t see this pop up in too many balance sheets today. Much like Cadillac sales in the late 70’s, our current framework of creating beginning-middle-end experiences does work in large numbers. Like Sienfeld and Gates appearing in the Microsoft campaign.

With every album-selling Wal-Mart, there is a song-selling iTunes. Recently, the second bible of the suburban home, the cookbook, has gotten a run on the iPhone from both Kraft and Betty Crocker. To the audience, the experience feels linear: they have a need, and the technology available helps to solve that problem in a beginning-middle-end way.

As a creator, though, this is anything but linear. It feels like an unmanageable mess. But there is a framework to describe this experience: Circular Narrative.

Circular Narrative has traditionally described film (Citizen Kane, Pulp Fiction), or television (most recently Lost) narrative structure that tells a story disjoined in time and space, through the linear lens of character experience.

When applying circular narrative to a brand, the main character (Kane or Marsellus or the Island in Lost) is the brand itself. The experience your most loyal audience members have with that brand, and the portability of that experience is what creates the scenes that are presented to the larger audience: the second-order sets of friends in different platforms.

Sounds small, right? Why invest in this kind of circular narrative when each loyalist has on average a relatively small group of friends. Take Facebook as an example, with 115 friends in a group on average. Kraft releases the Fill A Bowl, Feed America application on Facebook and attracts about 15,000 monthly users. But each of those users is sending a notification of their involvement to  their friends’ mini-feeds, resulting in an average of almost two million impressions. In this one channel alone.

Are you creating a circular narrative that makes brand experiences small, useful, and portable?
Please contribute to the conversation here in the comments section or on Twitter @mleis.

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