How the adventure stories of our past feed into the narratives of business.

Raph Goldberg, Director at Tanglewood Media talks about how the stories of yesteryear can help build business today.

Want to learn how to get people to love your business? Want your audience to become brand ambassadors and spread your message around the world? Then learn from the best in the business! Take a note from real life adventurers and explorers who sold us their tale and immortalised themselves forever as legends.

 “Dr Livingstone, I presume… your identity negotiation within predefined collective cultural identity archetypes is going well?”  

In November 1871 H.M Stanley and Dr David Livingstone met in modern day Tanzania, in Ujiji. The now famous introduction, “Dr Livingstone, I presume”, marks the highpoint of Victorian attitudes towards adventure and exploration and the mythologizing of colonialism. A meeting two years previously, where H.M. Stanley was sent to track Livingstone cements and diffuses the myths and narratives of Victorian culture as the reality and the fiction of the event went their separate ways.

Adventurers of all types, from all ages, form a beautifully tangled web of mythological adventure and exploration, providing us with the very back-bone of our archetypal stories, characters and settings. Cultures of all types and ages require this ability to create their own myths and archetypes, to form a common identity and forge cohesiveness in their society that wouldn’t exist otherwise. If you consider how our brains are hard-wired for receiving and understanding stories, the easiest way to create an identity is by creating stories.

In fact, many books tell you how to do just that.

Using existing archetypes to tell a story is one of the easiest ways of communicating. Now, our cultural diet is so well defined, the stories so deeply ingrained, that all we can do is build upon the blueprint of the archetypes of yesteryear.

As far as myths go, we can look back to the beginning of literature for some great examples of adventurers that fit into the archetypes of our cultural landscape. Just look at Homer’s Odysseus. Homer plots that now common story archetype of the voyage and return – the long years at sea, loneliness, despair, and out of it, experience and ultimately resolution.

 “The horror, the horror… I’ve got no followers on Twitter!”

Let’s just go back to Heart of Darkness for a moment.

It’s a classic quest archetype, with Marlow sent to rescue Mr Kurtz, an ill, maligned, much feared station master. The obsession Marlow develops with Mr Kurtz from snippets of stories, an almost mythological figure, keeps him focused on his goal throughout the darkness.

Quests are bound by this common unifying theme – a desire beyond desires, a dream of something just beyond the possible, without fear or limitation.

Social media can feel like shouting into a cave, or an abyss, or into a dark and foreboding jungle pregnant with sounds of death (like Marlow found it to be)… but it really isn’t. What it’s really about is creating an identity that people can latch on to, so that when they need something your name pops into their head! From there, reach out to people and colour their lives with your story.

Shackleton’s quest teaches us to keep going

Remember Ernest Shackleton? This real-life adventurer became a real-life archetype in his ill-fated voyage to the South Pole in his ship the Endurance during WW1.

Ernest endured, but my, did he suffer.

In December 1914, Shackleton lost his ship to the ice of the Antarctica, fortunately saving the lifeboats. After retreating to a nearby island, the crew almost entirely broken and unable to carry on, Shackleton took 5 men to venture to South Georgia by lifeboat to seek rescue from sailors at the whaling station. On a miraculous arrival, they found the whaling station lay upon the north shore, not the south they had landed; a 36 hour walk across hills and valleys.  Barely surviving, Shackleton and all his 5 men entered the whaling station, securing rescue for the remaining crew.

Shackleton returned to Britain a hero, his name forever associated with his ship’s appellation; Endurance. However, he died desperate and in debt. Yet relatively few people know this. His legend supersedes his downfall.

If you have a goal, try and frame your own company’s narrative around it. So you want to be the number one seller of bespoke wooden clogs in Britain? Frame your own story around that, become the story, and use every opportunity to position yourself within that mould. It’ll give people that mental clue as to where to go when they’re after those beautifully bespoke poplar heels.

Where fact gets in the way of a good story, mythology takes over. The mythologizing of these great explorers and their heroic deeds gets blurred by our need for them to fit an archetype. And so as time moves on, the reality moves further away from story, and we’re left with just the bones of the factual account.

TL/DR; build your business’s story around an archetype! Be adventurous!  

Honestly, engage your customers by positioning yourself within an archetype. Be the hero; be the explorer; be the rebel. Other brands do it, so why not you? They actually write it in to their social media plans, ensuring that they always appear within the limitations of that archetype.

Let’s quickly draw up how you can begin to think about this. The types of things you can use to build your stories are numerous.

Why not try a few of these:

• Unique stories that set your business apart from others – such as teaching stories to illustrate your products or situations.
• Stories of human interest; such as a founding story.
• Stories about overcoming some problem or struggle; how the company overcame problems funding, or product difficulties (obviously don’t give away IPs!).
• Developing products – always interesting, though try and do it after the fact.
• Helping clients – people like to know how you go out of your way to help humanity (don’t be smug!)

If you want to draw upon your own narratives, there's no better way than with video. Video helps you to tell your own stories, build your own identities and tap into those common cultural archetypes.

At Tanglewood Productions we work with everyone from corporates to charities, telling your story to the world. For corporate video production, viral videos, how-to videos and more, speak to Tanglewood Productions at the Brighton Chamber of Commerce ‘Come on an Adventure’ Summit. Book your ticket here.

If you want to contribute to the Chamber blog, contact us on hannah@brightonchamber.co.uk