Understand what the basic shapes of stories mean for B2B audiences
From man in a hole to Cinderella, the stories humans tell – and want to hear – follow a surprisingly small number of patterns. So what does this mean for businesses?
If you’ve found your way to this article it’s safe to assume that you, like us, care about high-quality content and know that storytelling is the most effective way to create it. A quick recap anyway – the evidence of 45,000 years of images and written words is that good stories are more effective than dry facts – people listen and remember them and will even change their behaviour as a result. So far, so TED Talk.
But what does this mean for corporate content creators trying to engage their desired audience and deciding how best to spend their budget? Well firstly, there are two essential questions to answer: who is this content aimed at and what story do we want to tell with it?
To answer the latter, a recent academic study about humans and stories gives us food for thought: according to computer analysis of 1,737 plots by researchers at the University of Vermont, all stories, no matter their content, follow six basic shapes: rags to riches, tragedy (aka riches to rags), man in a hole, Icarus, Cinderella (see box) and Oedipus (fall, rise, fall).
The computer confirmed, more or less, a theory first introduced in the 1950s by the American author Kurt Vonnegut, who said all plots can be categorised into seven different shapes.
VONNEGUT’S SEVEN SHAPES
- Man in a hole – the main character starts off moderately happy, then gets into trouble, but eventually gets out of it again and is happier than before.
- Icarus – things get better and better for the main character, until they suffer a sudden and irreversible fall.
- Cinderella (aka the New Testament) – rise, fall, then rise again.
- Boy meets girl – the protagonist finds something wonderful and life-changing, but loses it and has to get it back. When they succeed, it’s forever.
- From bad to worse – the hero starts off in a bad position and things only get worse. Kafka’s Metamorphosis is the go-to example.
- Which way is up? Like life, the plot and developments are ambiguous. We don’t know if they are good or bad for the protagonists.
- Creation story – less common in Western literature, the creation myths of many cultures are based on a god or gods giving gifts over time that improve the lot of humankind. The shape of the story is up and up.
For Vonnegut, the line of a story is plotted along two axes: the X axis represents time, from beginning to end, and the Y axis represents a scale from sadness to happiness, or ill fortune to good fortune. His original revelation, which led him to define all seven shapes, was that the ‘Cinderella’ shape, which he claimed had been the shape of the most popular plots in films based on ticket sales, is also the shape of the New Testament – rise, fall and then rise again to ‘off-the-charts bliss’.
The shape of business stories
Crucially, these shapes are not just for fiction – hard business news is reported in the same narrative arcs. For ‘man in a hole’, for example, we have Elon Musk’s experience at Tesla. Setting up an electric car company looked like the future, until it didn’t as Tesla went through years of losses, and then it did again when Tesla became both profitable and the world’s most valuable car brand. For now, Musk’s purchase of Twitter, now X, looks more like ‘from bad to worse’, but time may improve the story’s current downward curve.
When it comes to corporate content, the vast majority of companies want to build connection through stories with a positive narrative arc, so content tends to follow the shape of the creation story – a rise and rise. Or, if is there is drama or a problem, it’s something back in the past which has now been solved thanks to the company’s innovation.
Thought leadership on emerging subjects, where the way forward is not yet clear, or at least up for debate, may follow the line of ‘which way is up?’. The business-changing potential of AI, and ChatGPT in particular, certainly remains a ‘which way is up?’ storyline, at least for now.
But based on Vonnegut’s theory of the most popular and engaging narratives, it’s worth considering whether there is a way to tell your story using a Cinderella shape, or man in a hole – in which the company or industry is transparent about some of the challenges it faces and exactly how it is tackling them. Case studies of projects can be an effective way to do this, because the content needs to honestly explain the initial problem or obstacle that was causing a roadblock for your company – or indeed one of your clients – before going on to describe how it was solved and the benefits seen since.
Keeping it authentic
Not only will telling these types of stories help your company stand out among its peers, but this type of authenticity should now be a key consideration for corporate storytelling to meet the transparency that audiences increasingly expect. Some 83 per cent of people believe that communicating the pluses and minuses of an innovation is important to earning and keeping their trust in a company, according to the latest research from my old communications firm Edelman.
So biographies of founders or senior leaders, for example, may follow the arc of boy meets girl, which needn’t feature romance at all, just a person finding something great, losing it and winning it back again. Think of Steve Jobs’ experiences at Apple, where the tech visionary was fired before a comeback that has been dubbed “the most spectacular second act of all time” at what is now the world’s biggest company by market capitalisation.
Origin stories are also more interesting when they acknowledge early failures and how the company turned them around – Netflix’s ‘about us’ timeline, for example, makes no mention of the time the company tried and failed to sell itself to Blockbuster for $50 million in 2000, because its original business model of delivering DVDs to watch at home in the post seemed to be running out of steam. This is a missed opportunity because the company completely changed the trajectory of its story – and eventual success – with an early pivot to become a subscription streaming service.
Your business may not be one of the world’s leading entertainment companies, but being open about any difficulties and overcoming them is a chance to show how what seems to be a corporate ‘bad to worse’ plot can be rapidly transformed into Cinderella’s off-the-charts bliss, showcasing your team’s resourcefulness, innovation and resilience along the way.
When Vonnegut pitched the shapes of stories as a potential thesis to the University of Chicago, it was to the anthropology department, not the literature department – undoubtedly it tells us something about what humans respond to that all the stories we have told for tens of thousands of years follow a small number of predictable shapes. Today, companies have nothing to lose by experimenting with these shapes to find out which ones speak to their audience most effectively and help them stand out from the crowd.