Welcome to the Eclipse Podcast. I'm your host, Toni McKee.

Storytelling is a bit of a buzzword right now in the communication game, both for good and for ill. Some say it's just another word for greenwashing. Others say it's fundamental to how humans share, process, and retain information.

My guest, Nigel Cope, believes in the power of storytelling. Trained as a journalist,

Nigel has more than 25 years senior level experience in corporate comms and financial journalism, including at Kingfisher and The Independent. Nigel and I discuss the need for storytelling when it comes to engaging stakeholders and unpack the elements of a good corporate story.

Nice to see you, Nigel. Thanks for joining us.

Thank you very much, Toni. Good to speak to you, too.

I'd like to start by asking you about your background. Why did you make the switch from journalism to media relations?

Well, I was a business journalist for a long time, 17 years in total, 10 on The Independent, and I had really enjoyed it. I'd got to the stage by the end where I just wanted to do something a bit different. There's something that was related, and so would use the kind of skills and experience and knowledge that I had. And corporate comms just smelt like a very good way of doing that.

As a journalist, you kind of, you've got your nose pressed up against the window from the outside. Whereas with in-house comms, you're in the room. And you're sort of shaping or helping to shape the company story from the inside. And I found that very appealing.

Interesting, and you stuck with it, apparently, because you never went back to journalism.

That's right. I stuck on that side of the fence yeah.

So when roughly did you make that change?

2003.

Okay. So back then, what would you say were the key differences and similarities between the two worlds?

Well, I’ll start with the similarities because I think there was a lot of common ground.

I think there's still is, which is why you do find it's quite a common move or common transition that people make. So, you are dealing with the same kind of information. like a company's story, their campaigns, whether it's financial results or other things that they're doing with their strategy, same sectors, same economic backdrop. So, when you move from one to the other, from journalism into PR, there's lots that is the same. And it's all about telling stories. Like journalism, your writing stories, inside you’re shaping the company's story. The pace was slightly different, particularly on a daily newspaper. It's very fast, you know, every day is a unit, and you're just sort of speeding to the deadline every day. In house, it felt more measured, more strategic.

A tiny thing, but it really struck me on my first day was the difference in noise level. The newspapers are quite noisy, chaotic places, you know, everyone's on the phone or they're bashing away at their keyboard, or sometimes they're just shouting across the room to each other. And a corporate HQ felt really quite quiet by comparison. It took me a little while to get used to that. But I think more significant differences are like working on your own versus working in a team.

 So in journalism, it is quite independent and you're writing your stories or you're editing other people's stories and you're fairly self sufficient. In corporate comms you're working as part of a team. You have to share more, plan more, copy more people into emails, and it's a much more sort of inclusive and collegiate way of operating. And the aims are slightly different.

You have to be very clear with yourself about what the aims are. So, in journalism, you're there to get the story. Just tell it the way that you think is right. It should be balanced, obviously, but you're just going for the story. When you're working for a company, your job is to shape the company's story and you need to be clear with yourself about that.

Oh, that's a really nice summary of how to look at the two different worlds and really draw out the differences and similarities. You mentioned storytelling as one of the big similarities. You have to tell the story as a journalist for the greater public, maybe, whereas on the inside, you're telling stories for the benefit of the company. How do you define the role of storytelling when it comes to building strong and meaningful connections with stakeholders?

Yeah, it's an interesting one. Storytelling, if you think about it, is a fundamental part of the human condition. It's how, when we're bringing up children, how they make sense of the world,

how they learn, a way of capturing their imagination and corporate storytelling really has a lot of the same ingredients. It's the way that a company can explain itself to its various audiences.

If it's a good story and it's believable, people remember it, and it becomes a kind of glue that can help bind those audiences together with the company. If you do it right and you're consistent, you create advocacy, and then it helps you get goodwill in the bank, you know. If you're telling your story, your corporate story in a consistent way, it just helps you when things are maybe not going quite so well, and there will always be those times. So, when things aren't going quite so well, if you've got a consistent story to fall back on that people already know, you're kind of a little bit one nil up before you start, whereas if you haven't really told your story, you pop up with an announcement that's not so good, it's pretty much always too late then, really, to try and say, "Ah, yeah, but what we've been trying to do in recent years is X and Y."

Right. So in a lot of ways, it's just good practice, but also kind of risk mitigating.

That's right. Yeah. It is both, definitely.

Brilliant. So what do you think are the key ingredients to a good corporate story?

I think I'd pick two or three things, certainly authenticity and consistency.

So, on authenticity, if I take that first, I think it really helps if a company can develop a narrative and a set of corporate stories that genuinely reflect the purposes of the business.

So, for example, if you take my former company, Kingfisher, which owns B&Q, it can talk about energy efficiency or any home improvement trend because that's its business and everyone knows that that's its business.

The same with Screwfix, one of its other businesses. It can sign itself as the voice of the trade because a lot of its customers are tradesmen and so it's genuine when they say our tradesmen are experiencing this or they've got this issue with the princesses or whatever.

 You listen to them because you know that's their business.

Consistency I would say is very important because when you're inside a company and even if you're an advisor to it, you're very close to it, but your audience is but not so close. Whether they're a customer, a shareholder, or a supplier, you would be just one of a number of companies that they'll be dealing with, and they'll be hearing their stories as well. So, if you're moving too often or too quickly from one story to another, or it can appear slightly disjointed and the messages diluted. I think it was Peter Mandelson, the former Labour comms guru who once said, "It's only when you're really quite bored of telling a message that your audience is already just starting to listen." And I think there's a lot in there.

You can think that, "Oh my God, I've been repeating for ages", but for the other audiences they might miss it completely the first couple of times. Or they might forget it the third time because there’s umpteen other things that they're hearing. Especially these days with a bombardment of content.

The other thing I'd pick up is, use plain English. There's a lot of management speak out there. It's gobbled gook. Avoid it. You might be explaining something complex. You don't need to do it in complex terms.

And then finally, try and make it interesting, make it fun. Sometimes corporate problems can default to formal and a bit safe, but I think when you see companies, I'm sure we’ll come onto this later in the conversation, when companies do it well, they’ve grown in confidence, they’ve found their voice, and then you can start to actually have a little bit of fun. And actually, that's when people remember stuff.

Yeah, I think especially in this day and age, when everyday stakeholders like consumers, customers, they're looking to form more of a bond with brands that they're using, and they're really wanting to have that sort of common language to be able to have that connection, because in some ways it can be like gatekeeping if you're using too corporate language, I think.

That's right. Yeah.

Can you share any examples of situations where authenticity in storytelling played a very crucial role?

Generally, I think that can be when sometimes a company might not be doing very well and all companies will go through periods when that's the case, maybe the results aren't so good and then sometimes a business can go into its shell and stop communicating.

It's kind of a little bit human nature, it's kind of a bit of a clench mechanism. “I don’t really want to speak because they're going to ask me about why is this not going so well, why is that not going so well” and invariably that's a mistake.

You do need to keep going, keep the door open, keep communicating. And you should have found other things to talk about. I mean, going back to the authenticity thing, if a company is thinking about things that are related to its purpose, the things that are in its DNA, it should be able to keep doing that in good times and bad. And that's a very useful thing I think companies have.

Whereas if you only want to talk when things go well. you're always at the mercy of the times when they won't be.

And when things are going poorly, isn't it a good idea just to sort of acknowledge the issue upfront and be honest about how you might be as a company dealing with that issue?

Generally, yes. I think we've seen that in spades in reverse with the Post Office situation, more recently unfortunately. But yes, I mean, with Kingfisher, there would be times when you're closing some stores or you might be pulling it out of a country for whatever reason. And if you are just open and say, this is why we're doing it, because the following things didn't go quite as well as we wanted. This is what we're doing about it. And we think the impact will be, we’ll be able to focus on the following parts of our strategy, which we think will actually then show it more value from.

And then people actually move on quite quickly. It might feel like you have a day of negative headlines, but if you've explained it, generally the audience accepts it, you get credit for being open, and then everybody can move on.

Whereas where you get a problem is if you try to obfuscate, people feel like not really got the whole of the truth. And then other audiences, whether they're analysts or the media, they keep picking away and then it's dragged out of the company and it's not a good look.

Right. That's what it comes down to. It's just not a good look. And then maybe it comes even more   difficult to gain the trust of your stakeholders back after an incident like that. What do you think are some of the big opportunities that companies are missing out on when maybe they don't use storytelling to its greatest effect?

One thing I'd say is that I think in my experience, companies are sitting on actually an awful lot of information, but they don't always use it. So, if you look at a company's financial results data and financial presentations, slides, that annual report, it was just going to be by and large, like a 200 -page document. It's full of material, that's for the central case studies, nuggets that could be turned into an infographic for social media, all kinds of things. It's been signed off, it's been audited, it's been reviewed by the management to within an inch of its life.

It's ready to go. So, work with the PR agency, your design agency, to sort of help you mine that material and use it. And that can actually sort of last over quite a long period of time.

But I think what tends to happen is often in -house, you know, just spent three months on an annual report or many, many weeks on a set of results, you want to see the back of it by the end.

Whereas actually the external agencies that aren't in the trenches day-to-day doing it, that's where I think they can help because they're a one-step removed and they can maybe present stuff to a company and say,

 "Well, you could repurpose this" this in the following way?"

Yeah, exactly. We've definitely had a lot of conversations like that with our clients here at Black Sun, where our clients are just having reporting fatigue and they do never want to see that information again, but you're right. It just has a whole life ahead of it. Beyond the report, on websites, repurposing for all kinds of social media, and the stories are, they put so much effort into mining for these stories and producing them for the report. Why not give them a further life?

Which companies do you think are doing storytelling really well? Do you have some sort of heroes that you follow and what do you think makes them stand out? –

Yeah, I do, I think I'd pick three, Greggs, Weatherspoons, and Next, the Retail Group.

Okay.

So, Greggs are a pick of this example, as I was saying earlier, of how a company finds its voice, and I think they really have, over a number of years now, and they've established themselves as down to Earth. They don't try and pretend to be something that they're not. Their tone is warm and engaging and then because they've got confidence in their tone of voice over a number of years, then they start to have quite a lot of fun with things. You know, they've got a clothing range now, haven't they? I mean, in Primark, I mean, how many, how many companies like that have their own clothing ranges? So I think that's an example of consistency as well. You know, they've kept, they've stuck to their guns. They've done it for a number of years. And now there's a kind of warm, it's got a halo effect, a good warm glow around the business. So if things did, if they had a period when they weren't doing quite so well, I think they're still going to match this point about having good will in the bank. I think they'd still have that.

So I'd say then, in a similar way, I'd say Weatherspoons. That's the business that it does what it says on the tin. You know, it's kind of low prices, again, down to earth, real and it's got a halo effect. I was reading in one of the papers about this Weatherspoons app, where customers could invite others to buy them a drink. And then people do. And it's been set up by this guy,

 and then when it got 50 ,000 members, I think he said he'd get the word “spoons” tattooed on his arm, and he did. And when it got to half a million members, which it did, he said he'd change his middle name by deed poll to spoons or spoon. Now, there aren’t many people having sort of Barclays tattooed on their arm or changing their middle -name to Tesco or something.

I mean, some will now tell me they've done that, but good luck to them. But it seems less likely, whereas these businesses, they've managed to get a following, a genuine following, and then they get advocates, and the word of mouth is very powerful.

So I picked those two, and then Next is a slightly different case, more for, well, I guess it's communication, but have really made a name for themselves, I think, with the economic commentary that they profiled with their results.

And people now look out for that, yeah, analysts look out for it, journalists look out for it, the chief executive, Lord Watson, Simon Watson, the chief executive there for over 20 years now.

 Yeah, he's like the voice of the high street, and the way they do it is going back to this plain English point. They speak in a very clear and simple way. So what they might be describing as consumers, consumer trends. economic data that might, in essence, be quite complicated, but they find a way to tell those stories in a way that's understandable and accessible.

Okay, that sounds really interesting. I noticed you picked all consumer brands. Is Next a consumer brand?

Yeah, Next the retailer. I mean, I think it's probably it is maybe slightly easier. for brands like that to develop a real tone of voice, whereas maybe if you're a business -to -business organization, it is slightly harder. It would need to be done in a slightly different way.

 But I think if you're a consumer -facing, you've got a few more options to play with.

Yeah, definitely. Thinking back to your experience at Kingfisher, a lot of brands, I think, have a different tone of voice when they're talking to their customers or consumers versus when they're telling their corporate story or their equity story to their investors. Have you seen that at all? And what do you think is the way to kind of smooth that over a little bit?

Yes, you will get differences there, partly because the different expectations from the different audiences. So you've got a city audience, investors and analysts, they expect a lot more data, way more numbers. They don't mind things being more complicated.

We're issuing strategy, how you're delivering on it, and can they put a number at a spreadsheet to help their model? That's what they're interested in. And I don't think there's anything wrong with that being a slightly different sort of voice, but I think the common denominators have to be that the messaging is the same and the aims are the same. and as far as you can, the way you're communicating it is the same.

 I mean, if I think of the Next example, the information that they're putting in that results press release is aimed at the media, is aimed at analysts and it's aimed at investors and it's the same material.

But I think if we take an example like, say, B&Q versus Kingfisher, (the parent company), B&Q will talk to its customers, it would do it in a slightly different way, much more sort of down to everyday language. It definitely should because that's its customer base. Kingfisher being the listed entity would maybe speak in a slightly different way, but I think there are still ways of unifying the two and it not seeming like it's two different businesses, almost talking to completely different people because I think then that you do risk getting a bit of a disconnect.

Right. So now I'm going to ask you a little bit of a personal question when you're going about your daily life. So, you're not in the office, you're not working for a company. How do you use stories in your everyday life?

Okay. Interesting one. We probably all do it, but we're probably not always aware that we're doing it. It's subconscious. I'd go back to the point about children.

I mean, my children are a bit older now, but I think when you're bringing up children, it is a natural way of communicating. They try and give people not just, "This has happened. We're doing this," but you try and give them the sort of context, the rationale, and you could use examples of your own life when you might face certain things. And that tends to happen naturally, I think, when you're talking to children, because you're sort of aware that they're younger, I need to modify and calibrate what I'm saying a little bit so that they can understand. So that's it from it. So I think that would be a way that I would use it over the years.

And then otherwise, just going back to the workplace, I think we would all do it. And then maybe not be aware that that is what we're doing. If you're explaining a new project to some, if you're hiring a new team member, if you're going for a promotion or judging whether someone else should have one, the likelihood is that you'll be telling a story about that project,the company or yourself. And it becomes a sort of natural way that you're providing context, it's sort of some data points and that just becomes how you would explain either yourself or a situation to another policy. But I don't think you would necessarily always think, right, I need to structure this as a story and I need to have six bullet points or three bullets. I don't think that's that. It just becomes a bit more instinctive than that.

 Right. But if you did, give yourself talking points for every piece of communication you made. you'd probably be a much better communicator.

You really would. You really would, and maybe the really best communicators are kind of subconsciously doing just that. In the sort of four seconds before they start speaking, you're right, they saw three points that they make here. And then they find an interesting way of doing it, but they maybe it's so natural that they are not aware they're doing it.

 Absolutely. Well, this has been a really fun and fascinating conversation. Nigel. I really appreciate you joining us.

You're welcome. Thank you very much indeed. I enjoyed it.