“The power of a good story “- by Anouk Pappers

“So we teamed up with 3D Accountability to test the impact of a good story.

We used a story we had written for the detergent brand Omo about their ‘Dirt is Good’ campaign, which we featured in our book

Around the World in 80 Brands. We tested it on a group of university students and the results were staggering!”

“The hypothesis was as follows… a good story will increase the likelihood of recommending a brand

(among other things).’ We worked in a laboratory setting

and we conducted measurements at three intervals during the research period:

before sharing the story, half a day after sharing the story and six weeks after sharing the story

(of course this was no longer in a lab setting).

“So we asked students before we had shared the story with them whether they preferred Omo to any other brand. Then we shared the story with them and asked

them again. The Brand Preference had increased by 17%!”

“Six weeks later we asked them again and Brand Preference was still up by 10%. Furthermore, there was a 33% growth in Net Promoter Score –

that means that the likelihood of people recommending the Omo brand to peers grew by 33% after hearing the ‘Dirt is Good’ story.

After six weeks, it was still 29% higher than before the first measurement.”“Wait, there’s more…

before they read the story, 19% of students said they would like to work for Omo.

After they had read it, 53% of students did!

And after six weeks it was still 44%.

“Another important factor they measured was Word of Mouth. Word of Mouth is the verbal passing on of information.

Storytelling is a common form of word-of-mouth communication where one person tells others a story about an event.

In the case of the ‘Dirt is Good’ story, Word of Mouth was stimulated by 19%, which is huge.

“And just to really show you how impressive these figures are, we also used a control brand – that is to say another detergent –

and we asked the same questions about it at all three measurements.

The likelihood that the students would recommend the control brand to their peers increased by 2%

at the first measurement and after six weeks it was only 1%.”

Anouk PappersBrand Anthropologist

Founder CoolBrands and CBNWS

Author ‘Around the World in 80 Brands’

Author ‘Storytelling Expedition into the Middle East and Africa

Author ‘CoolBrands the Guru book’

Author ‘Storytelling Expedition into Brazil Food’

Anouk travelled the world and interviewed more than 600 CEOs, CMOs and business owners

and wrote their story