Story-telling is a staple of consumer advertising. Brands have understood for years that strong stories create emotional connections and build lasting memories that drive purchasing behaviour. In their highly influential IPA report The Long and the Short of it, researchers Les Binet and Peter Field found that emotional advertising is twice as efficient as rational, and delivers double the profits.

The power of emotional story-telling in consumer advertising is well understood but of course it’s not limited to that segment. B2B companies have also cottoned on to the power of stories, even though it may not always feel that way given the highly left-brained nature of many campaigns. People are people after all, regardless of whether they are buying a Christmas present for a loved one or a cloud computing contract for their employer. Emotional factors influence any form of purchasing and marketing teams who ignore that fact do so at their peril.

If you consume much B2B marketing, you will no doubt have come across thought leadership reports that are heavily left-brained and lacking in emotional elements. These dry, dense, highly rational pieces of content rely heavily on data drawn from surveys or other sources. The same principle that Binet and Field found in their research on consumer advertising applies here, but in reverse. With no personality or emotional cues, the findings from these reports simply wash over audiences and there is no lasting connection between the brand and its message.

Most (but not all) thought leadership producers have thankfully realised the error of their ways. They now supplement the left-brained data that still forms the bedrock of their content with right-brained stories: case studies; examples and anecdotes drawn from more open-ended, qualitative interviews. These add colour and bring a much-needed human touch that helps to make the message more memorable and builds that essential connection with the brand.

But there are important differences between B2B and B2C when it comes to stories. In B2C, stories are often fiction, like the mini-dramas that play out in a John Lewis Christmas ad. By contrast, stories in B2B are usually drawn from real life and describe the trajectory of a business or leader. For example, a report may feature an interview with an executive who explains how adopting AI in her business led to growth or enhanced profitability.

Survivorship bias and the narrative fallacy

Stories like this are undoubtedly important and yet there is a problem. B2B thought leadership exists to influence audiences. Producers often describe this kind of content as “actionable insight”. This means that it contains a prescription of what companies ought to do in order to succeed. Stories are there as inspiration for this action. This is not just wishful thinking on the part of producers. Numerous studies have shown that thought leadership influences corporate decision-making.

Audiences should be wary about that, particularly if they take action based on stories and case studies. These anecdotes are often isolated examples, and it would be wrong to draw general conclusions from such a small sample. This is a problem that psychologists call survivorship bias, which occurs when we focus on the successful members of a group and ignore those who failed. So, in the AI adoption example mentioned above, if we only tell a handful of stories about executives achieving success, this doesn’t tell us much if we ignore other examples of leaders who took similar steps but did not achieve such positive outcomes.

This is a common problem with case studies, which often focus on success because, of course, that is the story that the producer (and the subject) want to tell. We hear nothing about the many companies that failed or those that may have succeeded by taking an entirely different route. The problem is that we start to see causal relationships where none exists. Just because Bill Gates dropped out of college and went on to amass huge wealth does not mean that it is a good idea to abandon your studies.

There is a related problem with these kinds of stories, which the author Nassim Taleb calls “the narrative fallacy” in his book The Black Swan. This refers to our tendency as humans to create simple explanations and narratives for complex events. We can wrongly conclude connections between cause and effect, and ignore the role that randomness, chance and factors outside our control play in leading to a particular outcome.

The narrative fallacy is everywhere in corporate thought leadership. The business world is highly complex, and there are hundreds of variables that can influence business outcomes, including the actions of competitors, the market environment and pure chance. And yet a lot of thought leadership tries to prescribe simple steps to follow. “Companies that do x, y and z tend to have superior performance”. “Business leaders who follow these simple steps are likely to achieve success.”

These simple explanations are of course highly alluring. We want to believe that it is possible to outperform by following a simple prescription. Yet it is usually misleading to expect that this can happen. There are too many factors that influence outcomes and business is rarely as straightforward as following a few steps as a recipe for long-term success. In his book The Halo Effect, IMD Professor Phil Rosenzweig describes how company performance creates an overall impression, or halo, which influences how we perceive it. We conclude that a successful company has a great strategy, strong leadership, a positive culture and so on. Yet when that company turns bad, we describe the same things in negative terms, even though they may have changed very little and what led to the downturn was something else entirely, such as the actions of rivals or wider market forces.

So how should thought leadership producers and consumers address these challenges? Here are a few pointers:

Recognise the power of uncertainty. Business success does not come from following the simple prescriptions that some thought leadership producers would have us believe. The world is much messier and more complex than that. Producers should acknowledge that and be careful not to oversimplify.

Accept the limitations of stories. Audiences love stories and they are an important part of any piece of successful thought leadership. I would definitely not advise cutting back on them because they are an important part of building the memories that good content can create. But we should be honest about their limitations and be careful not to draw too many conclusions from a small number of isolated examples.

Explore alternative scenarios. Thought leadership is not scientific research and most audiences understand that it does not meet that threshold. But it does influence readers - and producers themselves strive to make it “actionable”. If that is the case, then producers need to be careful to outline alternative recommendations and show that the drivers of business outcomes are complex and unpredictable.

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