Pixar’s Secret Formula That Any Business Can Use to Supercharge Marketing Strategies
By: Charlene Annabel
Tags: Business, Marketing, Pixar, Storytelling For Business, Business Strategy

What’s The Secret Sauce?

Anyone can write a story plot. You start with a protagonist or the main character, introduce scenes, add more characters, build the story up to a peak, and the end.

For Pixar, it’s beyond just the plot. It’s planting a heart in the story by giving meaning to the movies. The same techniques that Pixar was using to create great films about toys were the same techniques that Matthew’s family had been using for years on how to sell toys.

A great story connects with people who came to the store because they were selling an experience, not only toys. At that moment, Matthew realised the secret to a great movie is also what makes a great business, and that is storytelling.

Key Narrative Technique Used by Pixar

In one of Pixar’s films, Up, there was no dialogue in the first ten minutes as the scene set through a montage of images backed by music. The pictures were memories of Carl Fredricksen and his wife, Ellie’s, life together.

Key moments included a celebration over her pregnancy — followed by a miscarriage after that — and Carl arranging their dream visit to Paradise Falls right before Ellie falls ill and dies of old age.

What Matthew is striving to achieve with this particular scene was to invoke feelings of happiness and sadness. It’s an emotional play to trigger chemical reactions in the brain that creates powerful effects.

“When you’re talking to someone having a child, it creates dopamine, which focuses your attention and helps you connect better with the character on screen — or a speaker in a presentation. But when you have a sombre moment in a story creates oxytocin, which creates empathy. It’s a very powerful marketing tool because they both create trust,” explained Matthew.

Fair to say, no matter how urgent I needed the bathroom while watching this film, I wouldn’t leave my couch because I wanted to know what would happen to Carl when the montage's last image showed him at his wife’s funeral.

In essence, there are three aspects to storytelling in business:

1. Memorable

Within an hour, people forget 50% of the information they’ve read, seen, or heard. However, specific memories that stick with you are memories presented in the form of a story, an event, or an experience. Stories are 22 more times more memorable than facts alone.

According to Matthew, if businesses can wrap their data and statistics around a story or an anecdote, people will likely remember it. Besides a written story, visual storytelling is how people communicate today — memes are one of them.

In visuals, colours, texts, and images perform the magic. This same principle can be seen in McDonald's marketing ads. It captures a mix of brightly coloured vegetables, juicy patties, and freshly baked buns.

Without the need to include lengthy texts on its ads, such visual storytelling technique invokes a mouthwatering desire among its audience to purchase McDonald’s burgers.

2. Impactful

Storytelling aims to impact the audience’s chemicals in the body. Whenever Matthew crafts a story for entertainment or business, he always tries to get people on the edge of their seats by getting them excited about what will happen next in a plot.

When you tell a great story and you see a character laughing or being happy, you’re changing people’s chemicals; you laugh with the characters and you feel good because your endorphins go up. When you see a character on the screen sad, your chemicals go down, (and) your cortisol kicks in. — Matthew Luhn

The effects Matthew illustrated can also be seen in our daily social interactions. Think about a time when you’re hanging out with a group of people who got your energy levels so high that you didn’t notice how much time had passed because you were so happy around them. A story that appeals to your audience emotions reaps the same impacts as well.

The trick here isn’t to incorporate only happy or sad emotions in your marketing ads or your business's story. What makes a great story, according to Matthew, is when you go from one chemical (happy) to the next one (gloomy).

Up is a fantastic example of how an impactful story brings people on a roller coaster ride.

Carl and Elle’s Relationship Through Time

In business, when it comes to storytelling, the first person that came to mind was Steve Jobs. When he introduced the iPhone ten years ago, Jobs held up a smartphone and said, “Smartphones exist, and they’re stupid.”

Having heard that, you could have imagined the downward impact of emotions it landed on the audience. However, he quickly turned the story around and said, “But mine is smarter than you computer at home.”

As Matthew calls it, such up and down tension release is what impacts people chemically.

3. Personal

Personalising a story creates more than just an impact on your audience. It acts as a bridge that connects people to you.

In Toy Story, Woody, the cowboy takes us through a series of wild adventures with his friends. He’s all about being loyal to the owner. When Woody was toy-napped and taken to a toy collector apartment, all he could think about was finding a way home to reunite with his best friends.

When he met Jessie, the cowgirl, she shared with Woody that she once had an owner who abandoned her. The story was so personal and relatable that Woody changed his mind on going home.

The main focus of the story centres around Woody, and we feel a personal connection to it.

An anecdote or a story can be so powerful you can change the way people feel. Sharing personal and unprofessional moments where you’ve had people use your products or your company have had a positive experience; when you share that, you make it memorable and you make it personal. — Matthew Luhn

Matthew Luhn’s Five Strategies to Include in Any Story

1. A Great Hook

A great storyteller hooks people in within eight seconds. Beyond that, it’d have blown the chances of capturing your target audience.

The shock value to deliver is to create something unusual, unexpected, or conflict or action at the beginning of those first eight seconds.

“In The Incredibles, we show heroes who ban people, so people are eager to know about it. It could also be a rat who wants to be a French chef in Ratatouille,” added Matthew.

Using Apple as a case in point, when Steve Jobs revealed the iPod to the world, he started saying, “What if you could have 1,000 Sony Walkmans in your pocket?” A simple hook like this would stop your audience in their tracks and listen to the life-changing story you’re about to impact them.

2. Character Transformation

Imagine yourself as an entrepreneur, how will your product change a person’s life? The “why” behind a consumer’s drive to purchase something is the main reason businesses should spend more time thinking about the message they want to convey.

Great stories are all about transformation, and when crafted with a meaningful intent, it’s a powerful tool to encourage customers to try your products first since people generally dislike change.

Stories allow us to live through the lens of other characters. The same way Martin Luther King Jr.’s I have a dream story-based speech inspired masses of people to change, “It can be a testimony of how you worked with a company and had a great experience — that’s a change (which showed) who they were before and who they became,” Matthew said.

3. Connection

When delivering a business’s story, it must be relatable to your audience and crafted by keeping them in mind down to the minutest details.

In Ratatouille, we don’t connect to a rat but a rat who wants to do the impossible. The latter makes it easier for us to engage with.

In Toy Story, it’s not a story about a bunch of toys stowed away in a storage box but toys that feared about being abandoned, failing and not belonging. In life, we can relate to our desire for love, connection, acceptance, and happiness.

4. Authenticity

Don’t say the mission statement in a presentation, don’t tell people the answer. Do such a good job when you’re delivering it that they understood it on their own and everyone comes to the same conclusion. — Matthew Luhn

Being vulnerable and honest is the best way to think from a perspective of how your products/services will change people’s lives.

Anyone can try to sell a product or service their company is offering. Still, it’s a different story when people feel compelled to support your business if they’re sold on an experience that they can relate to.

iPhone was not only the most groundbreaking gadget ever invented, but it also greatly simplified our lives by giving us access to almost everything we want with the touch of our fingertips. It’s a mode of convenience we desire, especially when times are becoming more fast-paced.

5. Structure

A story can have the other four elements, but it could still fall flat if the delivery method isn’t right. It’s akin to being an Olympic swimmer, but you’re competing in a relay.

Matthew says the best structures have a set-up, conflict, and pay-off. In summary, it translates to a very simple beginning, middle, and end.

“This is how the world works — there’s a beginning, middle and end to the day, and in the cycle to our life. Explain the problem that you’re setting out to solve. Describe how you’ve solved it. People don’t mind if you’ve had moments when you failed, just that you got up and made it work,” Matthew continued, “Then end with the success. This is the answer.”

Thank you for reading!