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If you have not seen Kurt Vonnegut's lecture on "The Shape of Stories," please pause here and go watch it. I'll even give you the abridged version because I really want you to watch it.

Vonnegut was an astoundingly skilled lecturer, a cross between stand-up comic and college professor. Between wry jokes, he draws a compelling argument for the importance of studying a story's emotional arc.

That's different from a plot arc; an emotional arc illustrates the fluctuations between "good and ill fortune" as time passes in a story. If you recall Horatio Alger's "rags-to-riches" stories from 19th century U.S. history class, you're in the ballpark.

Watching Vonnegut walk through it, you get it. It feels intuitive and matches with most folks' lived experiences with storytelling. But it's a little harder to prove quantitatively — to use data to show the emotional arc's path through a civilization's storytelling.

But what if I told you...

Big Data Meets Storytelling

An academic group at the University of Vermont sent over 1,300 stories through AI models to analyze them for emotional arcs. They mapped the rise and fall of fortune along a time axis, and their research supported the existence of six common emotional story arcs:

• ‘Rags to riches’ (rise)
• ‘Tragedy’, or ‘Riches to rags’ (fall)
• ‘Man in a hole’ (fall-rise)
• ‘Icarus’ (rise-fall)
• ‘Cinderella’ (rise-fall-rise)
• ‘Oedipus’ (fall-rise-fall)

Do any of these look familiar?

So yeah, Vonnegut was on to something with his emotional arc. The researchers also investigated which of these six common arcs are most popular. Using proxies like online downloads or public sales figures, they discovered that "the success of the stories underlying these emotional arcs suggests that the emotional experience of readers strongly affects how stories are shared."

Specifically, three formats stood out as winners:

• ‘Icarus’ (rise-fall)
• ‘Oedipus’ (fall-rise-fall)
• ‘Man in a hole’ done twice in one story (so, fall-rise-fall-rise)

(Interestingly, the 2x Man in a Hole format somewhat mirrors the Three Act Structure used in building plot arcs, but that's a curious aside I'll noodle further.)

Find the emotional arc in your company's story

So, for the corporate storyteller, what does the emotional arc offer? We've been told for a long while just how important emotions are in marketing and sales. And again, you can feel when someone writing an article gets the frustration of a problem and the joy of a solution.

But equipped with a more quantitative vision for successful emotional arcs, you can reverse-engineer your content to more strongly reflect that connection with your reader (aka your buyer).

Consider the 2x Man in a Hole format in relation to a customer case study:

• Fall #1 — Customer has a big problem to solve.
• Rise #1 — They reach out to you and start the solution.
• Fall #2 — The solution isn't perfect immediately, and you and your customer work it out together.
• Rise #2 — The customer solves their problem and feels elation.

The change in fortunes over time (i.e. your solution's implementation in your customer's environment) sparks the emotional energy to keep people engaged.

Most companies gloss over or skip Fall #2, much to their detriment. They want to portray their solution as immediately wonderful, with no hiccups, problems, or lessons learned.

But doing so stifles the emotional energy — it crashes the arc. Without emotive power behind them, the reader calls bullshit, and they bounce off the page.

So, if you're going to "connect emotionally with prospects," understand how the emotional energy flows through a story and make it a priority in your narrative development.

And don't skip the tough stuff just because it's uncomfortable; in fact, that's the extra boost you need to tell an amazing story.

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Stellar content about content

Using the term ‘artificial intelligence’ in product descriptions reduces purchase intentions

by Eric Hollenbeck, Carson College of Business, WSU

Best be careful throwing around "AI" in your marketing. Or so warns the latest research out of Washington State University:

When AI is mentioned, it tends to lower emotional trust, which in turn decreases purchase intentions,” [lead author Mesut Cicek] said. “We found emotional trust plays a critical role in how consumers perceive AI-powered products.

Companies relying on "AI-powered" to lead their GTM strategies may want to rethink their positioning, especially if you're selling high-ticket products and services. Really, it's all about what you offer and connecting (hey, look! Connecting!) with the people you want to share it with.

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The AI gold rush is hiding a wider cash crunch for startups

by Rosie Bradbury, PitchBook

AI (and, more specifically, generative AI) has sucked the financial oxygen out of the startup environment. And while we're seeing glitzy numbers from genAI companies and their latest fundraising rounds, the rest of the tech startup landscape leaves much more to be desired.

Tighter funding parameters are creating knock-on effects for most startups. You can see it in the massive increase in down-round raises this year:

The first six months of 2024 has [sic] seen the largest percentage of down rounds, where financing comes at a lower valuation, in a decade, according to PitchBook data. There are also more flat rounds, which often involve additional cap-table structure.

We've seen considerable budget cuts and layoffs throughout the technology sector since mid-2022, and this data doesn't do much to convince me it'll change soon. When whatever will happen with AI happens, I think we'll face a marred startup landscape.

Where do marketers go in here? They should start building internal narratives, capture emotional energy, and tell a good internal story to keep leaders engaged. Resources will get even tighter — you need compelling emotional reasons to invest as much as logical ones.

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Content from my pocket of the galaxy

Our event is back on

Good news, everyone! I'm speaking at the Columbian Business Network's Breakfast Power Hour on Wednesday, August 21. Still chatting about using GenAI in marketing/content settings. Still having delicious danishes and coffee.

Let me know by Friday, August 16 if you wanna go, and I'll get you in for $10.

🗒️ Writing is a mode of thought

Bringing this one back...

We still dismiss writing as only an act of typing words. But as generative AI industrializes the production of words, it also reminds us how much great writing requires human thinking.

Click here to read more...

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See you soon,

Alex