Photo: BRC Imagination ARTS

Everyone says story is king but few have any clue what a story actually is or whether they really have one – although they always imagine they do.

Talking about story vs technology, you may find it helpful to reframe the discussion this way: to create a hit attraction requires a balance of heart, image and technology (HIT). But there’s a hierarchy.

Heart essentially means story, or emotional impact. Since ‘story’ is so misunderstood and has so many unhelpful associations that don’t apply to attractions, it helps to say ‘heart’ instead, because, in the end, your visitor experience may not deliver a traditional story structure with a beginning, middle and end, but it must strongly engage your visitor’s imagination, interest and emotions.

Key recurring qualities in achieving ‘heart’ often include:

* Emotional engagement – it makes you feel something.

* Instant curiosity. It hooks you in the first few moments. You must keep watching to see what happens next because you care.

* It’s personal. Consciously or unconsciously, members of your audience can project some element from their life or their dreams onto the story you’re telling.

* It's about them, not you. Don’t try to show them how clever you are – instead, explore something about them, their world or their imagination.

Of the three elements in HIT, heart comes first because it’s the most important. The other two elements must serve heart.

Image can be spectacle or beauty or anything visually dazzling. But whichever it is, it must delight the eye and serve heart, never distract from it.

Technology means technical novelty, which magnifies the impact of heart but, once again, this works best in the service of story, never as a distraction from it.

In an overall attraction strategy, the superpower of image and technology is their ability to attract (sell tickets) and mesmerise an audience. The weakness of image and technology is that each new effect dazzles for a moment, but they lack staying power, so once the effect fades, you’d better have captured them with heart.

The alternative is to continue topping yourself up with one new effects, one after another, but that’s not always economically sustainable.

To capture and sustain visitors’ attention, the most powerful special effect is not a pyrotechnic or a hologram. It’s not projection or smoke or lasers or 3D or augmented reality. By far, the most versatile, powerful and sustainable generator of special effects is the imagination of your audience. If you can fire their imagination, if you can invoke its power (usually with a great story, well told) they’ll see and feel more than any visual effects wizard can put into an attraction.

That doesn’t mean you don’t need great images and great technology. It’s just that heart comes first, not last.

That said, it’s wise to remember the legend about Disney-artist Herb Ryman who was one day struggling to understand some direction that Walt Disney was trying to articulate. As Disney started to leave, an exasperated Ryman said, “Wait. I’m still not clear. What do you want me to do?” Supposedly Disney turned back and said, “Just do something people will like.” Then he closed the door and left. In the end, that’s the best advice ever.

Photo: Paul J Zak

Southern Californians have an ongoing debate: which ride at Disneyland is best? Most of us who live near the park have been going there since we were kids and as adults enjoy the ‘Happiest Place on Earth’ with our kids. Could we use science to figure out which attraction is really the best?

One of the foundational innovations made by Walt Disney and his Imagineers was to wrap each attraction around a story. Disney Imagineers call this type of entertainment a narrative experience. Space Mountain, a rollercoaster you ride in the dark, is wrapped around a narrative of space travel in which guests enter a space station, are instructed on their mission, and see special effects as they whizz around the track. Importantly, it’s not just the rides themselves that are a narrative experience; the queue to enter the attraction has story elements that build anticipation for the adventure.

My team and I went to Disneyland to see if narrative-based attractions are just a nice idea or really ‘wow’ the brain.

Two decades of scientific research led to my discovery of a neurologic state I’ve named ‘immersion’ that captures how much the brain values experiences. This neural social valuation measure has been used to improve marketing, make corporate training less boring and more memorable, optimise movie trailers, and customise luxury shopping in real-time. Immersion can now be measured by applying algorithms to data pulled from wearables. So suitably equipped, my team and I headed to Disneyland.

The data showed that the Disney Imagineers know their stuff. Every ride we went on generated Immersion above the 98th percentile compared to several thousand live experiences that we’ve measured. Counter to my expectation, Space Mountain – not Pirates of the Caribbean – was the most immersive attraction. The second highest immersion ride was Splash Mountain, a log flume ride that, at the time, was based on characters and songs from the 1946 Disney film Song of the South

Where was my anticipated favourite, Pirates of the Caribbean on the list? For our group it was dead last, producing immersion that was 19 per cent lower than Space Mountain. Pirates’ immersion was hurt by its having only a few peak immersion moments. The bottom line is that intuition blows when data flows.

The data also showed that queuing up for rides generated Immersion in the 90th percentile. This confirms Walt Disney’s narrative-driven design. Indeed, waiting to get on an older rollercoaster, Thunder Mountain Railroad, was more immersive than the ride itself!

In the 21st century when many of us can enjoy unlimited entertainment online, why are people leaving the house at all? The answer is that the experience economy is most valuable when one has an actual experience. Data from 50,000 brain observations shows that experiences with a narrative arc – in which emotional tension is built through conflict or crisis – is the most effective way to sustain high immersion.

Narrative should be infused into every phase of the customer experience, from online interactions, to purchasing a ticket and from entering an attraction, to exiting. It’s also essential in post-experience add-ons, such as shopping and sales of annual passes. Essentially, ‘more story’ in all parts of the visitor journey equals more immersion.

The neurochemicals that form the basis for immersion create a desire to repeat peak immersion experiences. This means these experiences are not only highly enjoyable, they also drive customer lifetime value, wow customers and make the businesses that deliver them more profitable.

* Excerpt from Immersion: The Science of the Extraordinary and the Source of Happiness, by Paul Zak (Lioncrest, 2022)

Photo: Foster Kerrison

The best stories change you. Think about the last great book you read or the last great film you watched. It stays with you. It lingers. It makes you think and ponder. That’s what a good story should do. It should make you reflect on the human condition and feel less alone. A great story changes the world, one person at a time.

How do you create change in your audience? There are four ways you can increase your audience’s likelihood of feeling moved and being transformed. 1) Truth — Tell an emotional story that embraces universal truths. 2) Personal — Make it resonate. 3) Status quo — Meet your audience where they are. 4) Community — Create a world where they can connect with others.

Why is it important to have emotional anchors? Creating emotional anchors will increase the likelihood that each member of your audience will have the same emotional takeaway relating to the theme and the wish fulfilment of your experience.

The emotional anchors are the major plot points to your story. They’re the ‘can’t miss’ moments that define your story. They’re the walk on Main Street, USA to Sleeping Beauty’s Castle and the fireworks at the end of the day in Disneyland. They’re the emotional anchors that bookend and highlight your journey from beginning to end.

These emotional anchors keep the story moving forward in an emotionally engaging way. They keep the audience’s interest in exploring further. Like a movie or TV script, they propel the story forward, but unlike a movie or TV script, the protagonist is your audience. Your audience will choose what they want to experience next, so building these emotional anchors are vital to your experience.

We’re already witnessing humanity’s desire to expand upon the limitless potential of storytelling. As audiences become more sophisticated and inundated with choices, they’re seeking new ways to partake, escape, and immerse themselves in unique experiences.

We’re no longer only entertained by reading books, watching plays, films and TV shows and attending museums and other events. We’re seeking to blur the lines between different media to experience a world or a story as an active participant and perhaps to influence it.

Like playing a video game, we desire to have control over our actions and observe the consequences of them in a safe environment. Even if our desired level of engagement is to explore or observe, we want to be in the ‘place where it happens’ and immerse ourselves fully in our fantasies with fewer barriers. We can be whoever we want to be in a different world. It’s the ultimate fantasy.

Source: Immersive Storytelling for Real and Imagined Worlds, Margaret Kerrison

Photo: Ecaterina Capatina

Recent statements from returning Disney CEO Bob Iger have opened the doors wide to deeper considerations and conversations about definitions and applications of storytelling and how they may empower organisations. Especially in the themed and brand entertainment and experience industries, where storytelling and experience design converge to create memorable visits for millions of people every year.

First and foremost, it means acknowledging that storytelling is evolving and branching out; not becoming something else, but becoming more than it used to be. There are well-established methods, dynamics and devices to help create tales of wonder and emotion. Still, the ways they are brought to life and by whom differ increasingly due to context and control of the story experience.

The immediate future of storytelling will go beyond simply telling the story. When merging storytelling and experience design, the outcome is not static structures but living narratives where the audience, the experience and the story all influence each another. Storytelling becomes story retelling; the testimonial tales told by audiences of their experience.

There’s no such thing as a singular brand narrative from the brand’s perspective. The brand storyverse is a convergence of many narratives of various origins, often amplified by social media.

The magic may begin with the story, but how much is a brand actually in control of whether the magic is perceived as strong or weak? A more nuanced understanding of the roles of the audience is needed in this regard.

We’re in the middle of an evolution where ‘audience-driven story experiences’ are taking over from ‘story-driven audience experiences’. Creators of themed and brand story experiences need to acknowledge audience influence and agency from the point of early creative strategy and concept development.

In terms of guarding and safe-keeping, these considerations aren’t so much about how much control you want to relinquish, as how much freedom you need to give to the audience for them to build personal narratives from being characters, rather than observers, within a theme framework.

This new approach can apply to all visitor experiences, not just large-scale attractions, because it can be scaled. For example, you can empower your team and cast members – the most value-for-money asset any experience provider has – to add something new and unique to the story experience, while staying on-theme and on-brand.

Their meetings with guests will be more personal and authentic if based on their character, rather than on carefully scripted lines and catchphrases, for example.

Jesperhus Resort in Denmark works with its Flower Girls, a team of hostesses interacting with guests throughout the park. Each Flower Girl has her own fully developed character and style and not a single line of script is provided to the cast members. Instead, they have character descriptions to improvise from, and as many of them are students at the nearby theatre school, they are fully capable of doing so.

The impact of designing frameworks for audiences, cast and team members to interact with the story experience in numerous ways creates a multitude of authentic, personal stories both to experience and to re-tell. When properly guided and included in the narrative, many team members will be able to make themes and values come alive. Add new technology to the mix, and we have a story experience revolution on the horizon.