Storyselling - selling stories
How WWZ, a highly diversified energy provider, uses the traditional publishing channel of its customer magazine to market digital television, a low-involvement product.
Everyone is talking about digital television, but the market is far from saturated. WWZ, Wasserwerke Zug AG, uses its customer magazine Strom (quarterly, circulation 55,000) as a market penetration tool for its telecommunications offering, in particular for digital television. The challenge is to emotionalize this purely technical sales offer by telling stories. Storyselling instead of storytelling.
Innovations make stories
Initially, the innovation cycle of digital television sets the rhythm. With four current issues, there is one story per year for digital television: Issue 2/2010 focuses on high picture resolution on the occasion of the World Cup in South Africa. Together with Xaver Stierli, former World Cup participant and team colleague of Köbi Kuhn and Karl Elsener, Infel takes the reader on a journey back to 1966, when "light" still played against "dark" at the World Cup in England. Issue 2/2010 focuses on the "smart card" innovation, which makes the set-top box superfluous. Text and images dramatize the absence of qualitative losses. A year later, interactive television still dominates WWZ's sales pitch: Infel translates the possibility of time-shifted television thanks to digital technology into the analog world with a wink.
Sequential storyselling
At the end of 2011, digital television will become even more important for WWZ. Infel increases the cadence. From now on, an article on the topic will appear in every issue of Strom. Now the stories can no longer develop along the lines of technical innovations alone. The advantages must be repeated and placed in surprising contexts. For example, Infel takes customers by the horns and portrays digital abstainers as yesterday's couch potatoes (4/2011). Or: As a free rider of the SRF's HDTV switchover campaign, Infel turns February 29 into a switchover day in a double sense (1/2012).
Emotions lead to action
Each article has its own dramaturgy and "works" as a self-contained story. But only the sum of all reading experiences leads to an overall impression of the offer. The emotionalization of the stories is important here. As we know from neurology, recipients hardly remember facts, but they do remember feelings. Donald B. Calne, Professor of Neurology at the University of British Columbia, puts it in a nutshell: "The essential difference between emotion and reason is that emotion leads to action while reason leads to conclusions." The aim of storyselling is therefore to anchor rational aspects such as technological innovations or product features in the reader's consideration set with humor, positive surprise effects and emotionally charged stories. Matthias Bill, Martin Fritsche
