Anytime I refer to The Belief Journey, I'm talking about one of three critical dials in my world-first Beliefonomics Storytelling Framework, the other two being The Brand Journey and The Channel Journey. All three work together to unlock your central Brand Story that drives purpose and profit. The Belief Journey contains six distinct stages, illustrated below thanks to Ashley Boyd: I explain it in actionable detail in my book, with an excerpt provided below for you now: BOOK EXCERPT (Chapter 9, "Beliefonomics: realise the true value of your brand story", Mark Jones, 2020). Let’s clear something up straight out of the gate. When we talk about belief, it isn’t just a conversation about religion or politics, as much as I love those subjects. Within each of us exists this sea of existential beliefs about who we are, how we interpret the world and understand other people. These self-beliefs fundamentally shape our world view. The key to understanding this reality is realising that our beliefs are constantly forming, shifting and changing. Each night, scientists tell us, dreams are one way our brains pro cess and make sense of the day’s activities. These happy, sad, terrifying or profound experiences form, and inform, layer upon layer of belief systems that govern our decision making – commercial or otherwise. For example, a large number of people believe all people are essentially good. Dr Brené Brown advocates this thinking, famous for her research into vulnerability and leadership. Her top tip is to assume others are not out to get you, they’re doing the best they can. It follows that if most people are doing their best, we believe most people are good. It’s not hard to see evidence of this belief at work. How often have you seen pedestrians stopping instinctively to help someone who just stumbled and fell? We believe most people will help us in an emergency. Flip this thinking into the commercial realm. Back when Uber started, it was a radical idea. Why would you jump into a car with a random stranger? The most popular conversation at the time was about trust – do you trust Uber's rating system to protect you from bad drivers? Do you trust random strangers? For the early adopters like myself the real question was do I believe most people are good? Yes, I do. Yes, they did. And here we are, some 11+ years after Uber was founded and the world is populated with ride-sharing services who trust the technology and believe in good people. Of course, it almost goes without saying that we believe in a lot of things. Another common belief in society is that each of us has the choice and ability to significantly change the direction of our lives. Not happy with your health, body shape or appearance? The gym, a fitness coach, weight-loss program or plastic surgeon will deliver the results. Self-belief is combined with belief in commercial services. At the consumer product level, we don’t just trust in products. We actively exercise belief in those products. For example, I believe that the breakfast cereal Weet-bix, combined with milk and honey, is good for my kids. All four of them have consumed vast quantities of the stuff over the years and, as parents, we’re happy if they eat it every single day. Sometimes twice. If that statement makes you twitchy, perhaps you have a different set of beliefs about what foods are good for you or your kids! With these ideas in mind, and inspired by my own Belief Moment (which I share in my book), I developed the Belief Journey (model pictured below) which is one of three critical dials in my world-first model for brand storytelling, The Beliefonomics Storytelling Framework. If you’ve been exposed to ideas like Design Thinking, User Experience Testing or Customer Experience, you’ll know the customer should always lead strategy development. The Belief Journey is a complementary model that helps us understand how customer beliefs operate and change within distinct stages. As we intuitively know, life is more complex than the binary notions of I believe in something or I don’t believe […] BOOK EXCERPT from “Beliefonomics: Realise the True Value of Your Brand Story” by Mark Jones (2020), Chapter 9 Buy a copy of the book here, available in print ($24.99 plus P&H) or ebook ($9.99), or contact Mark to discuss mapping the Belief Journey of your organisation.

No storytelling model captures my imagination quite like The Hero’s Journey by Joseph Campbell (1904–1987). Thanks to my book illustrator, Ashley Boyd, it looks like this: To create this model Campbell studied thousands of stories, genres, mythologies and writings from across the world in a quest to unlock storytelling’s common themes and narrative threads. Thinking about it as a monomyth, or a single myth, is the key to understanding its profound insight. His argument is that all stories follow the same pattern or journey from the known world to unknown world, and back again. A simple example is leaving your home in the morning (known world), going on a holiday to a new location (unknown world), and returning home (to the known world) again. We’ll unpack it below, but Campbell’s legacy is one we can’t ignore in brand storytelling. Regardless of whether you’re the brand or the customer, we all live in a complex, fascinating world in which everyone is constantly shifting between known and unknown environments. Comfort and safety are traded for discomfort and danger, before resolving issues and returning back to comfort. I think about this model all the time. Once the monomyth sinks in, you start seeing evidence of it everywhere: religious traditions, cultural mythologies, films, corporate history, the rise and fall of nations, governments, and even the microcosm of your own family. The penny dropped for me when ..." READ MORE in your own copy of 'Beliefonomics: Realise the true value of your brand story' available to order here in print ($24.99 plus P&H) or ebook ($9.99).

BOOK EXCERPT from 'Beliefonomics: Realise the True Value of Your Brand Story' Up to 90 percent of purchasing decisions are made subconsciously through our emotions, according to research by the Nielsen Company and about 20 PhD and MD neuroscientists who discovered a correlation between the brain's processing ability and real-world consumer behaviour. The conclusion for those of us passionate about storytelling in business? Choose your emotion wisely, apply through story and expect to affect change. Following the map outlined in my Beliefonomics Storytelling Framework, your goal is to foster Belief Moments that engage hearts and minds – and wallets. Belief Moments move us on the journey from unbelief to belief in a product, service or idea. Get it right and your stories are not just emotional reflections of an ideal, they’re speaking a truth that captures the essence of your brand. The story becomes who you are, your identity. Likewise, your customers' Belief Moments are stories that can act as a reflection of society, shared morals, and who we are at different stages of life’s journey. Nike’s famous Just Do It advertisement narrated by Colin Kaepernick is powerful, and memorable, because it emotionally hooked us into the brand’s vision - everyone can achieve greatness on their own scale. [see my musings on Nike's 2020 update to this campaign here]. “Don’t believe you have to be like anybody, to be somebody,” Kaepernick says. “Believe in something, even if it means sacrificing everything.” The soundtrack and images irresistibly bring these ideas to life. So, what was the impact? Not everyone was happy. Some called for a Nike boycott over claims Kaepernick disrespected the American flag, but that’s a side story in my view. The overwhelming view was Nike kicked a field goal, experiencing a US$6 billion lift in value following the campaign (source: Abad-Santos, A., 2018, ‘Nike has made $6 billion since its Colin Kaepernick ad, Vox). It’s at this point I should jump in and call out what you’re probably thinking – I don’t have Nike’s budget and a top-notch creative team. Sure, but the principle still applies and the creativity inspires. It is possible to create your own Belief Moment, regardless of budget. For example, the 2011 film Fat, Sick & Nearly Dead remains one of the best low-budget film-maker and brand collaborations I’ve seen. Joe Cross, an Australian entrepreneur with health and weight problems picked a Breville juicer and travelled across the US, meeting people and existing on a diet of blended fruit and vegetables. Joe lost weight, restored his health, started a movement, and ultimately kicked off a new lifestyle business. Although not originally involved in the documentary, Breville realised it was a good opportunity and partnered with Joe. According to media reports, the Australian brand more than doubled juicer sales after the movie launched on Netflix. In fact, you can count me a convert. After watching the doco, I was inspired to crack out a blender for the juice diet. Remarkably, I lost 10 kilos and to this day juicing is part of my diet. It’s an instructive example. One of the first steps in the storytelling journey is to put your brand aside for a moment and think about your customers in a different way – beyond traditional demographics into the world of psychographics and belief systems. Ask questions like, What do customers believe about their world? How well do you ‘get it’? Using the Breville example, how many future customers believe they could change their lives on a smoothie and juice diet? I call this stage of brand storytelling strategy The Belief Journey, and it’s the focus of [Chapter Nine in my book] and many energetic workshop engagements. BOOK EXCERPT from 'Beliefonomics: Realise the True Value of Your Brand Story' by Mark Jones (2020), Chapter 8. Buy a copy here in print or ebook version.

"You can expect to increase your Market Impact exponentially by developing a Brand Story – a clear, compelling narrative that taps into your customers’ belief systems and underpins your go-to-market strategies.” Book excerpt: "Beliefonomics,” Mark Jones ©2020, p234. Buy it here. The Beliefonomics Brand Storytelling Index© is a method of self-evaluation for organisations (grid pictured below), and it’s where we start every engagement. The goal is clearly to achieve an Amplified story state where the story is Simple and the Market Impact is high (10x). Most of my clients begin somewhere between Disorganised and Managed. As you can see from the right hand column - headed Next focus - there are certain steps required to move up the ladder. The Beliefonomics Brand Storytelling Index© NOTE: I share details in my book about how the Market Impact figures are calculated. Now, I'll share with you some of the diagnostic questions used by teams in a co-creation workshop setting to help identify their current Story State and Market Impact. Have a go at answering them for yourself: To what degree do you have a simple, well-defined brand story? How successfully have you aligned all your sales and marketing resources around a common storytelling vision? To what degree are you held back by organisational silos or lack of reliable data? Are you amplifying your brand story across every relevant customer media channel? Given these factors, what story state on the Beliefonomics Brand Storytelling Index best describes you today? A brand’s story gains traction with customers, partners and staff who do more than engage with its content – they’re actively sharing it to invite others into the conversation. It’s important to emphasise the significance of this simple, unified story from an economic and profit perspective. Brendan Markey-Towler from the Australian Institute for Business and Economics and the School of Economics at the University of Queensland, writes in The Conversation: Our research shows the more simple a story, the more it extends and agrees with preconceptions, the more persuasive it is. A good story becomes embedded in investors’ minds; the story becomes the expectation. Source: Markey-Towler, B., 2017, ‘How storytelling drives finance and economics’, The Conversation In my experience, you start to see the impact of a strong, simple story almost immediately after it hits the market. Brand stories develop a life of their own, spreading by word of mouth and through customer advocacy. A good litmus test is whether the mainstream and marketing trade press are writing about, and analysing, your campaign. BOOK EXCERPT: 'Beliefonomics: Realise the True Value of Your Brand Story', Mark Jones (2020), Chapter 7. Buy it here, ebook or print versions now available.

Ever since Just Do It was created in 1988, Nike ads have become almost as famous as its shoes. In fact, those motivational Just Do It memes never get old. This Shia LaBeouf Star Wars parody is my personal favourite. Just Do It is so valuable, iconic and central to Nike’s brand identity it can’t let us forget those three words. Which is why the campaign is regularly refreshed with new executions, such as 2018’s Dream Crazy narrated by Colin Kaepernick to celebrate 30 years of Just Do It [see my post here for what I think about the controversy around this campaign]. Now the third act in its latest campaign has been released: Nike’s short film, You Can’t Stop Us, is a truly stunning piece of creative work. You Can't Stop Us | Nike Narrated by American professional soccer player Megan Rapinoe, it features 24 different sports, 53 athletes, and some 4,000 action sequences masterfully edited down to 72 final scenes pairing the movements of 36 athletes across time, history and ethnicity. The result is a montage that “underscores commonalities shared by athletes around the world” says Nike and “celebrates sport as a source of inspiration”. From a commercial perspective, You Can’t Stop Us couldn’t be more strategic. How do you catch the attention of savvy, online shoppers spending record amounts of iso-time consuming videos and social media? You create a video designed for social media. With more than 45 million views on YouTube at the time of writing and more than 20 million views on Twitter, it’s clearly working. Using the Beliefonomics™ framework as our lens, let’s take a look at what we can learn from Nike about using storytelling to drive commercial advantage during the pandemic. First, tune into the zeitgeist, or mood of the times; then choose whether you want to empathise and align with it, or deliver a counterpoint. If you want to change someone’s beliefs, values or worldview, behavioural economics tells us you must skew heavily towards emotional engagement over rational arguments. As I write in Beliefonomics, “In business, we rarely acknowledge that emotions, sentiment and relationships can influence contracts worth thousands, if not millions.” Counterpoint emotions matter The interesting thing in the case of You Can’t Stop Us is Nike’s use of counterpoint emotions to effect change. What do I mean by counterpoint emotions? Consider the overwhelming emotions of 2020: anxiety, sadness, stress, negativity, uncertainty, loneliness, and worse. Now, pause for a moment and watch the Nike ad…even if you’ve seen it before, watch it again now and notice what emotions it’s likely designed to trigger for you. For me it bursts with higher-level emotions like nostalgia, belonging, hope and resolve. [read more about why emotions matter in storytelling in my blog post here]. You Can’t Stop Us is a creative antidote to the dominantly negative emotions experienced by a global audience experiencing pandemic fatigue. Critically, it’s also avoided the sappy, faux-sympathetic approach copied relentlessly by brands in the first half of 2020. Remember this video? Every COVID-19 Commercial is Exactly the Same. Nike is different, and successful in my view, because it’s exactly the opposite. It embraces positivity and hope in a credible way. Powerfully scripted lines like, “We’re never alone, and that is our strength … when things aren’t fair … no matter how hard it gets .. we’ll always come back stronger” are poster child examples of expressions with counterpoint emotions. Pairing ordinary people and sports stars in seamlessly shared scenes is designed to visually shatter the “us vs. them” paradigm. Notably, Coca-Cola is also on trend with counterpoint emotions. Open Like Never Before is a creative execution from the UK launched recently to challenge negativity. Coca-Cola & George the Poet present: Open Like Never Before At a time when we’re painfully separated from one another, brand leaders at Nike and Coke are using storytelling to build emotional connections with customers that transcend cynicism and feelings of loss. Stay true to purpose Now, before you start directing your teams to be more positive, let me emphasise the next equally important truth: campaigns like these only work if the brand uses emotions which are authentically aligned to its core values and purpose. Put simply, it has to instantly ring true in the hearts and minds of the audience. I’m not alone in loathing false sympathy or understanding from an unfamiliar or untrusted brand. I don’t need fake compassion and empathy from my barber, pet food supplier, dry cleaner or ISP. To quote 'Beliefonomics' again (p.51): “Brand story is not a manufactured reality, divorced from customer experience or changed with every new marketing director. The brand story is the central narrative that acts as an organisation’s north star, informing business strategy and creatively inspiring every brand and marketing campaign.” A clearly articulated purpose must be your creative cornerstone. Nike says on its website: “Our purpose is to unite the world through sport to create a healthy planet, active communities and an equal playing field for all.” Virtually every creative expression we’ve seen from Nike for decades has aligned with that purpose. If you’re curious, Business Insider has a handy overview of how Nike ads have consistently tapped into the social zeitgeist since 1988, tackling issues from HIV, to gender, ageism, disabilities, role models and equality. Now to be fair, no CMO I’ve interviewed or worked with over the past decade enjoys telling the CEO or board, ‘We’ve developed this great campaign, but it will take 30+ years to see the final results.” Real change takes time, but you need something that works now. The answer is found by asking: what is my brand’s purpose? Get that right and the process of creating stories that unlock profit and purpose becomes much simpler. Mark Jones is a master storyteller, brand strategist and author of Beliefonomics - Realise the true value of your story. Contact him to explore how storytelling can advance your profit and purpose. Book Mark to speak at your next virtual or in-person event here.

Collectibles. They’re a big deal in Australia. We love small, cheap plastic stuff from retailers and fast food chains. Why? It works. It drives sales growth and invariably engages our hearts and minds. Collectibles are inseparable from kids' meals at Maccas. And over at Coles and Woolworths, collectibles are proven winners. The community has largely accepted this strategy as an integral, some would say fun, part of the retail experience - if you ignore controversy over plastics and the environment. So it was interesting to see Coles re-enter the fray last week with its Little Treehouse campaign. It’s offering a cute little set of 24 books based on the LIttle Treehouse series by author Andy Griffiths and illustrator Terry Denton. Like every good consumer strategy, it’s simple. Spend more than $30 and you get one of 24 different little plastic-wrapped books. It’s a lucky-dip model, meaning it will likely take more than 24 visits to Coles to end up with the full set - unless, of course you start trading or buying them on social media. What’s less simple is understanding what’s going on from a strategy and leadership perspective. In fact, that’s exactly what the media has been trying to figure out. Over at 7News, the stoked emotions with a report about the books being printed in China. Canstar wondered if customers would accept this campaign in the midst of a pandemic, quoting an expert who called the timing “perplexing.” Meanwhile, the AFR quoted chief marketing officer and campaign architect Lisa Ronson setting the record straight. To paraphrase her, “kids are spending more time at home during a global pandemic, so of course it’s a good time!” But let’s be clear, questions about the campaign timing, printing in China or the bigger question about plastics are a side show. This isn’t a story about growth, it’s a story about trust. Growth is sorted. We’re all at home cooking more than we ever have during the pandemic. Ms Ronson unpacks the trust narrative in an interview with Mumbrella. Our vision is to make Coles Australia’s most trusted retailer. So, I felt that campaigns like this one which have that excitement of the collectables that we’ve run in the past, but are making Australians healthier and happier very much at its heart is in line with where we want to go. If you want to foster trust, customer engagement and authentic emotions that build loyalty, you tell a story. Or in this case, you invite a book author and illustrator to tell those stories for you. It’s a great example of fostering what I describe in Beliefonomics as a Belief Moment, a story that engages hearts and minds to shift your belief from one state to another. Stay with me as we quickly unpack this idea. What’s “the story?” Coles is providing free books to align with a real-life hearts and minds moment: story time with your kids. This is an emotive, trust-building and time-honoured tradition shared between parents and kids. Coles wants to join you in the kids bedroom. Not in a creepy way, of course. It must be authentic and fun - as things do indeed appear. What about “belief?” Coles is inviting us to believe it is the most trusted retailer in Australia. Not in supermarket retailing, but the category as a whole - an important difference. In marketing parlance, it’s a vision that seeks to reposition the supermarket outside the Coles vs. Woolworths narrative. Woolworths, arguably, has already won that battle. It’s the “fresh food people.” Coles are not. In response, it seems when you’ve lost one battle, pick another. So, do you trust Coles above all other brands? It’s a journey that begins when you open a Little Treehouse book and start turning the pages. Just don’t get distracted by the fact that, metaphorically, there's a retailer in the room. ~~ This is the first in a series of articles for CEOs and leaders who use storytelling to change the world. Sign up for the newsletter here! Mark Jones is a master storyteller, brand strategist and author of Beliefonomics - Realise the true value of your story. Book him to host or speak at your next virtual or in-person event.

In our first week taking pre-orders for Beliefonomics: Realise the True Value of Your Brand Story, we received international orders from Canada, Hong Kong, North America and New Zealand! Wow, thanks friends for all the support! I guess we'd better figure out how to charge for international shipping!

It's been 3 days and 3 years in the making, and I'm about to launch my first book into the wild. Beliefonomics: Realise the True Value of Your Brand Story was conceived on a plane three years ago, written in three inspired days at a retreat in Gloucester, and this past year has taken me on a rollercoaster of despair and exhilaration at the prospect of sharing it with you. We're launching on World Storytelling Day, 20 March 2020 at a live VIP event in Sydney, including a book signing, obviously!, and StorySLAM performance artists to make you laugh, cry and wonder at the impact of hearts and minds storytelling. Anyone who pre-orders the book from today until 10 March will be in the first-callout offer for any remaining available spaces at the exclusive event -- it could be YOU! Regardless, your support with pre-orders on the book would mean so very much to me. I'll personally sign and number your copy as one of the first sold in the world! Please head to BUY THE BOOK, and consider sharing the fact you've bought it with others on Facebook or LinkedIn to help spread the word! Onwards!