Instead of sim­ply telling con­sumers brand sto­ries they may very well turn around and for­get, mar­keters should strive to con­nect with con­sumers in more mean­ing­ful ways. That was the gen­er­al hypoth­e­sis of MRY CMO David Berkowitz in an op-ed that cit­ed Coca-Cola’s Share a Coke cam­paign as a good exam­ple of this con­cept of sto­ry­mak­ing, or a brand “[facil­i­tat­ing] and [tap­ping] into the sto­ries peo­ple are cre­at­ing and shar­ing with each oth­er” as the antithe­sis of sto­ry­telling and the mar­ket­ing mod­el of the future.

Here are four exam­ples of brands active­ly sto­ry­mak­ing rather than sim­ply sto­ry­telling.

Adobe

At a recent Ad Age con­fer­ence, Berkowitz said Adobe is a great exam­ple of this mod­el as well – in which sto­ries are about a consumer’s inter­ac­tion with a brand. This con­cept is illus­trat­ed beau­ti­ful­ly in Adobe’s 25 Years of Pho­to­shop video.

The video, which includes graph­ic design work from prop­er­ties like “Gone Girl”, “Shrek”, and “How to Train Your Drag­on”, “[cel­e­brates] the com­mu­ni­ty of artists using the prod­uct for 25 years,” said Ann Lewnes, CMO of Adobe, adding that giv­en the nature of the prod­uct, it is “easy for us to have our com­mu­ni­ty par­tic­i­pate in mar­ket­ing activ­i­ties.”

Fullscreen/‘Ouija’

Brand/content cre­ator net­work Fullscreen focus­es on con­tent that is organ­ic to plat­forms and mean­ing­ful to its tar­get demo­graph­ics, accord­ing to Ash­ley Kaplan, head of con­tent at Fullscreen.

For the hor­ror movie “Oui­ja”, for exam­ple, the net­work part­nered with Uni­ver­sal Pic­tures to cre­ate a video in which YouTu­ber Kian Law­ley dis­ap­peared after play­ing with a Oui­ja board with his friends. The video asked fans to sub­mit info about his where­abouts with the hash­tag #Oui­jaWhereIsKian.

Per Kaplan, the result­ing cam­paign had 3 mil­lion Vine views and more than 7 mil­lion tweets.

“But it was the con­tent of the tweets that sur­prised us,” she said. “We know [influ­encers] can have an out­size effect, but can we con­vert affin­i­ty for the cre­ator to affin­i­ty for the brand?”

In this par­tic­u­lar case, Kaplan said the answer was yes as engage­ment was around the movie rather than the influ­encer him­self and the film went on to open at box office with over $20 mil­lion.

Fullscreen works with creators/influencers because “the audi­ence that wants to con­sume con­tent across mul­ti­ple devices,” Kaplan said.

Her advice is to “unite the per­son­al with the social” and “across every plat­form, the brand should start con­ver­sa­tions and allow the com­mu­ni­ty to respond to it.”

Burger King

Burg­er King talks a lot about sto­ry­mak­ing and prefers to sort of take a step back and let con­sumers take the lead, accord­ing to CMO Eric Hirschhorn.

“I love this idea that the sci­ence of sto­ry­mak­ing is…subject to the laws of iner­tia that any phys­i­cal object is sub­ject to,” he said. In oth­er words, it takes a lot of momen­tum to make sto­ry­mak­ing both start and stop.

“The risk pro­file of start­ing a new con­ver­sa­tion is real­ly high for us as a brand,” Hirschhorn said. “It’s much more effec­tive to insert our­selves into a con­ver­sa­tion that already exists.”

He uses the exam­ple of Burg­er King’s Chick­en Fries, which is a menu item the brand recent­ly brought back after learn­ing via agency Code and The­o­ry that con­sumers were clam­or­ing for it online.

The brand looked at the rel­e­vant ways in which its tar­get audi­ence (13- to 18-year-olds) talk, which Hirschhorn said is most­ly through emo­jis, and decid­ed to insert itself into those con­ver­sa­tion via its own Chick­en Fries emo­jis.

“It was quite obvi­ous for us that was our cam­paign,” he said.

In addi­tion, Hirschhorn said he doesn’t want to become “preachy” and tell con­sumers what to think about the Burg­er King brand.

“What’s most effec­tive is to give peo­ple the free­dom to have an opin­ion about your brand,” Hirschhorn said. “And I don’t think neg­a­tive sen­ti­ment is nec­es­sar­i­ly a bad thing. It’s rich­er ter­ri­to­ry rather than telling them one way to feel.”

Visa

Per Chris Curtin, chief brand and inno­va­tion mar­ket­ing offi­cer at Visa, the Visa Check­out app, which allows mer­chants to imple­ment a native in-app check­out expe­ri­ence for iOS and Android-based devices, was mod­eled after the Unit­ed Air­lines app, which was built with the air­port trav­el­er in mind who is drag­ging a suit­case and only has one hand avail­able.

To illus­trate the ease of use of the Visa Check­out app, Visa cre­at­ed a video with a surfer order­ing piz­za from the app:

Visa also cre­ate a video with foot­ball play­er Lar­ry Fitzger­ald catch­ing pass­es while order­ing jer­seys.

What’s more, the brand worked with foot­ball play­ers Odell Beck­ham Jr. and Drew Brees to record the first world record for the most one-hand­ed catch­es in one minute.

This, Cur­tain said, has inspired con­sumers to shoot their own one-hand­ed record videos.

“We want­ed to con­nect the idea that we had a prod­uct to be used with one hand with mer­chants in par­tic­u­lar,” Cur­tain said. “And the swipe is a fric­tion­less pay­ment expe­ri­ence even though there’s mas­sive amounts of fric­tion baked into the process.”

So what do oth­er brands need to know that want to make sto­ries along with con­sumers?

1. Brands Need Enthusiastic Fans

“I think brand love leads to sto­ry­mak­ing,” Lewnes said. “If they’re not very attached to you, it will be dif­fi­cult to have them tell sto­ries.”

Plus, she notes, giv­en the democ­ra­ti­za­tion of video-mak­ing and pho­to-tak­ing and how easy it is for con­sumers to cre­ate con­tent, brands should be entic­ing them.

“It doesn’t nec­es­sar­i­ly have to be through some form of com­pe­ti­tion,” Lewnes said. “[But] we’re in a unique spot because the peo­ple who buy our prod­uct tend to be cre­ative, so the abil­i­ty to get them to par­tic­i­pate is so much eas­i­er than ever before.

2. Brands Need To Listen

“We’re not a cre­ator. We sell burg­ers and fries, so I think it’s hard to dri­ve par­tic­i­pa­tion,” Hirschhorn said. “I think it’s impor­tant to lis­ten and start to par­tic­i­pate in con­ver­sa­tions that already exist around things that mat­ter.”

3. Brands Need To Collaborate

“Not all con­tent we pro­duce is pre­mi­um, but we wit­ness a pre­mi­um rela­tion­ship, which is the peer-to-peer rela­tion­ship between [influ­encer] and audi­ence,” Kaplan said. “So it’s about work­ing with that cre­ator, lis­ten­ing about what is organ­ic and work­ing with the brand part­ner to inject ini­tia­tives and mes­sag­ing.”