Definition:
Storydoing is a communication and marketing approach that turns a brand narrative into observable actions or experiences. Instead of only stating what an organization represents, it enables people to participate in an activity that gives that idea a practical form.
The experience may be an event, activation, service, social initiative, or collaborative activity. Its defining feature is the practical consistency between the narrative, the brand’s conduct, and the role played by the audience.
Table of contents
How storydoing works
A storydoing initiative begins with a brand idea that is intended to be demonstrated through action. The activity should relate to its business, values, and the expectations of its target audience. A striking experience disconnected from the positioning may attract attention without building a recognizable meaning.
The audience is no longer only a recipient and takes an active role. People may intervene, make decisions, collaborate, try something, or share the outcome. Participation does not need to be massive: it may involve a small group when the action produces a verifiable story that other people encounter later.
Storydoing is often related to experiential marketing, but the terms are not identical. Experiential marketing designs sensory or participatory interactions; storydoing adds a coherent narrative and requires the action to express what the brand claims to represent.
Subsequent distribution extends reach but does not replace the experience. Photographs, videos, and testimonials document what happened and allow the action to become content, provided that the communication does not exaggerate participation or present a fully scripted event as spontaneous.
Designing an initiative
The design should connect the brand promise with an action that can be delivered and evaluated. These elements should be resolved before production:
- Core idea: Define which principle, problem, or behavior the brand wants to turn into a specific action.
- Audience: Understand motivations, barriers, and context without assuming everyone wants to participate in the same way.
- Experience: Design a clear activity that provides value to the participant even before it is publicized.
- Audience role: Specify what each participant can do, decide, contribute, or transform.
- Operations: Prepare resources, permissions, safety, accessibility, support, and incident responses.
- Measurement: Establish indicators for participation, experience, conversation, and outcomes related to the objective.
Participation should be voluntary and informed. When images, testimonials, or personal data are collected, production needs clear consent and usage rules. The activity should also avoid unnecessarily excluding parts of the audience through physical, technological, or economic requirements.
An action may be extended through content created by the brand or participants. That digital reach should preserve the original context and distinguish reach, interaction, and engagement: sharing a video does not by itself show that the experience changed the relationship with the brand.
The scope of storydoing
Storydoing can make an abstract promise tangible. An experience closely connected to positioning provides concrete evidence of behavior, helps participants understand the idea, and generates narrative material based on an actual action.
It may also create space for dialogue. The audience’s decisions, reactions, and contributions show how the initiative is interpreted and may reveal needs that were absent from a conventional campaign. This learning requires attention to critical responses rather than selecting only positive testimonials.
Results are not automatic. An experience may attract little participation, fail during delivery, or appear opportunistic when the message differs from the company’s practices. Credibility depends on the relationship between the action and the organization’s usual behavior, not only on the campaign’s creativity.
Nor is there a direct relationship between awareness and customer loyalty. Evaluation may combine attendance, completion, satisfaction, conversation, recall, and subsequent behavior, using comparable groups or periods when the goal is to estimate an incremental effect.
Storydoing examples
The following cases turn a brand idea into an action in which people participate or whose delivery can be observed:
- Airbnb: In 2016, the platform and Aquarium de Paris ran a contest for people to sleep in a room installed inside the shark tank. The action turned the promise of unusual accommodation into a real experience for the selected participants.
- Coca-Cola: The Happiness Machine campaign transformed a vending machine at St. John’s University into a device that dispensed drinks and other surprises. The students’ reactions became part of both the experience and its subsequent video narrative.
- Patagonia: On Black Friday 2016, the company donated 100% of global sales from its stores and website to grassroots environmental organizations. The action turned its environmental positioning into a verifiable commercial decision based on the donation, not on closing stores.
- TOMS: One Day Without Shoes invited people to spend part of a day without footwear to draw attention to health issues and access to shoes. Participation connected the audience with a cause historically associated with the brand, although its current impact model should no longer be described solely through the former One for One formula.
These examples use different scales and mechanics. Their shared feature is not spectacle but a demonstrable action through which the communicated idea can be experienced or verified.
Storytelling and storydoing
Storytelling organizes characters, conflicts, values, and events into a narrative. Storydoing turns that narrative into an action in which the brand and often the audience do something observable. One primarily works through a story; the other includes a delivered experience.
The two approaches can coexist. A narrative context guides the activity and helps document it afterward. The experience then supplies events, images, and testimonials from which a later story can be built.
A campaign does not become storydoing simply because it includes an event or requests a response on social media. There must be a substantive relationship between the story, the action, and the participant’s role. When the experience serves only as a setting in which to display an advertisement, it functions more like a conventional promotional activation.