Scorn makes for good storytelling.

It brings out emotion and ultimately unscripted drama.

Look no further than the bevy of reality TV shows cranking out the profits to understand the appeal of NOT knowing how the story will turn out.

With this in mind, I suspect we’re going to see and read a helluva story on Monday (March 8, 2010) when according to The Wall Street Journal Toyota moves to discredit its critics.

If you want to see the imprint of Toyota hiring two well-connected D.C.-based PR agencies to shape its outbound communications, watch the fireworks on Monday.

No question, the folks from Glover Park Group and Quinn Gillespie & Associates have been busy beavers applying their version of communications honed on the political front.

According to the Journal story, Toyota will challenge the credibility of the whistleblower:

The company is providing reporters with court filings that it says show the former employee has a history of mental illness and poor performance reviews.

In fact, Toyota has already started attacking the credibility of former employee Dimitrios Biller sending an e-mail to The Journal that highlighted:

Copies of legal filings that include negative job reviews for Mr. Biller at a past employer and highlight mental-health issues.

Welcome to the Gordon Liddy school of communications (”nice” snaring job reviews from another company).

Apparently, David Gilbert, the professor from Southern University who claims to have replicated the sudden acceleration in Toyota cars without creating an error code, also stands in Toyota’s line of fire:

“The Gilbert demonstration is a hoax or a parlor trick,” said the person familiar with Toyota’s thinking…

The person familiar with Toyota’s thinking?

As if there’s only one such person.

I can’t say this comes across as stellar Journal reporting either given “the person familiar with Toyota’s thinking” is the PR person whispering in the ear of the journalist.

“The analysis of Professor’s Gilbert’s demonstration establishes that he has reengineered and rewired the signals from the accelerator pedal. This rewired circuit is highly unlikely to occur naturally and can only be contrived in a laboratory.  There is no evidence to suggest that this highly unlikely scenario has ever occurred in the real world.  As shown in the Exponent and Toyota evaluations, with such artificial modifications, similar results can be obtained in other vehicles.”

Lord knows, I’ve taken my own shots at Toyota (three to be exact with the latest being Customer Letter No 4 Loses Its Way).

But Toyota isn’t the first mega brand to suffer from the-gang-can’t-shoot-straight communications.

Given the company is the largest car maker in the world and has deposited equity in the brand karma bank for years, I assumed they would eventually bounce back.

Now, I’m not so sure.

I don’t think Mr. Toyoda and his compadres have any idea about the line they’re about to cross on Monday.

To communicate through character assassination and a smear campaign is to reach a point of no return.

The Wall Street Journal recently kicked off an advertising campaign.

An anchor ad caught my attention, which you can see below (note we took liberties with the typeface to improve legibility of the scan).

View a larger version here.

Notice anything about the body copy?

There’s no mention of the “B” word.

Maybe they expect the reader to conclude that The Wall Street Journal means business because the photo depicts a guy in a suit reading the paper. (BTW, what kind of business person stands on a sidewalk, leans against a wall and enjoys a “relaxing” perusal of a newspaper?)

But there’s nary a mention of business in the body copy.

Instead, the ad makes a pitch for the paper’s analysis and fresh perspectives that “enable you to make the right choices for your”:

* Family

* Career

* Life

Let’s take these one at a time.

Family encapsulates aspects ranging from buying a home to making sure junior gets into the right college.

I associate career with one’s personal ambition.

And I would say life covers enjoyment and health as the two macro umbrellas.

Step back for a moment and consider the process behind developing and writing this ad.

I guarantee the paper’s management team was involved every step of the way in scrutinizing, debating and finally deciding on the final words. Given Mr. Murdoch’s hands-on approach, it’s within the realm of possibilities that he played copywriter for a day.

The point is, reverse-engineering the ad offers a glimpse into the future of The Journal.

Clearly, the entertainment quotient in the paper will continue to be dialed up as it strives to appeal to a broader audience than the pre-Murdoch product. It’s not a coincidence that the Journal ad inserted into this post was taken from Sports Illustrated.

We associate the “sound bite” with television.

Capture your idea in an entertaining 20 seconds and increase the likelihood of making the 11 p.m. news.

The same concept exists in print journalism.

At the risk of oversimplifying, given a choice between dull or exciting, reporters will take exciting every time.

One of my all-time favorite lines goes back to supporting Philips in the mid 1980s when they were launching CD-ROM technology. A reporter was pressing Rob Moes, the VP of marketing for Philips, for projections on how many units (CD-ROM drives) would be sold looking out five years. Rob’s knee-jerk response: “That’s like asking Mrs. Magellan how many lunches to pack.”

In honor of this classic, I’m creating “Moes Takes” which joins “Iron Reporter” as a regular blog feature. Moes Takes will call out entertaining quotes from recent publications as well as how they might appear if dulled down.

Without further adieu -

“The market may be crazy, but that doesn’t make you a psychiatrist.”

Meir Statman, Finance Professor at Santa Clara University
Inefficient Markets Are Still Hard to Beat
The Wall Street Journal (Jan. 9, 2010)

The juxtaposition of crazy and psychiatrist makes for great wit.

Dulled-down version:

“The markets are erratic so it’s extremely difficult for the average person to understand.”

Next up:

“States are cutting bones and they’re big bones. These are all femurs.”

Arturo Perez, Fiscal Analyst for National Conference of State Legislators
48 States Desperate for Revenue (only available in print)
San Francisco Chronicle (Jan. 17, 2010)

Any time you can channel from your high school bio class, you’ve got a winner.

Dulled-down version:

“The states are reducing budgets to the bare minimum. Everyone is making large reductions.”

And finally:

“Pennsylvania has the potential to become the OPEC of natural gas. It’s mind boggling. It will have an impact on Pennsylvania’s economy not seen since the collapse of the steel industry.”

Robert Watson, Associate Professor Emeritus of Petroleum and Natural Gas Engineering
“Natural Gas Changes the Energy Map” (only available online by subscription)
Technology Review (Nov./Dec. 2009)

Can’t see the”OPEC of natural gas” being adopted as the state slogan, but works nicely as a quote.

Dulled-down version:

“Pennsylvania could become the world leader in natural gas. It should provide a boost to the state’s economy which never recovered from the decline of the steel industry.”

If you’ve uncovered an extraordinary quote or two, please post a comment or e-mail them my way (lhoffman at hoffman dot com) and I’ll try to use them in future posts.

Like most business publications, the Journal has been covering the maneuvering related to the Supreme Court addressing the question on intellectual property:

When can a business method be patented?

As you would expect, stories have revolved around attorneys and CEOs informally pleading their cases that just so happen to align with their own interests. Not exactly scintillating content.

To the credit of Journal reporter Jess Bravin, he captures a wonderful anecdote in his story Justices to Test Patents For Business Methods:

In 1917, for instance, the U.S. Patent Office granted Clarence Saunders a patent for a “self-serving store,” where customers took items from shelves and brought them to a checkout counter to pay, rather than giving shopping lists to clerks who then fetched the groceries. Mr. Saunders licensed his patent to independent grocery stores under the name Piggly Wiggly.

Are you kidding me?

The action of walking down an aisle to pick up to a bottle of ketchup could be patented? (Which probably means someone also owns the patent on the salad bar concept.)

Back to the Piggly Wiggly -

I found Mr. Saunders’ Patent No. 1242872 and couldn’t help but notice the filing date of October 21, 1916 and the issue date of October 1917.

It’s comforting to know that even back then, the U.S. Patent Office moved at its own pace.

I love the language in the actual patent:

The object of my said invention is to provide a store equipment by which the customer will be enabled to serve himself and in so doing, will be required to review the entire assortment of goods carried in stock, conveniently and attractively displayed and after selecting the list of goods desired, will be required to pass a checking and paying station at which the goods select may be billed, packaged and settled for before retiring from the store, thus relieving the store of a large proportion of the usual incidental expenses, or overhead charges required to operate it, all as well be herinafter more fully described and claimed.

Apparently, English teachers back in 1917 were a bit more tolerant of run-together sentences.

I have a feeling we’re going to hear more stories about Clarence Saunders and his unique patent in the coming weeks.

To net it out, companies ranging from IBM to Novartis to Amazon aspire to be Piggly Wiggly.

Side note: I suspect Jess Bravin, who works out of D.C., discovered this anecdote at the local Patent Museum which spotlights how Mr. Saunders transformed his patent into the Piggly Wiggly empire.

Boy meets girl.

David topples Goliath.

Money.

Overcoming hardships.

Goliath meets girl.

All the basic themes of classic storytelling work in any culture and in any language.

But this doesn’t mean you can develop stories in your home market, fling them over the fence to far-reaching countries and expect them to resonate with the local media.

Regardless of the theme, you still need local characters for a story to play in a “Peoria” like China.

Look at the story last week in the Journal “Scouring China’s Streets for Car Design Ideas” that examines Mercedes-Benz’s decision to focus on China for inspiration in building tomorrow’s cars for the global market, not just China.

First and foremost, you have a local protagonist in Olivier Boulay, who heads up the Mercedes design studio in Beijing.

A killer anecdote sets the tone for the story:

A decade ago, in search of inspiration for an ultra-luxurious Mercedes-Benz, designer Olivier Boulay studied Japan’s chauffeur-car culture.

Now, as he dreams about the future of the automobile, he zips around Beijing on a $367 electric bike, along with throngs of the city’s residents.

Nice touch that Boulay shared the receipt of his motorbike with the reporter.

The story goes on to weave in China-centric stats like how China now represents Mercedes’ fourth largest market compared with 10th place back in 2006.

But the most revealing data lies in a bar chart that shows Mercedes now sells more cars in China than in Japan (although it’s strange that the same bar chart didn’t appear in the online version of the story; perhaps a shortage of bytes on this day).

Accentuating the point, we learn that Boulay spent 17 years in the Mercedes design studio in Japan before making the jump to China.

Step back for a moment and consider the head of Mercedes Japan. Do you think he or she was thrilled about this story? What about the Mercedes employees based in Japan?

But without this context, you don’t generate the drama that shapes the story.

The communicators looking after the Mercedes global brand recognize this point and obviously had the clout to advance this one-voice story (would be interesting to know if the Mercedes communicators had to navigate internal politics to free up the story).

Playing a bit to the nationalist tendencies in any country, Boulay shares:

“You can see how a new generation of consumers in this country is way out in front.”

Also worth highlighting, you don’t need hard news to generate these types of stories. The closest the Mercedes story comes to a news hook is noting that “Boulay moved to Beijing this year.” Not exactly a stop-the-presses moment.

All in all, it’s a great example of localizing storytelling.