When Toyota hit the icy patch in their narrative this January, they did not do what most organizations their size would do, they didn’t do what the Tiger Woods brand did when the Escalade hit the fire hydrant: huddle, confer, strategize, ponder, debate, script, re-write, close ranks, assume a defensive posture, call in damage control experts, and use all of it as an excuse for Not Doing Anything.
No, they improvised. And by that, I don’t mean they flew by the seat of their pants, or made it up as they went along. From the CEO on down, they jumped into the conversation with the audience and performed aggressively to build a narrative that countered the media hysteria around the recall and the ambulance-chasing members of the legal profession who fanned its flames.
This is what improvisation is. A conversation designed to connect the performers with their community. Not a monologue, a strategy, a script or a campaign. A dialogue. Observations and comments. Listening and responding. Action and reaction.
AdWeek this week highlights one component of Toyota’s conversation with the audience: a Digg Dialogg with Toyota’s head of U.S. Sales, Jim Lentz. One of the more telling beats in the article is how skeptical J.D. Power & Associates, the traditional arbiter of performance and quality in the automotive industry is about this tactic. They don’t see ‘movement’ in their polls, they say. The jury is still out, they say. What the J.D. Power people fail to grasp is that the conversation itself is the movement. The fact that it happened, along with untold other interactions between the brand and audience, constitute a flow of events that defy any one snapshot’s (i.e. poll’s) ability to capture its effectiveness. Trying to measure one data point in a narrative with a million data points is foolish. J. D. Powers is trying to apply old school metrics to a new school process. It’s like taking a poll about how people feel about Rings and using it to gauge the audience’s perception of Lord of the Rings.
No doubt there’s a major problem with Toyota’s process, the company has admitted as much. Its quantity got ahead of its quality. It began thinking of its audience as consumers instead of customers. It’s a big, big, issue, with immense implications for the brand. What’s impressive is that they didn’t let the immensity overwhelm them. They didn’t look for an epic solution to the epic problem. Rather, they began a journey of epic proportions., and they are conducting it one conversation, one scene, at a time. They are contrite, but they are not backpedaling, or wasting time deliberating. That would cause the narrative to lose its momentum. They didn’t script a narrative and then try to force it on the audience. They improvised, with the conviction that their journey will eventually re-connect them with their community, and win back its confidence and its applause for their performance.
Brands who emphasize consumption contribute to obesity, both mental and physical. They represent an ever-larger drain on the planet’s resources. They introduce a lot of useless crap onto the world by manufacturing illusory needs. They associate levels of consumption with status. The biggest of this. The most of that. The hardest. The shiniest. The latest and greatest. These brands pay for the audience’s attention. Most significantly, they define the relationship between the brand and the audience using numbers.
I, Customer, am an individual. One of a kind. All my friends are one of a kind. I got my thing, you know, just like you got yours, just like everybody’s got their own. I am basically awake 24 hours a day, because I got plates in the air, you know. My homies in Bulgaria are coding some tracks we’re going to run off a honeypot server for which we are getting paid by a new label in Atlanta call Tso-Tso that does B-Boy tracks for mall shows and competitions all over the Southern U.S., Australia and the Philippines. Shit is off the hook. We get a dollar per download, and already this month we’ve made five thousand dollars. First thing in the morning, I am catching a plane to Fort Meyers to work with some friends down there who have a band and play clubs at night, and weatherize houses during the day for twenty bucks an hour. I’m producing their next album and they are paying me by getting me a job weatherizing houses for the summer. And on the weekends we take out one guy’s girlfriend’s family’s boat and party like animals. Any brand that’s down for this scene is welcome to roll with me.
The human experience has many faces, is described from many perspectives, in many languages, but it is ultimately the same story. There is no one in this world you can meet, no animal you eat, no plant you grow, no product you use, no adversity you encounter, no interaction of any kind you can have, of which it cannot be said, “We are in this together.”
In our crazy race to escape these kinds of vortexes, we can turn direction-blind. We pick a course of action, or someone picks a course for us, and in our all-out effort to escape a certain fate, we go heads down as hard as we can for as long as we can in that direction, like barn-sour horses galloping toward a distant barn. A strategy, 
Here are some characteristics of a Newtonian Narrative: It is finite, with a beginning, middle and end. It unfolds in linear time. It follows a formula or script. It has a credited author. It is inhabited by a well-defined and finite number of players. It is rooted in physical geography. It is platform specific (even when it is multi-platform). It is solid, mechanical, repetitive and dependable. It is immutable. The book you read today will be the same book tomorrow. It is causative, that is everything in a Newtonian Narrative happens because of something else. Events are related to one another according to its formulas. (”If Peyton Manning endorses it, people will buy it.”)
The Quantum Narrative redefines storytelling by ripping up and recomposing the stuff stories have been made of since the first cave dweller showed her companions how to build a fire (and got thrown out of the cave not long after by another cave dweller who claimed the secret of fire for himself).
I grew up on a farm. My father spent a lot of time away from our farm selling and installing systems for other farmers that gave them more opportunity at what was, quite literally, the grass roots level.