By Richard Millar
Practice Head, Consumer Marketing
Hill & Knowlton London

PR has a vital role in creating the narrative behind brands, which places it in a key position to develop a dialogue with consumers. now is the time for marketers to become storytellers and add value to the business of communications.

Ingvar Kamprad, founder of IKEA, is both a retailer and marketer of genius. Throughout, he has remained connected to his customers. In constant dialogue, he understands them in a way that research alone cannot inform. From his customers, he las learned that products that sell are those with a story to tell.

We all love stories. We use narratives to inform, entertain and inspire. The more relevant and compelling the story, the more likely the reader is to react.

Now, more than ever, consumers want products that contain elements that enable them to tell their own story, impressing their peers. There has never been a greater moment for the marketer to harness this potential and brands to act as storyteller to attract consumers, drive revenues and build brand equity.

Marketing must understand the dynamic of conversation. This means listening and responding, not just talking or asserting. Every day, countless stories are created online. They are interpreted, challenged, embellished and endorsed, the next chapter written by a mix of individuals. It is the game of consequences on a huge scale.

Ford's online 'soap' Where are the Joneses? is a fictional comedy that allows viewers to influence the storyline. You can submit and edit scripts and design characters. This conversation and its consequences play out on a daily basis. To create powerful stories means relinquishing control, sharing creation, fuelling word of mouth.

Some believe that the consumer owns your brand, but only partial control need be ceded. What is true is that consumers respond more positively to influence and endorsement than the assertive techniques of yesterday, and they know they have a role to play in telling your story.

When LG launched its Chocolate phone, it seeded handsets to online influencers, identified by the popularity and reach of their blogs. It created a dialogue enabling the bloggers to review the product early, turning negative opinions into positive. Today, the phone has a 92% positive word-of-mouth rating, according to blog tracker Opinmind, and has become LG's fastest-selling mobile product launch.

In a world of media fragmentation, we have become obsessed with channel delivery rather than content. Yet the story provides the consistency at all touchpoints for the consumer.

For the narrator of the past, this meant creating appropriate angles for individual journalists, enabling the translation of the story with an exclusive angle. Now, this skill can be applied to the communities that consumers participate in both online and offline. Through relevant narrative - verbal, visual and tonal - today's storyteller can connect brands with their consumers, and align them to their passions in a way that no advertising can.

IKEA's notgoinganywhere uk has created a campaign that engages its audience and allows consumers to play their role in the story. They can download a 'Not for sale' sign from the web site and display it in a window in their home. A sign even adorns Arsenal's Emirates Stadium.

However, to realise this ambition, the PR industry must develop its knowledge base. We must understand the consumer better in order to create and maintain an ongoing dialogue, just like Kamprad. And we must understand the dynamics of our clients' business far better, creating stories rooted in their brands.

To thrive in this environment, PR professionals must demonstrate intimate knowledge of the consumer. We have long argued that until the industry can align itself to the client's business goals, it will continue to be peripheral. Aligning the story to the business and the consumer will create measurable commercial impact.

Stories are the new currency and our role as storyteller has never had more value, nor opportunity. This is the PR industry's creative product and it must have the courage and conviction to seize this opportunity, but also earn the right.

If we can, we will add real value to the business of communication and not just the art of communication.