Experiential Storytelling: You're Probably Casting the Wrong Character
There is a mistake made in almost every experience brief that rarely gets challenged. It's become so widely accepted that it disappears almost as quickly as the ink dries on the brief.
Put the consumer at the centre.
It's one of the most widely accepted principles in modern marketing, which is probably why so few people stop to question it. The problem isn't the principle itself. The problem is how we've interpreted it.
Somewhere along the way, experiential storytelling started treating "at the centre" as a role rather than a position and started casting everyone as a hero. That's where things begin to unravel.
At Untold, we believe brands tell stories, but people live them. That means thinking carefully about who people become when they step inside an experience. Stories don't come alive because one person has been placed in the middle of them. They come alive through the relationship between different characters, motivations and points of view.
Think about any story you love. The hero might carry the plot, but the mentor creates understanding. The guide reveals the world. The rival introduces tension. The witness gives the moment weight. Remove those layers and the story becomes flat, regardless of how much attention has been lavished on the protagonist.
Yet experience design still has a curious habit of handing everyone the same script: arrive, interact, create, share and become the hero of the brand story. The venue changes. The technology evolves. The activities become more sophisticated. The role remains remarkably similar.
Not everybody wants to be the hero. Even those who do may not want to play that role throughout the entire journey. The challenge is that participation, as we commonly understand it, isn't nuanced enough to guide good experience design on its own.
Take fandom. The default instinct might be to put fans at the centre of the action. But often what fans want most isn't participation. It's proximity. They want to witness a moment larger than themselves. They want to feel closer to something they care deeply about. In that context, casting them as the hero may actually weaken the experience in some cases.
A product adoption brief creates a different challenge. In that context, casting people as apprentices, learning from someone with genuine authority, can be far more powerful than simply asking them to observe.
A community brief introduces another challenge again. The audience may not want centre stage at all. They may simply want recognition, belonging and the feeling that they're among people who understand what they care about.
The audience changes. The story changes. The role changes. That's why we need to rethink how we conceptualise participation. Not as a light switch people either turn on or off, but as a dimmer that can be dialled up and down over time.
Some people arrive ready to contribute. Others need time to observe. Some may never want the spotlight at all, yet remain deeply engaged. And this oversight often causes us to mistake activity for engagement.
Story roles give us a way of designing for that reality. Not as boxes to drop people into, but as a way of designing progression. People might enter as listeners, become explorers and leave as narrators. The same person can occupy different roles as their confidence and relationship with the story deepens.
Once you begin thinking this way, participation stops being a flat concept. Its layers become part of the story's architecture. The host becomes a guide, the product demonstration becomes an apprenticeship, the creator becomes an interpreter and the audience becomes witnesses to a reveal before being invited to shape what happens next.
Technology gets a clearer job too. Instead of asking how interactive something can be, we can ask whether it helps people discover, understand, contribute or carry the story forward. The mechanic follows the character, not the other way around.
This doesn't mean replacing customer-centricity with a complicated cast list. Nor does it mean nobody should ever be the hero. It means recognising that being important to a story isn't the same as being placed at its centre. Sometimes the most generous thing an experience can do is let people lose themselves in a world rather than insist they take control of it.
Conculsion
The strongest experiential stories create layers. They give people different ways in and allow their roles to deepen over time. Someone watching closely may be every bit as engaged as someone making noise, and the person quietly absorbing the moment today may become the one narrating it tomorrow.
So before designing the activity, choosing the technology or deciding how people will participate, ask a more interesting question:
Who does this story need them to be?
