Darren is a head of brand and marketing strategy at SapientRazorfish. A few years ago he wrote a New York Times Bestseller book called "Storyscaping".

There is a difference between storytelling and storyscaping. The former is a tool used by marketers to spark emotion in customers through the stories brands tell about themselves. Naturally, the end goal is to get the customer to buy a product or service. Storyscaping goes a step further than that.

The power of a story is the feeling of closeness it creates between a customer and a product. Storyscaping builds a complex system that transmits such closeness into the world through various channels of communication, engulfing customer's perception of the brand.  

Not only that, storyscaping also helps customers encorporate the product into their own story. Let's take the example of "Cabbage Patch Kids". In the 1980s these toys were incredibly popular. Why? A customer wouldn't simply buy a toy, they would "adopt" it, becoming the central hero of this story. An altruist, too. A whole community of such altruistic heros, buyers of  "Cabbage Patch Kids" was born. The story made it more about the customer, than the toy itself. 

Aside from the theory, Darren's book features technical and analytical methods of using storyscaping. Still not clear on what's it all about? Come to the festival and ask Darren yourself!