INSIGHTS
Don't Shy Away from Conflict
Friction within the story is the key driver of audience engagement
As business owners, entrepreneurs, and brand leaders, we all know that the companies and organizations we've founded or work for exist to solve some type of problem.
Someone identified a challenge that needed a solution and they thought of a new way to solve it.
In story, we call that problem or challenge "conflict."
While many brands and marketers understand the value of storytelling, few understand the need to embrace conflict as the driver of those stories. Many even view the idea of conflict as negative or controversial. Something to be softened, managed, or avoided entirely.
But conflict is essential to catch and hold an audience's curiosity and attention. You can't tell a great story if you don't embrace it.
The fight for attention
At some point, all of us have seen an article about how our attention spans have dropped from 12 seconds in 2000 down to 8 seconds now. Articles in Time, the Telegraph, The New York Times, and plenty more.
It turns out that wasn't really true. Our attention spans aren't getting shorter. What's happening is that in a world that bombards us constantly with content, we've gotten extremely selective about what we give our attention to. There's a reason you can barely make it through a one-hour meeting but have no problem binge-watching eight hours of television on a Saturday.
Our attention isn't broken. Our tolerance for boring content is just very, very low.
From a storytelling perspective, Paul Zak's research at Claremont Graduate University gives us a useful formula for what actually earns that attention:
Attention + Empathy = Emotional Connection
Zak's neurochemistry work showed that stories with dramatic structure trigger the release of cortisol (which focuses attention by signaling that something important is happening) and oxytocin (which builds empathy and trust). Stories without that structure, no matter how pleasant or polished, trigger nothing. The brain moves on.
(For the full science behind how this works, see Wired for Story: Why We Remember Stories Better Than Anything Else.)
The mechanism that triggers both chemicals is the same thing. Conflict.
Attention + Empathy = Emotional Connection
The Classic Conflicts
Most story structures come back to a handful of foundational conflict types. If you've taken an English class, you've probably seen these:
Person vs. Person. One character struggling against another. This is the most common conflict in fiction. The Hunger Games, The Wizard of Oz, any story where the obstacle has a face.
Person vs. Nature. A character against some force of the natural world. The Old Man and the Sea, Life of Pi. The environment itself is the antagonist.
Person vs. Society. A character against tradition, an institution, a law, or some other societal structure. To Kill a Mockingbird, The Handmaid's Tale. The system is the obstacle.
Person vs. Self. The internal conflict. A character battling two desires, two identities, or two versions of who they could become. Hamlet. Often the most powerful conflict because it's the most universal.
These are the building blocks. Every storytelling tradition uses some version of them. But when you're telling real stories for brands, the conflicts that actually show up in the work tend to look a little different.
Why conflict commands the brain
One of my favorite analogies for attention is the idea of a spotlight. In most of our day, we're thinking about different things, scrolling our phones, half-listening to a meeting. We can spread our attention across a lot at once. But when something really draws us in, we focus the spotlight.
With a story, the thing that focuses the spotlight is conflict. Specifically, the moment a character we care about encounters an obstacle they have to face.
This is biology, not taste. The brain evolved to pay attention to unresolved tension because, for most of human history, tension meant danger or opportunity. A story that introduces conflict early is speaking the brain's native language. It's saying, "Something important is happening here. Stay with me."
As the character moves through the journey to overcome or resolve the conflict, tension can increase and decrease through the plot points. This creates not just a story worth watching but a guided experience of attention and engagement. The storyteller is conducting the audience's focus.
What conflict looks like in brand storytelling
In documentary and brand work, the conflicts aren't fictional. They come from the real lives of real people connected to the organization. And they tend to fall into patterns that are worth recognizing.
Person vs. World. Cultural pressure, market forces, systemic resistance. This is the conflict that drives most origin stories. A founder who saw the industry doing something wrong and decided to build an alternative. Patagonia's entire brand is built on this conflict. Yvon Chouinard couldn't reconcile his love of climbing with the damage his own pitons were doing to the rock. That tension between a person and the world they operate in is where the brand was born.
Person vs. Time. Aging, legacy, urgency, what's being lost. This is the conflict behind stories about traditions, craftsmanship, and generational knowledge. Volvo's "The Birdman" from their Defiant Pioneers series puts Professor Carl Jones at the center of a race against extinction. Five bird species, three reptiles, a fruit bat, and several plants saved because one person refused to accept the timeline the scientific establishment had written off. The conflict isn't dramatic in a Hollywood sense. It's quiet, persistent, and real. And it held audiences for eight minutes.
Person vs. Expectation. What others need them to be versus who they are. This is the conflict that shows up in stories about employees, craftspeople, and community members who operate differently than the world expects. YETI's films are full of this. Cowboys, fishermen, and snowboarders whose lives don't match the assumptions people make about them. The gap between expectation and reality is where the most human stories live.
Person vs. Self. This one crosses over from the classics because it's just as powerful in documentary work. A founder deciding whether to scale or stay small. A customer choosing to change their life. An employee wrestling with whether the work they're doing matters. Internal conflict is the hardest to capture on camera, but when you find it, it creates the deepest connection because every person watching has fought the same kind of fight.
Person vs. Loss. Grief, absence, the void left by what's gone. This is the conflict that powers redemption stories and stories about rebuilding. It's emotionally heavy, and it requires real trust between the filmmaker and the subject. But when it's handled with integrity, it creates a bond between audience and character that nothing else can match.
The strongest stories usually draw from more than one of these at the same time. A legacy story often combines Person vs. Time with Person vs. Expectation. A transformation story often pairs Person vs. Self with Person vs. World. When you can identify two or three active sources of conflict in a real person's life, you have the foundation for a story that will hold.
The thing brands get wrong
The most common mistake brands make with conflict is softening it. They find a great character with a real struggle, and somewhere between the discovery and the final cut, the conflict gets sanded down. The edges are removed. The uncomfortable parts are polished away. What's left is pleasant, approved, and forgettable.
This usually happens because someone in the approval chain confuses conflict with negativity. They're not the same thing. Conflict is the engine of every story that has ever held an audience's attention. It's what makes us care. It's what triggers the neurochemical response that builds trust and empathy. Without it, you don't have a story. You have a brochure.
Every brand exists because someone identified a problem worth solving. That problem is conflict. The people your brand serves are facing their own conflicts every day. The stories worth telling are the ones that don't pretend those conflicts don't exist.
Robert McKee said it best: "Story is a metaphor for life, and to be alive is to be in seemingly perpetual conflict."
When you start developing stories for your brand, remember that people connect with other people. When we connect with those people, we're emotionally invested whether we know them or not. By understanding and embracing conflict in your narratives, you increase that tension and draw in the right attention.
Let your characters drive the plot forward. Embrace the hurdles in their journey. Don't be afraid of the true emotions they experience. With the right structure, you have what you need to create a real bond with your audience.
Author:
Braden Dragomir
