Most briefs ask a brand to prove its value. Consequences storytelling helps you do that by showing what happens when the value disappears. Without the product, without the action, without the change. The absence does the persuading. And absence, it turns out, can be funny, terrifying, absurd, or gut-wrenching depending on how hard you push it.
Here are 7 tactics from the Storytelling Engine that let the consequences do the talking.
- Consequences of Inaction
- Consequences Without the Brand
- Brand Benefit as Behaviour Change
- Social Systems & Ripple Effects
- Everyday Irony & Mini Mishaps
- Hyperliteral or Absurd Outcomes
- Make the Stakes Life or Death
1. Consequences of Inaction
Make apathy, delay, or ignorance feel dangerous — before the audience realises they've been caught doing all three.
The Drop Store — Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Kingdom of the Netherlands, Publicis, 2023
Water scarcity is easy to ignore when the tap still works. The Netherlands needed to make a distant crisis feel local — ahead of the UN Water Conference. The answer was a fake online store selling bottled shower water, toilet water, and washing machine water, complete with real packaging and pricing. A live storefront backed it up. The premise was absurd; the logic was airtight. By treating wasted water as a product with a price tag, the campaign turned invisible consumption into something people could see, hold, and feel foolish about. It gained global attention and shifted the mental model from resource to commodity.
Love Food Hate Waste's 'Mouldy Bread' (TBWA, 2023) built giant real-time rotting installations across public spaces — timed to decompose in front of commuters. The cost of ignoring food waste became impossible to walk past. Mattress Firm's 'We've Got a Problem, America' (Droga5, 2021) coined the term "junk sleep" and showed people behaving like they were drunk — because chronic bad rest does exactly that. Name the inaction. Then show its face.
