Transcript
In general, people respond to stories because we’re emotional beings and we like to connect and we like to relate to experiences. And I think when you’re trying to tell a story it’s important to really boil it down to what you want to say, what do you want people to know and understand if it’s storytelling for your company or for your brand or for your product. What do you want them to do to get out of this story? What are they taking away? What is the point of telling that story? And what is the question that you might be asking? What is the problem that you’re solving? And you need to have [the] an ultimate goal of why this story is being told. And you also need to define who your audience is so that you can be simple and you can focus the story toward that specific target audience. It is really hard to tell a story to a large number of different audiences because everybody is coming with a different perspective and different expectations and you need to really narrow down who you feel is important to hear your story.
In general, there are many components of a good story, I would say stories definitely need to have characters, and that character could be the founder of your company, that character could be a sample persona of someone who uses your product. If there are no characters or no people again we can’t build that emotional connection. So I’d say the fundamental elements of a good story is empathy. It’s considering a situation where you can relate and you can tell a story where the person watching that story can empathize with a character and get to deeper wanting to know more wanting to experience a brand or a product. Because they feel emotionally connected to that problem.
I think that it’s often very difficult to take all the different elements of what you’re building, what you want to say and to narrow it down, and that behind the scenes you know that things are very complex. But when you’re approaching it from the other side you really want to get as much knowledge as you can as quickly as possible especially in today’s world, where you might only have a few seconds to really understand the story that a brand or company is trying to tell. And so you have to put yourself in the position of the people who are receiving your story and realize that there is a very short amount of time that you have to really make an impact and get them to continue listening.
So when you think about politicians you think about Steve Jobs or someone who is the forefront of a company. You realize that yes what they’re doing is complex and they might have a lot of beliefs and things they want to change but they’re able to narrow it down to a very simple message and that message if written correctly can be very powerful and can really evoke a lot of emotion, out of its simplicity.
You think of brands, for example, Nokia – their message was purely about “connecting people”. That’s something that’s simple for everyone to understand and it also evokes a lot of emotion. IKEA, for example, is about “making people’s lives easier” right? They don’t talk about furniture even. They really get down to the core of something that we can all relate to. And when you make it simple and it speaks to us in a very primal way it’s very easy for us to relate to it and to feel interested in it, to feel attracted to it, to empathize with it. So I think it’s very important to boil your message down into a simple way that can reach the largest audience possible because everyone can relate to the key fundamentals of what you’re about, what you’re trying to say in your story.
