What is the purpose of your presentation of information as a story?
Which target group(s) do you want to reach?
Specify the speaking style and narrative voice for the target audience.
Which communication media and channels do you want to use?
Define the beginning of your story.
Define the middle of your story.
Define the ending of your story.
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Storytelling is old and modern at the same time and enjoys increasing popularity in the corporate context. Storytelling describes the telling of stories as a means of memorably conveying experience. This can be factual knowledge, but also beliefs or values.
A good story is entertaining, stirring, and memorable! People love stories. But what makes a good story?
First of all, it is necessary to distinguish between the two possible uses of storytelling as a method of corporate communication. One is the strategic use for your own corporate mission / corporate identity. The history of the company, the tradition of the brand or the values of the company play a role here. This provides employees with an opportunity to identify themselves.
However, this learning card deals mainly with storytelling as a marketing measure. The aim here is usually to communicate with the (potential) customer. Trend researcher Matthias Horx says:
Marketing tomorrow means telling a story about people who have set themselves the goal of creating something that people really love and need. Because it's unusually beautiful. Or solves real problems...
So that one does not achieve the opposite of the desired with a bad story, several questions must be clarified in the preparation:
What's the target? Sounds banal, but it's central. You have to know what you want to achieve with a story and you have to focus on this goal again and again during the development of the story!
Who is the target group? Who belongs to your target group? How do you want to reach these people?
The further questions on form and format will be illustrated with an example:
37-year-old Anna K. tries to live health-consciously with her family without being dogmatic. Anna is a food technologist and works for PizGO, a well-known manufacturer of frozen foods. The vegetarian PizGo pizza is also very popular at home, and her two boys even eat broccoli.
However, Anna is worried that the frozen pizza contains a lot of salt. When even the youngest creates a whole pizza on his own, Anna K. puts her mind to make the product healthier! Many weeks of hard work in the new technology centre, which PizGO has built up for the continuous improvement of its products, followed. But success does not come. The pizza becomes either tasteless or spoils quickly.
But one evening when she is cooking for the salad dressing and she only has a small rest of sea salt crystals left over, Anna comes up with an idea! She goes back to the lab and works all night. The next morning, she holds the evidence in her hands. With the new process, PizGO can reduce the salt content of deep-frozen pizza by 20 %. Thank you, Anna!
For 1. and 2. it is particularly effective to start with problems that had to be overcome.
A story should captivate and remain in memory. For this the production company needs a person as the leading actor! No product, no machine can really reach the emotions of the customer. If a character has a motive and a goal, you can fever with it.
Superstructure
The hero's journey: The American myth researcher Joseph Campbell had noticed certain similarities in the stories of different peoples. From this he derived the basic structure of the 'Hero's Journey', which can be found in many books (Odyssey, Harry Potter) or movies (Star Wars). The plot is divided into three stages. BEGINNING - MIDDLE - END.
Narrative voice
In the case of Anna K., it is a mixture of narrative voices. There is the personal narrative voice "... it worms Anna K...".
But also the general narrative perspective "...in the new technology centre that PizGO has built up for the continuous improvement of its products" and "Thank you, Anna!
This seemingly neutral narrative perspective is often used in company or product stories. Company histories are presented on the basis of successes, product histories often on the basis of setbacks. For example, an employee of the company can tell with a "I" voice how difficult it was to develop the new product.
In the reference report, the first-person vote is usually used ("I recommend the product...").
This also explains why an interview – often used in field reports – is rarely exiting. There is no tension between beginning, middle, end and hardly any surprises.
The fictional narrative is open to all perspectives, it can also only be worked with images and music.
The means of communication of a story are language, image, sound and film. This applies both to the company's website and the customer magazine, newsletter and social media. Which media are used depends on the goal, the target group and the type of campaign. There can either be a direction, from the company to the customers, or there can be an opportunity for interaction.
Companies are increasingly trying to include their target group. This ranges from comments in the company's own blog to user entries on the Facebook page to raffle campaigns (Coca Cola awarded free tickets for the premiere of Skyfall if certain obstacles were overcome within a few seconds) or viral marketing (millions of clicks for Google India). The interactive storytelling, in which the users become actors, can also work with a graphic (e.g. with mouseover for multimedia content) or a quiz.
There are no limits to the future of storytelling towards storyliving, i.e. making the stories personal and tangible.