“Facts tell, but stories sell.”
Finding your story, like any art form, is a process of uncovering the most compelling parts of your material combined with framing it in a way that becomes relevant to your desired audience. Whether you’re writing copy for your company’s latest product release or presenting to a board of directors, it’s never easy going into a project without knowing how you will construct your material, and even harder when you are expected to do it in a way that convinces your audience to think a certain way. Sometimes the story stares you right in the face while other times it’s a little more difficult to find. It’s all a matter of knowing your audience and their relationship with your company. All this and more will cover in this post.
Asking the Right Questions
Is this really that important? How is this going to help our audience? Will our audience even care about this sort of thing? Would anybody? Being ruthless with your own work shouldn’t be a hassle, but a cleansing experience. Don’t bother sending out material that no one wants to see. By eliminating 90 percent of the nonsense that ordinarily gets filtered or passed directly into the trash, you will eliminate countless hours of time wasted and tears shed on material that no one will care about.
Picking the Right Story
You’ll be telling different stories at different points of the business cycle, so don’t feel like you have to work them all in, in the first six months of your first venture. An easy guide to fall back on includes the following sequence of themes as illustrated in “What’s Your Story?” by Ryan Mathews:
- The entrepreneurial vision product of accident or design; in response to a crisis or academic exercise; To build a better world, or just to make a buck
- The establishment of the Enterprise set the backdrop for how companies want to be thought of
- The Corporate Coming of Age how companies change
- The Crisis Phase fall and redemption
- The Transition Phase
Of course, these four themes only scratch the surface of the vast repertoire you can choose from in constructing you own corporate story.
Choosing your Theme
Depending on how long you’ve been in business, you’re going to want to tell your story based on the context of your audience in order to reach a point where they will accept your reality. Unless you’ve operated in a vacuum for the entirety of your operations, chances are the public has already acquired an impression of your company. Use that as your launching point to effectively tie their impression of you to your own message.
Furthermore, each story’s theme carries with it an innate set of features appropriate for certain points of the business cycle. A good example is the “hero’s quest” as it relates to product development and diversification. Herein, the hero must venture into an unknown land in which nothing comes easily or without a price. Thankfully, our hero returns for the benefit of everyone involved. Another example is the myth of the fall and redemption, immortalized by most world religions, in which our hero undergoes an injustice of which they recover having learned an important lesson along the way.
Characters
Writing a story is about creating relatable points of reference for the audience to anchor their opinion. Organizations struggle with gaining customer acceptance, spending thousands if not millions on press materials and public events aligning their audience with their mission. What most people forget is that people relate to people, not just facts and figures. Begin by selecting the most compelling character for your protagonist. Audience subconsciously associate the speaker with the protagonist, so make sure the character is relatable and presented in a positive or redemptive light. Next, clearly establish the viewpoints of all other characters allowing for an interesting conflict to develop. Typical archetypes include the wizard or magician, willing hero, fool, hunter, judge, sacred messenger, guardian, trickster, great mother, and many, many more.
Conflict
The conflict is the essence of your story which allows the characters to progress from one point to another. Without it, there is no story. Adapt a rhythm and pace of mounting tension in order to move your audience from their current point of view to the one you wish to convey. Following a consistent pattern will give your audience a subconscious guide to follow making it easier for you to keep them alert and interested.
Resolution
What equates to a call-to-action is the summation of your core message having gradually reached a point of reconciliation between you and your audience. Your resolution should satisfy your theme in a way that is both simple and unexpected. Better yet, give your audience a chance to act immediately on what you have presented.
Last but not least, I leave you once more with a video by Ira Glass on how to finding your story. Thanks and enjoy.
