Storytelling - back to words.....
Storytelling is an essential MR skill - but our interpretation of that is becoming increasingly narrow, visually dominated.
How many hand-outs from MR Conferences have left you wondering what was said, because the charts are 90% visual, with very few explanatory words, resulting in bafflement: what was that talk all about?
Sure, video can capture situations and a sense of place vividly, and pictures can speak more than....but still.
The written word is immensely powerful in the right hands - it's a skill we need to hone.
Some supporting facts about storytelling and the written word:
2017 GRIT report lists "clear reporting" as the second most important requirement in an ideal MR project of 21 potential factors.
Hardcopy book sales are up +4% YOY in the UK (https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/mar/17/paperback-books-sales-outperform-digital-titles-amazon-ebooks). Lots of people enjoying the written word.....
Contemporary literary stars revel in writing detailled, lengthy but captivating prose - Karl Ove Knausgaard's (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karl_Ove_Knausg%C3%A5rd) extremely successful "Min Kamp" runs to 6 volumes - 3.600 pages of autobiographic detail; Zadie Smith needs his books "like crack" according to the Guardian.
What can we learn about storytelling from "the best"? Putting my market research spectacles on....here are some tips I found useful:
1. Focus on One Detail - Expand from there.
Hilary Mantel won the UK Booker Prize twice with her wonderful historical novels on the world of Tudor England and Oliver Cromwell (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hilary_Mantel).
In a recent interview with BBC History June 2017, she has this to say on the topic of handling masses of data and communicating effectively in a very condensed time frame:
"Better to slice history fine - concentrate on a single incident, let its implications ripple - than try to digest mighty storylines"
An interesting take - how often do we MR folk see sooooo much data in a project and wish to pack every little piece in - overloading the audience?
One pager summaries are a good discipline - but story-telling has to have more narrative impact than that, and the ripple-out approach seems to me a good one. Grab your audience with a detail, pull them in through that....then get up-close-and-detailled, lead them to the next reveal.
2. Re-Conceptualise according to Media and Audience
Again, Ms. Mantel in the same BBC History Magazine, referring to the shift from novel to film script:
"You can't really adapt one medium to another - you have to reconceptualise"
Translating this to our world of market research and the report/ debrief. Often we choose between a verbal debrief with toplines, a full report, or maybe a workshop - depending on time/budget requirements.
Is that contextual storytelling? Does it work according to the "jobs to be done" principle? More likely that's what was costed for.....but the result may well be static, with only one audience catered for.
Story telling isn't a one-size-fits-all concept. It's not how MR permeates organisations - Powerpoint or otherwise.
We need to think context - re-think/re-conceptualise, and re-frame the presentation. Sure, that's work, but it's not that tricky to think of contemporary touchpoints outside of a computer.
Canteens?
Coridoors?
Pinboards?
Watercoolers?
Kitchen areas?
Ambient or viral MR marketing concepts don't need to cost the earth - but they do require a bit of chutzpah and imagination.
3. Look to Engage Face-to-Face
We're all wrapped up in and by digital - online has numerous advantages, whether it's MROCs or getting closer to the moment through mobile ethnographies. It's scalable - meaning the price per project drops - and eminently agile.
But what about insight richness? In a "good-enough" era, digital is often fine.
But it's not a real replacement for face-to-face - real in-homes, proper ethnographies, face-to-face debriefs, for example, which are rich in contextual detail, emotional subtelty.
Belarussian investigative journalist, writer of "documentary novels" and Nobel Prize Winner Svetlana Alexievich (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Svetlana_Alexievich) has the following to say in the Financial Times of 17 June 2017, talking about her approach to writing:
"The genre demands that....you speak to people every day - you can't do that on Skype".
For each book, she interviews more than a thousand people, encountered initially by chance in public places, of which only 300 actually "make the cut" for her book. Her take on "participant engagement".
Global ethnographies are under great cost and timing pressures - why not use Skype? Or crowd-based observations?
Counter-question: how much do you really learn about the way these people live their lives through a Skype interview? You see a head shot, but not much more. If context is king, then digital needs to be extremely slick to capture it.
That's my pitch. Greenbook has told us the need for clear story-telling. Up to us to make it not just clear but intuitively compelling.
Curious, as ever, as to others' take.