Every business has a story: here’s how to tell yours

Caspar Lam and YuJune Park at Synoptic Office explain why storytelling is an essential business skill

In today’s increasingly brand conscious world, your story is part of the motivation for consumers to choose yours. But does every business have a story to tell? The short answer is yes.

Every business will have a value proposition and without one, it shouldn’t be in business. The story of a business is, essentially, the story of the value that it offers. While creative storytelling experiences tend to be most suited to B2C organizations, any company that has made it past the initial growth stage of its life cycle with a stable business model in place can tell its story.

A more comprehensive answer to the opening question considers whether the type of story you tell is a suitable vehicle for the audience you are trying to reach, how to mine the data at your disposal, and how to activate that data to tell a story that is meaningful, relevant, purposeful, and engaging.

Most organizations are very good at the collection and archiving of data. Few are as good at retrieving and using the data through the lens of its intended audience. It is here that design can play a key part, bridging the gap between the organization holding the data and the customer experiencing it.  

Are you making the most of your data?

Most businesses think of data as a means by which to track customers’ interactions with their products or services. They use data for analytic purposes in a marketing sense, traditionally reflecting the metrics back to customers—using segmentation and personalization tactics—to help their bottom line. A classic example is how Amazon suggests recommendations based on your prior purchases.

Increasingly there is now a marriage between data and personalization to build better user experiences. It is less common for an organization to look at the deeper cultural or market trends behind this data to create storytelling experiences that are on brand. It is rarer still for them to consider how data can enrich its consumer experience, tell a deeper story, and enhance its brand.

For B2B businesses, it may be more helpful to use data to give a high-level overview of their story. For instance, these organizations can activate their data to summarise what they offer or tell a high-level picture of what investment in their service or product means for buyers and decision makers.

We’re certainly noticing a trend towards B2B enterprise providers offering more user-friendly, “human” brand experiences and communication styles to tell the story of their products. Indeed, you can apply design thinking to breathe meaning into information you might not have thought could tell an emotional story. All it takes is a mind shift that positions audiences as humans first and foremost, and as B2B buyers second.

What counts as data for storytelling?

A second mind shift required for businesses to tell effective stories is a rethink of what constitutes data. For many organizations, it is limited to the structured data that lives on their spreadsheets. We need to widen the ingredients list if we’re to start cooking up engaging stories. Data is not just figures and numbers. It is also unstructured data—all the verbal and written content an organization creates over time.

At the start of a data audit, we ask to see everything, down to every published blog post. From a huge data bank, only a few key “subplots” will emerge. A vast collection mechanism means you don’t miss anything that could be an important “actor” in your story.

When the hard work of trawling your systems and repositories is done, the long-term value of data begins to be realized. Data is not a resource you stockpile in case you need to go back to it. It is a living, breathing element of your business that should be in constant interplay with future initiatives.

Think of it as a renewable resource that can be re-used to meet different challenges over time, from raising brand awareness more generally to highlighting specific products, services, or events.

Overcoming operational challenges

Armed with your haul of data, the next step is to assess what to keep and what to discard to tell the relevant story for your business to the right people. You’ll need a clear, aligned view of both your business goal and brand strategy to determine this.

Mind shift number three, then, is an operational and cultural one. Effectively activating data to tell a story is rarely purely a design project. It requires a thoughtful marriage of brand strategy with digital strategy.

Brand and technology teams, however, have fundamentally different objectives. Branding teams prioritise messaging and connection while technology teams prioritise gathering, securing, and storing data, with little recourse for telling stories with it. Breaking down these siloes can be a challenge, let alone coming to a place of strategic alignment.

To overcome this operational challenge, businesses must create a new triad. Client-facing teams need to come together with both strategy teams and tech teams. Achieving this comes down to good leadership. Individuals in the c-suite with a deep understanding of the business’s vision will need to act as the glue.

How to make the story interesting

People in general have limited visual perception. That’s why popular data visualizations (infographics) tend to tell one sharp story. Barrett Lyon’s map of the internet is one example. It offers a powerful statement of what the internet is and how it has grown since its inception, but unpacking its intricacies requires more time and effort on the part of the viewer.

The Ancient Greeks knew how to tell a good story. To be interesting, it should offer a promise, not a statement. To achieve true “catharsis” (rooted in the Greek kathairein: “to cleanse, purge”), a story must offer the reader a way out of their problem. To engage, it has to offer something attainable.

Stories become richer when they connect the unexpected nuances between data points. Essentially, by curating your store of data, you can allow the end user to make meaningful connections themselves. It should feel like a discovery. To achieve this, you need to understand your audience and how to set their expectations.

In design terms, you need to think carefully about what resolution of data is appropriate to the audience, how complex the journey should be, and how to facilitate them to visually unpack that in a way that’s engaging, and user friendly (enabling them to “zoom in” and “zoom out” is one effective discovery technique). User experience testing is crucial to understand what your audience needs—and it will help secure internal buy-in from key stakeholders in the business.

Then, the subject matter of the data is almost irrelevant. What matters is the value of the results your story yields for people, and the experience you offer to get them there. For example, Yewno (a start-up harnessing semantic analysis and topic modelling) used machine learning and AI to help academics discover interesting connections amongst sets of scientific literature. The story we helped Yewno tell boils down to the powerful way its technology transforms information into knowledge.

Whatever data sets you have at your disposal, and whatever story you want to tell, the right data visualisation partner will help you make it compelling, while ensuring your past always informs your future.

Caspar Lam and YuJune Park are Partners at Synoptic Office and Director and Assistant Professor/ Associate Professor of Communication Design at Parsons School of Design, respectively

Main image courtesy of iStockPhoto.com