Story Design for Business
Using the Screenwriter's Toolkit to Improve Your Message
Creating a compelling story that connects with an audience is often seen as a uniquely creative exercise that can only be done by certain people. But that’s not true. There is a method to story design that has existed for hundreds of years and can be taught to any team.
The screenwriter’s approach to story is especially relevant for business because the same limits on time and attention span exist. The audience expects to understand the situation, the characters, the story path and the resolution in a very limited time. In a theater, that’s two hours. For your business, it’s far less than that, so you and your team need a toolkit.
Inciting Incident
In every film you see, something happens in the first ten minutes to set the story off on its course. Similarly in business, your company or your product began with a customer problem that you wanted to solve. Not only should you use that story, it should be the foundation of your communication.
Genre
Genre is critical to the filmmaker and even more so to the film audience. The first question you ask before going to see a film is "what are we in the mood for tonight?" It sets your expectations and prepares you for the type of story you're about to hear. It's imperative that you give your audience the same benefit. The more prepared they are for what you want to tell them, the better they'll hear it.
Guiding Idea
Based on the screenwriting device called a "controlling idea" from the book Story by Robert McKee, the guiding idea is much like a positioning statement and describes how your customer's life improves dramatically from the time before they experienced your company or product to after.
Characteristics
In films, we remember locations and storylines and relationships, sure. But what we really remember are unique characters. Hannibal Lecter. Hermione Granger. John McClane. Miranda Priestly. Images and emotions immediately spring to mind. You want your audience to do the same thing: to recognize your unique characteristics, associate them with your brand and think positively about them.
Client Situations
SALES
View Inc. had a long enterprise sales cycle with many decision influencers on the path to a close. They also struggled getting new sales reps up to speed on this complicated deal flow. We built a sales mapping process that mirrored storyboarding in order to teach all sales personnel an efficient, repeatable method for accelerating and improving sales outcomes.
MARKETING
Google, Adobe and Y Combinator brought us in to teach teams the screenwriter’s method to narrative strategy and story construction in order to improve brand development, marketing messaging and product design. The workshops ranged in size from a dozen to a hundred with the content tailored for each situation.
PRODUCT
The industrial design team at Poly was seeking to create a new method for partnering with Product Management in order to more effectively link customer needs to design strategy. We used the screenwriter's approach to bring more depth to user personas and structure business elements in the form of story so the full team was speaking the same language.