Business narratives to get results: an interdisciplinary approach
It’s widely acknowledged within business that having an idea and cracking ahead with a proposition is a priority.
Where often a business can be found wanting is how they connect with an audience and the media about their idea? This involves implicit cues. Here specialists quite rightly are employed: Journalists, PR, Marketing, and Strategists.
The company looks to how their business can be interpreted creatively, win support and be carried with the wind. Digital circa 2000 provided a closer opportunity for companies to do some of that heavy lifting themselves, particularly when digital gave them something they were previously denied. That was direct access to their audience, as well as show their wares off to the media for amplification. Social Media accelerated this digital potential.
Telling stories to connect with audiences is something we take for granted. We’re all to a degree good storytellers. But if you were to parachute into the middle of a war, business deal, a product launch, policy document, or shown a set of statistics that could tests us.
Here professionally trained people with deep knowledge of the language of storytelling step forward — journalists, advertisers, artists, creatives, filmmakers, entrepreneurs, digital players, philosophers and some.
I get told this a lot, that I have a peculiar career. Peculiar in the sense that I have been all of the above, a journalist; worked for one of the UK’s leading advertisers Jon Staton #RIP as his creative director; an artist in residence at London’s Southbank Centre and I’ve been the entrepreneur building platforms. Each of these offers methods in telling stories, why and how they work, but it’s when they’re combined they can be truly powerful. Something I’ve seen working with or training companies like the FT, BBC and Google.
Here’s the rub, as societies flux and change through tech, demographics, politics and cultures, these changes impact the way audiences receive stories. The super narrative that was once so effective for a group gradually begins to wane. Yet here are foundations for stories and ways of rebooting the way we re-align with audiences. That’s what my doctorate taught me — the study of stories and how and why we respond.
To that end tweaking or creating new approaches matters. Applied Story (stories applied to real life situations), Entrepreneurial narratives (building stories around a product), Cinema Journalism ( which mixes journalism, art and cinema effectively) are a few I’ve presented around the world.
Media Hyphenates is a recent launch that aims to shrink the generation gap by bringing emerging talent and experts together to create solutions for the future. Create, build and story tell: if you’d like to know more see here, download (free this edition)
http://www.viewmagazine.tv/mediahyphenate.html
I’m looking to talk more about the approach in keynotes and presentations soonish.
