John Winsor

Games versus Stories

Lately, we've been thinking about the evolution of storytelling in both advertising and product design. Certainly, the power of storytelling does a great job of connecting brands and people but it seems that the paradigm of storytelling is changing to one of gaming. Instead of the one-way conversation between storyteller and audience, gaming demands that both participate in an ongoing dialogue. If the audience stops participating the game is over. Mountain Dew seems to understand this shift with its new Game Fuel.

Surf in the City

(via Nau’s Thought Kitchen)

Jamie Brisick pens a really wonderful photo/audio essay about surfers in New York on Surfline. Jamie’s format is a wonderful expression through mixed media.

Storytelling Just Got Better

Ira Glass has always been one of my favorite storytellers. Now, This American Life has gotten is appearing as a television show on Showtime. If you've heard the NPR show, you're gonna love the Showtime version!

Compelling stories are explored every day on "This American Life," the nearly 15-year-old, award-winning Chicago Public Radio show that boasts a devoted weekly listening audience of 1.7 million, and is heard on more than 500 stations nationally. The series, created in 1995 by host and executive producer Ira Glass, pioneered a unique way of telling stories on the radio. Its first-person telling of these revealing stories makes the radio series a great fit for television.

In the same spirit of the radio show, the televised version of THIS AMERICAN LIFE, premiering Thursday, March 22nd at 10:30 p.m. PT/ET, takes 30-minute looks at stories culled from all over the country. Glass and a small team of radio producers and filmmakers spent six months on the road: traveling to Iowa pig farms, following a first-time filmmaker in California, photographing a raucous night at an Illinois hot dog stand. The result is true stories that are dramatic, emotional, and often funny.

A Carnival of the Absurd

I awoke this morning with the sounds of helicopters buzzing my house. While having breakfast, the sounds of moving vehicles a few blocks away could be heard. What was all of the commotion?

As I rode my bike to work I turned the corner a couple of blocks from my house to see an incredible media circus at the Boulder County Justice Center. You see, a new suspect has been named in the ten-year-old Jon Benet Ramsey murder case.

The case held the attention of the media for years after the incident in 1996. But why has all of the media rushed back to resolve the story now?

Is it our societal need to finish a cultural narrative? Or, is it our unwillingness to pay attention to the issues that are currently playing out in our culture. Instead of obsessing over a ten-year-old case, what are we doing to make people safer, from Boulder to Baghdad? Couldn't we put more energy into saving lives?

Unfortunately, obsession makes the world go 'round.

More on Storytelling

Ever since Beyond the Brand was published, I've been posting a lot about storytelling and why it's so important in development of a brand. I just came across Alain Thys's post on Futurelab entitled, The Ten Truths About Branded Storytelling. Check it out, it's worth a read.

WSJ Picks Up Storycorps Vs. Jetblue Story

Thanks to Bryan Chiao of RM 116 for notifing me that the Wall Street Journal wrote an article about the Storycorps versus Jetblue story that we both posted about here and here.

Here's an expert:

While the notion of owning the idea of storytelling might seem far-fetched, StoryCorps worried the public might confuse its project with JetBlue's Story Booth effort, due to the similarity of the name and concept. Both story tours visited Washington at the same time in mid-May, it says.

Last month, Sound Portraits accused JetBlue of "an overt, willful and substantial misappropriation of the trademark rights and goodwill" that StoryCorps "has spent years to generate and maintain." It asked JetBlue to "cease and desist" using the name Story Booth.

"We are just hoping that it stops and that they change their name before it ruins our project," says Dave Isay, founder and executive director of Sound Portraits.

Bryan also has a nice analysis that I agree with.

The Search for Meaning, Step 5 - Develop Narrative Thinking

In this disruptive age, the power of stories is becoming recognized as an important tool. It’s a move from cold hard facts to warm and fluid narratives. People crave a human connection with the companies whose products they buy. A cornerstone of good branding is good storytelling – but it’s a two-way street. Companies must learn to go beyond telling their own stories to listening to and understanding their customer’s stories.

By being more human and relying on storytelling and narrative strategic thinking, companies have the opportunity to be more relevant to other members of their community. Marketing strategy must be framed as a fluid, organic narrative instead of a static, immovable framework. It’s the tree versus the pyramid. Telling and listening to human stories not only provides a context to people’s lives, but also engages the imagination and interjects magic.

                                              

Founders of exceptional companies are seldom focused on their “brand” when they start their business. Instead, they focus on stories that eventually change the world, by using bottom-up strategy to see beyond the horizon.

The reality is that in the start-up phase you inherently rely on your customers, suppliers, and employees to help develop your strategy. Established companies often forget this, and try to distance themselves from their turbulent, risky beginnings. But companies would do well to rediscover their roots and revisit their own creative history.

The Search for Meaning, Step 4 - Always Ask Why

I was talking to a client recently about his company’s access to customer information. He said that the company has spent the last decade developing enormous databases of information about their customers: they know precisely what is purchased, when, and where. But even with all of this information, the client’s company was dismayed to realize they still didn’t understand why their customers behave the way they do.

All of the quantifiable data in the world won’t help you understand a person’s underlying reasons. It will not give you the cause, only the effect. Not only does the very act of asking yourself why force you to make leaps of faith and use your intuition, it also makes you more human, giving you the ability to connect to your customers on a deeper emotional level.

The Search for Meaning, Step 3 – Belong to Your Community

So many companies have isolated themselves from the communities in which they participate. It’s easy to see what happens; it happened at Radar. I started Radar in my garage. While the garage was crowded, noisy and full of interruptions from neighborhood kids, it sure was fun. It also functioned pretty well. We were all generalists. There was no need for meetings. Everyone always knew what was going on.

Now that we are in an office and ten times as big, much more effort must be made to communicate, hence there’s less time for us to be out in the community with our customers. It is also much more difficult to keep the internal community of Radar as close as it was when we started. It’s not a bad thing. But it takes a lot more effort and management than it used to, and that all can get in the way of spending quality time with the right customers.

While growth certainly demands more organization, it also means that you have to make a greater effort to be a part of all of your communities. Many of our clients are big, complex business organizations and their executives often tell us that they’re too busy to actually go out and spend time with their customers. The reality of doing all their internal tasks precludes the time or the energy it takes to get outside the confines of their offices.

In this dynamic environment, the companies who will be successful will know their customers as they know their friends. They will be creatively engaged in their communities.

To be a part of these communities, companies must develop new ways to communicate. It is a prerequisite for social and emotional connections. They must form community network strategies to give them the ability to understand and react to changes occurring in every corner of their community.

The Search for Meaning, Step 2 – Don’t Begrudge Complexity

In its essence, truth is complex. You can’t take the complexities and idiosyncrasies of the world and reduce them to black and white numbers and hope to gain any real understanding. I see this happening all the time in the sales department of many companies. Naturally the focus of salespeople is to consistently hit their goals.

In many instances I’ve seen salespeople count orders that aren’t really tied down or withhold excess orders until the next month, just to meet these rigid, predetermined goals. Instead of focusing on the needs of the customers, or even on the reality of what’s sold and what isn’t, the salespeople focus on the numbers that supposedly represent reality. Numbers can be manipulated; real people with complex wants and needs cannot.

The real problem is that quantitative tools for building strategy can’t capture the complexity of human life. They provide a wonderful rear-view mirror view of the world but it’s hard to drive a strategy into the future by looking backwards. Think about the stock market.

We’ve become so enamored with the ups and downs of the markets that we tend to forget the complex reality of what they represent. The best market analysts are not the ones who can merely recite the percentages of growth or decline, but the ones who can use their intuition to correctly interpret the reasons behind these movements.

Even the way most companies view their own structure – as a pyramid – suggests a static, top-down entity. Companies must recognize the complex world in which we live and begin to see their involvement in it in a new way.

Instead of looking at the corporate structure as a pyramid, consider seeing it as a tree: a living, growing tree whose roots are planted deeply in the reality of its environment, that has the sturdy support structure of a thick trunk, an efficient delivery system from the nutrients of the ground to the tips of the leaves and back again, and the ability to populate the ground (or market) with its products, its seeds.

The only way to welcome the role of complexity in your strategy is to rely on more organic strategic methods.