7 Reasons to Use Storytelling in Research
“The point of a story can penetrate far deeper than the point of any bullet.” - Laurence Nault
Getting to the point
There are seven basic plots in storytelling as we have seen over the last few weeks. These plots form the backbone of myths, fairy tales, novels and movies, and also of advertising, brand stories and how we can all communicate in business, including market researchers telling the story of their data. Here are seven reasons why stories will help you communicate ideas more effectively, helping you to build your story and helping your audience to remember the point of it all.
#1 Stories make your audience care, especially when you know your audience (which you should always take time to do before writing your story). If you know their concerns, frustrations and goals, your stories can reflect the right emotions and experiences, helping your audience to see themselves in the story and identify with its narrative. That’s when they start to care.
#2 All of us will always take time to listen to a good story, and even the busiest person will stop to listen to someone’s narrative, which is why we all love Hollywood movies, reading magazines and gossiping in the office corridor. You are far more likely to keep your audience’s attention if you communicate through storytelling.
#3 Stories help you reshape your data into something far more meaningful, and is the way humans have always passed on knowledge and information (data came very late to the scene). When your information is set in the context of a story it jumps off the page and comes to life. It has been estimated that around three-quarters of what we ‘learn’ comes through storytelling, and this is easy to believe. Numbers by themselves are meaningless, and disconnected from what is important, whereas data in the context of a story creates real meaning and connection. Just watch one of Hans Rosling’s TED presentations to see a master storyteller giving meaning to vast amounts of complex data!
#4 Stories will help you to construct your information into a much more impactful narrative, organising the data you have into a beginning where you set the stage, a middle where you present the challenges and key insights and an ending where you share a new reality. This construction works for any topic, helping you organise your information in a useful way, and also identifying which data is useful and helps the story move along, and which data is unnecessary to share the key insights you have.
#5 Stories are motivating, and will help you to move your audience toward a goal, whether the goal is one of learning or even one of changing behaviours. Stories are very effective in attitudinal training because motivation helps persuade us that something is important, inspiring us to action and not only acknowledgement. Stories also help you to transcend the immediate environment and take the audience to a different place, where their minds are more open to perceiving and thinking in different ways.
#6 Stories are much more likely to be shared with others. We are all tuned into the power of stories, and love to share them (back to gossip again!). They are like multiple little hooks of the burr which inspired George de Mestral to invent velcro. Stories draw us in as we pass them on to the next person, just as we all like to share things in Facebook (fifty years ago neighbours would spend hours talking to each other outside their front doors!). If you want to spread the word about something, you create a story and let it be shared, which is why word of mouth is so much more powerful than more direct forms of advertising.
#7 Above all, stories act like emotional glue, connecting your audience to your message through the shared feelings of the underlying messages. We don’t and can’t remember lots of trivial facts, and learn from connecting the dots to a big picture and above all an underlying emotion. Our memory connects information through the emotions we felt, and it is emotions which create meaning by telling us what is important and why. Stories help us to create relevance, helping us to convey deeper messages (and the most important lessons) through the emotions which will grab the hearts of an audience.
If you want to change the heart of a client, tell them a good story.
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