Should Be Telling

Stories That Stick was a GREAT read. Lots of examples, and actionable insights, and you start to look around at your world as a bunch of stories being told simultaneously.

“The most powerful stories are the ones we believe about ourselves.”

The goal is to create cognitive ease versus cognitive strain.

Cognitive ease refers to the state of mind in which things are easy to understand and process. When information is clear, familiar, and expected, it requires less mental effort to digest. This state promotes a positive feeling towards the information, making it more persuasive and easier to remember. In storytelling, creating cognitive ease can mean using simple language, familiar scenarios, and relatable characters to make the story flow smoothly and be more engaging. Clean design and smart branding can create cognitive ease, making potential customers like you just a little bit more.

Cognitive strain, on the other hand, occurs when the information is complex, unfamiliar, or presented confusingly. When it requires more mental effort to understand something, it can lead to frustration, disengagement, or misunderstanding. In storytelling, cognitive strain can occur if the story is too complicated, jumps around without clear transitions, or includes jargon and concepts that your audience isn’t familiar with.

Are you telling a story that’s easy to understand?

In Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking Fast and Slow, he talks about Systems 1 and 2 thinking. System 1 operates automatically and quickly, with little or no effort and no sense of voluntary control. It involves intuition and rapid processing and is associated with cognitive ease.
System 2 allocates attention to the effortful mental activities that demand it, including complex computations. It is associated with cognitive strain and involves conscious thought, reasoning, and analytical processes. When information is complex or challenging, System 2 kicks in to work through the details and understand them.

Are you selling too many flavours?

Kindra tells the story about the Gelato shop that had too many flavours. She visits this place, and people can’t make up their minds, kids reeling from the perceived hardest decision of their lives, to pick a single flavour. Parents get angry because kids can’t decide, and more customers leave upset than happy. WTF?! Right?

When we have to make a decision and we’re given too many options our brains go into something dubbed Analysis Paralysis mode. A paralyzing state where we’re stuck in analyzing mode. Remember the Jam study? Too many options do not make a satisfied customer!

A rule to live by is plus or minus 6 options. Yes, we can remember 7 digits off hand, but 5 is much MUCH easier. Don’t give me more than 7 options or else I may not buy at all.

Stories Sell: Remember Apple’s commercial about a family?

People don’t buy the thing they buy what the thing Will do for them. And you need to tell the story to make them understand why your product is the best for that.

A story is how you’re going to differentiate

A study from Intuit found that 540,000 people start a business every month. 75% of people do it with their own savings. 64% start with less than $10,000. That a whole lot of competition starting up every month. How are you going to stand out amongst the crowd?

How will you differentiate? Will it be excellence? Customer service? Passion? How will customers know you’re different, not just like everyone else?

Stories revolve around the nouns in your life, people, places, things, or ideas. Or the firsts in your life. Or the special moments in life.

The Four Story Types are value, founder, purpose, and customer.

The author talks about the four archetypes of storytelling. This made me reflect on the story we tell about StratLab. We have a founder story (though we rarely talk about it), we have a purpose story (but again, we don’t talk about it a lot), we rarely talk about our wonderful customers, and finally, we usually lead with our value story (why we’re a good deal to hire!). Which is probably not the best story to lead with.

We have some work to do.

What Story Will You Tell?

Can you interview the founder of your company or non-profit? Can you get them to tell a story about the first year in business? The biggest struggles they had to overcome, the biggest triumphs of the first year. Get comfortable telling how it all began, even though you probably don’t think it’s a special story, many others will find inspiration in it.

Can you talk on camera about why you do what you do? You have a purpose, and the more comfortable you are talking about your purpose in your company/organization the more customers will understand why you do what you do. Anyone can sell the same widgets as you do, but no one can do it the way you do and the way you support the people around you. Your purpose is what differentiates you.

Is there a good story about the reasons customers hire you? Why did your last customer tell their friends about working with you? Your value story is the sizzle on your steak, it’s the reason why people keep coming back. Tell that story. When push comes to shove, why are your customers hiring you over the competition? That’s your value.

Do you have a favourite customer? Do you have them on camera telling the world about why they work with you? Your customer stories will set you apart. When other companies can barely get online reviews, you will keep growing because you’re hearing the story from the proverbial horse’s mouth. Testimonials are a powerful marketing tactic, use them wisely!