In this episode, award winning author and communications consultant Jim Signorelli shows us how to communicate in a compelling, memorable way. Through storytelling, you’ll connect with your audience at an emotional level and get your ideas to stick.
After listening to this episode, you'll understand:
- Why storytelling is such a powerful communications tool
- How storybranding can help position your product
- The key elements of a story
- How you can use business storytelling to get your ideas to stick
SHOW NOTES
Do you communicate facts and data, but can’t seem to get the buy-in you want? Would you like to connect with your audience on an emotional level and have them remember every word?
Business storytelling is a powerful communication tool to make your message meaningful and memorable.
StoryBranding
Storybranding is a process and approach to establishing a brand’s identity. It’s based on the metaphor of a story.
With StoryBranding, you cast the brand or product as a character in the story. Working with leaders, marketing, and others in the organization, you work to discover the product purpose and how it helps customers overcome an obstacle.
StoryBranding helps a product or brand stand out in terms of its essence and what it stands for. This contributes not only to the marketing approach, but also for alignment internally and identification with customers who ascribe to the same beliefs.
Oral Storytelling
To be effective in a business setting, storytelling must be relevant, short, to the point, and give emotional energy to the facts. Stories are an emotional envelope for facts. They can create a more meaningful connection with people than with facts and charts.
The Key to Storytelling
Storytelling can be deceptively simple. The key is to understand what is and is not a story.
A story should have a time stamp (when) because it’s an event in time. There’s often some type of dialogue in a story or the mention of characters (people). Finally, there needs to be some kind of payoff for listeners. That payoff could be a relevant answer, a surprise, or another type of reward for listening to the story.
The Clarity Pattern
One storytelling technique is known as the Clarity Pattern. This technique was often used by Apple’s Steve Jobs and tells a tale of how we arrived where we are.
Through telling about the background, history, or thought process around an initiative, you create an emotional bond with listener and help to clarify the ‘why’ in a compelling way.
When done correctly, the Clarity Pattern helps listeners to feel that they are part of the story or that they have gone through the journey with the presenter, which helps build an emotional bond and makes the story memorable.
Listen to the full episode to understand how to communicate in a more memorable and impactful way.
YOUR HOMEWORK
Transform a fact-based case history into a story.
When you’re presenting information, try to take any facts or data and turn it into a story. Discuss how those facts came to be. Fashion the case history into a story about the people you worked with and the problem you’re solving along with the emotional impacts. Also, try to be visual with the story by using words that form images in the minds of your audience.
Links mentioned in this episode:
- Jim’s website: Story-lab.net
- Check out Jim’s book on Amazon
Jim Signorelli
COE of Story-Lab Chicago
Jim Signorelli is an award-winning author, branding expert and communications consultant. Following a 16-year stint as CEO of ESW Partners, a major agency in Chicago, Jim’s interest in story as a business communication tool expanded. He became affiliated with Anecdote, the leading business storytelling training company based in Australia. Jim now conducts oral storytelling workshops throughout the U.S. for companies as large as Microsoft and as small as the 10-person start-up. Jim is frequently a featured speaker at conventions and events.
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