Storytelling: Five Building Blocks for Great Stories

Fitting a whole year's personal experiences into thirty seconds is not easy. It quickly becomes clear: to tell a compelling story, you need to think carefully about how best to prepare and present it. It is an art to tell an exciting story. Following Ivana's introduction to storytelling last week, in this article, we reveal five building blocks that guarantee a good story!

Defining a Purpose

Almost every company knows what it does: it produces one or more products or offers services. Fewer companies can describe how they work. Even fewer companies are aware of their working methods and values. And even fewer companies can explain why they exist at all. I dare say that very few companies have a clear vision.

The 'three W's' (What? How? Why?) together form the Golden Circle and, according to the excellent TED Talk Start with Why, form the basis for successful storytelling. The first step is therefore to define the company's activities more precisely.

HELPFUL QUESTIONS TO ASK YOURSELF INCLUDE:

• What do we offer?
• What do we stand for?
• How do we work?
• How are we positioned and what distinguishes us from the competition?
• What makes us special?
• What is our concern?
• What is our vision, our big goal?
• What drives us?
• What do we believe in?

Another good foundation for successful storytelling is to focus on people's basic needs. These include, for example, security, love, community, development, self-actualisation, and freedom. The Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs, well known in marketing, provides a good basis for this. Nike provides an example of good positioning with Just Do It!. This slogan optimally addresses the need for self-actualisation.

Finding the Protagonist

A good story should not be too general. Instead, one should concentrate on a single fate – a protagonist. We all know this from school lessons: abstractly explained facts or pure data are more easily forgotten than captivating stories that appeal to as many senses as possible.

But which heroine or hero should one choose for their story? Naturally, the protagonist must fit the company or brand (see the first building block "Defining a Purpose"). However, the protagonist should
, after all, you want to tell an exciting story. Many companies make the mistake of making a product or service the hero of the story. But customers can rarely identify with such abstract things.

The chosen protagonist should then be described as thoroughly as possible with many details. The more vivid the character, the better. This allows readers to identify with them more easily.

FOR A PARTICULARLY GOOD STORY, ONE SHOULD ALSO CONSIDER OTHER CHARACTERS:

• the antagonist: the opponent of the protagonist
• the friend: the friend always faithfully stands by the protagonist's side
• the mentor: the "master" and "enabler" of the protagonist

These additional characters help to make a story vivid. In many cases, however, not all four characters are needed. The negative role of the antagonist can also become a challenge in a corporate context.

Topics and products are becoming increasingly complex and are often difficult to understand. It therefore makes sense to follow a narrative structure. This means first telling a story through an example before moving on to general topics. In summary: you should offer readers added value instead of overwhelming them with facts.

Transforming

Successful stories often follow Jonathan Gottschall's recipe: "Story = Protagonist + Dilemma + Attempted Release". This indicates that every good story should address a dilemma or conflict. The protagonist confronts this issue and, ideally, resolves it.

Ikea provides a wonderful example with their advert "

". The piece tells the story of an older man who is visibly bored by his monotonous daily life. So he packs a pink folding chair and embarks on a journey of discovery. Instead of promoting the facts of the folding chair and its (probably low) price, Ikea presents the dilemma of a man who takes us on a small adventure.

Evoking Emotions

If you want to tell a good story, you cannot avoid emotions. Successful brands and companies (whether Apple or Starbucks) utilise a repertoire of emotions to tell vivid stories. Both text, images, and music are available to us to evoke specific emotions in the reader on demand. Instagram leads the way: we love images because they awaken feelings and memories within us.

WHICH LANGUAGE SHOULD BE USED BEST IN STORYTELLING? HERE ARE A FEW TIPS:

• Avoid complex sentence structures, write actively and simply instead
• Create images in the mind with analogies and avoid numbers
• Incorporate synonyms to avoid using the same words repeatedly
• The more detailed you tell something, the better!
• Narrate descriptively and vividly

Telling Transmedially

The traditional "telling" of stories is over; today, we consume content through various digital and analogue channels. Most of us now get our information almost exclusively digitally. But whether analogue or digital, our needs have hardly changed. Internet users, just like readers of an "offline" newspaper, yearn for fresh, entertaining, and surprising stories.

So, once you have put together a good story, you just need to deliver it to the desired target audience. And today, the best way to do this is transmedially in different formats, from different perspectives, using different media. Ideally, you create a kind of "universe" around your own story, with the original story at its centre. The story then needs to be adapted depending on the chosen medium, such as Facebook or YouTube. It is important that the core of the story is not lost.

How to optimally implement transmedia storytelling and make stories "go viral" will be covered in the next blog post in our storytelling series.

*Dominik Berger joined Zensations in January 2016 and is responsible for digital project management. As a child, he never wanted to go to bed without a bedtime story; today, he searches for the best stories to fall asleep to on

.*