Tag Archives: story telling

Gothic Churches and Retail Displays

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The art of the merchandising display is the focus this week at the Global Shop conference in Las Vegas. There are giant bottles of Knob Creek, Zombie Baby Dolls, hair care products, lottery ticket dispensers and an unimaginable host of other products. Some of it is terrific, some of it is terrible and most of it mundane. What strikes me is that while all of it is eye catching, it isn’t always the kind of thing to engage the shopper.  Product features are clear and brand identification is almost always an easy task, but there is little that tugs at the heart strings, little that tells a story. And it is the lack of underlying meaning that has me thinking about history and what we can learn, and apply, from its study. Retail displays specifically have me thinking about the Gothic churches of Europe.

The Gothic age produced the great cathedrals of Europe and brought a full flowering of stained glass windows. Churches became taller and lighter, 
walls thinned and stained glass was used to fill the increasingly larger 
openings in them. Stained glass became the sun filled world outside. Abbot 
Suger of the Abbey of St. Denis rebuilt his church in what is one of the 
first examples of the Gothic style. He brought in craftsmen to make the 
glass and kept a journal of what was done. He truly believed that the 
presence of beautiful objects would lift men’s souls closer to God.

The works served several purposes aside from the architectural. First, for a population that was almost wholly illiterate, the depictions of 
bible stories would serve as illustrations and lessons for the priests and 
bishops to point to during mass. Second, they created a holy ambience that would focus the congregation. The 
stained glass would change the color and quality of the light in the knave, 
giving what to the peasant would seem an ethereal glow. This created an 
atmosphere “primed” for worship, convenient since most of those present 
wouldn’t understand the Latin lessons anyway. Third, symbolically they represented a membrane between the sacred and the 
profane. Through the window was the real world. Sin, hate, pain, suffering. 
The stained glass was a shield from that into the sanctuary of the church 
and instead made the window a symbolic looking glass into the Heavens. Quite a lot of structural and functional utility in such a simple concept.

And so I return to retail and the displays we find in them. What works well lifts the spirit. It does more than catch they eye, it transforms the experience. The pieces that don’t work are simply loud. They impart feature information, but tell no story. They are indeed noticeable at fifty feet, but they don’t invite you to come in.

As with the retail space in its entirety, its elements should, ideally, come together to tell a story that is symbolically charged, drawing the consumer and/or shopper into the story, captivating them and providing information about the human condition, not just the product. For example, the Makita display here at the conference encourages the viewer to physically engage with the tools, but it does far more. It is made of steel, rivets and brushed, beaten metal on proud display. It reflects in every element of its design the idealized imagery of labor, adding a sense of value to the professional construction worker and a sense of mythic masculinity to the novice. The display tells a story about the person viewing it, not just the product, creating a partnership between the customer and the brand.

Just like the experience that the stained glass and sweeping arches of the Gothic cathedral was designed to convey, so to should retail. And this holds true whether you are Frito Lay, Miller Lite, or Sony. That means understanding that shoppers and consumers do more than seek out information and features. They may not be able to articulate those needs in a survey or traditional interview, but they are there. It’s just a matter of uncovering them and turning them into something more than a sign.

Stories, Invention and the Bottom Line

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The power of a good story, or even a rather mundane one, is truly phenomenal.  In it are wrapped up the hopes, dreams, symbols, and significances that shed light on who we are as individuals and as members of a culture.  But the real power comes not from the explicit statements that emerge during, say, interviews, but from the subtext and patterns of meaning people assign to objects, relationships, and thoughts as they are created by participants through narrative. Not everything can be expressed as matter-of-fact discourse, especially things one cannot really put one’s finger on, or things that do not exist yet. Some of them are central to human experience, such as falling in love or admiring the full moon rising over the sea. If we want to explore this kind of experience, we need means and methods that are suited to communicate it.

I kept thinking about this problem, and one day I decided to see what happens if I explicitly ask research participants to write stories, pieces of fiction, about a topic related to my client’s needs.  Specifically, they were asked to write a story from the perspective of someone shopping for beer.  Much to my surprise, I ended up a wide range of ideas being expressed and a degree of complex language that was poetic, mundane, funny, sad and utterly fascinating.

I have used this method of gathering insights ever since, when I want to learn about things that are beside the topic but nonetheless worth exploring. It is by no means a replacement to fieldwork, but it is another tool that can be used to tease out how people construct their world in ways they may not normally be able to express. These things concern the creative aspects of the cultural context of how meaning is constructed.

Why are stories important for interaction and knowledge? Traditional cultures are storytelling cultures in the literal sense: people tell each other stories. We have often set this fact aside in the post-modern, linear, data driven world of business, but it is still fundamental to who we are.  People do not buy products based on specs alone, they buy based on deeper issues that connect products and places to their humanity. At certain occasions the stories gain a special role, such as at a child’s bedtime or while sitting around the kitchen table (the primal campfire). Stories make it possible for us to share our world, not lists of product attributes. We actively participate in the creation of culture by listening to stories and telling them—and we learn about culture through stories. It is in the context of understanding stories that we uncover triggers and meanings that simply don’t emerge fro surveys and interviews. They supply us with metaphors and meanings that are hidden from view when people are in the participant mode. Stories give them license to explore ideas and create symbols that tap the deepest recesses of a product’s or brand’s subtler meanings.

Stories are aimed at exploring the subjective, but not the individual. They are the collective myth. The point with composing a story is to find a collective level in the invention. It is a kind of inter-subjective reality. Creative solutions and innovative ideas arrive when imagination is actively used by participants, not just the people working for the company in need of answers.

Art, Video and Client Acceptance

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When we conduct qualitative research it is inevitable that we have clients who choose to dismiss what we have to say.  More accurately, there are people within the organization that have, for a host of reasons, made the decision, consciously and subconsciously, to find any excuse possible to reject the finding.  The question is what to do about it.  That means reflecting on what the objections to the work are and the underlying case being used to dismiss the findings. Unfortunately, I think a large part of it stems from the fact that we, unlike a computer program used to crunch data, are the instruments of investigation, analysis and reporting.  The researcher frequently takes on the role of omnipotent, unseen author and expert – and that can be disconcerting to the person on the receiving end of the research. The text, sound clip, or video narrative is filtered through the researcher’s eyes; eyes that are, if trained properly in the tenets of the anthropological discipline, self-reflexive and committed to the honest and ethical treatment of the information gathered.  And in this lie the subtle politics of power and the subject/researcher relationship.

Our words alone, for right or wrong, frequently lack credibility in the minds of business executives and designers who are intent on validating their work or personal views.  What we have to say can be ignored in the light of “common sense” experience held by the business and design teams.  Conversely, while the statements of participants have credibility, their thoughts are often seen as disjointed, irrelevant, or dismissible as singular anecdotal moments.  By constructing stories, both parties (researcher and participant) gain credibility and influence.  The narrator/editor gains the status of author and guide, moving from being perceived as irrelevant to the business situation to a position of authority.  The participant is given greater significance in that he or she is understood as representational of a wider range of meaning, cultural patterns, and behavior.  The participant or participants used in a final work convey a coherent message that can, when the “story” is told well by the author/editor, be implemented by members of the audience.  Video in particular serves to provide specific direction while enticing the audience to tread into deeper waters, thus sparking greater innovation.

In conducting fieldwork, we as anthropologists are asked to share the concrete experiences of the participants’ environment, shared behavior, language, social relations, etc.  In sharing that rich and complex world, new ideas and deeper understanding emerge on the part of the client.  We as the experts see, hear, write, and film what are the most important aspects of the field experience and distill them into something that can be used by the various members of the business, development, and design teams.  And because video is such a potentially influential tool, showing the drama of daily life, the dramatic and artistic side of the story can create waves in the business community that the traditional, omnipotent style of presentation cannot.  Presentation styles, choices of material and stories, lighting, viewing angles, organization, etc. all work to structure the portrayal of a culture or population in ways particular to the ethnographer or team of ethnographers and in ways the client can relate to.  There is an inherent story-like character to all ethnographic accounts of the field.  This is doubly so when research is presented in the video format because of limitations of the lens and the limited timeframe of most cinematic pieces; the convention of film is to present information to an array of senses in a relatively short amount of time.  This does not imply that the videos we create are fictions or that the goal is simply to dazzle the audience.  It simply means that ignoring the story-like nature of the video results in dry, dull work that does little to impact the attitudes, expectations, and development directions of our clients.

The goal is ultimately to shake the client’s foundations of belief, to rattle his or her assumptions, to create a new state a awareness.  It serves to evoke a participatory feeling in the viewers and bring them into the moment of experience, compelling them to consider new ways of classifying and thinking about their world, as well as their processes. There is an artistic element to good research and its presentation. Without the art of ethnography, though it may sound counterintuitive, the findings are easier to dismiss. The story is central to the success of any ethnographic project.

How to Tell a Good Story

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We often get bogged down in the numbers when we talk to our clients.  They’re business folks and therefore we need to talk to ROI, segmentation schemes, bottom-line financials, etc. And yes, that information is necessary, but it shouldn’t necessarily be the focus of every conversation, particularly when we’re presenting findings and insights.  It’s like assuming every movie we see or every novel we read should be a bulleted list of events.  No, the story matters much more than we think.  Even though they might be resistant to the notion, business folks are still human and they respond to the story being told more than they would admit to others or to themselves.  Story telling is imperative to the success of any work you do.  Great stories succeed because they are able to capture the imagination of important audiences. They draw people in.

1. Understand That Attention Spans Are Short

People have little time. As a result, attention spans are getting shorter by the day. Do everything you can to keep your story from plodding along at the same pace and pitch. Mix the serious with funny, dialogue with thought, high energy with no movement, etc.  Telling the story is as much about the performance as it is about details.  Without the performative aspects, there are only facts and facts by themselves don’t make the case.

2. Believe In the Story You Are Telling

If the story doesn’t mean anything to you personally, don’t tell it. It won’t come across as genuine and your audience will know it. A great story is true. Not necessarily because it’s factual, but because it’s consistent and authentic. Clients, like consumers, are too good at sniffing out inconsistencies for you to get away with a story that’s just slapped on.

3. Be Targeted

Great stories are rarely aimed at everyone. When they are, they rarely stick with anyone.  Be aware that there are some people in the audience who won’t get it no matter what you have to say.  Those who do, however, will become advocates. Average people have too many different points of view, to many opinions and too many competing agendas to come at a problem with a completely clear mind. If you need to water down your story to appeal to everyone, it will appeal to no one.

4. See the Story in Scenes

It’s hard to memorize a story word for word. One of the biggest problems people run into when presenting is that it sounds contrived and forced.  That will kill the message quicker than anything.  Break your story into blocks of time. Think in themes and use visual material to jog your memory about the theme you want to address rather than reciting something you’ve committed to memory.

Great stories are trusted and trust is probably the single most important part of getting anyone to act on insights. No research succeeds in telling a story unless he has earned the credibility to tell that story.  And that is largely accomplished in how the story is told, not just in the pedigree they bring to the table.

Selling Aspirations or Realities

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We often see that words, phrases and concepts are repeated when describing an event.  But I have to wonder, is it more powerful for marketing to ask “what happened…” or “when you went/used/etc. what were you hoping for…”?  No doubt it is some balance between the two, but at which points in the shopping, consuming and disposal processes do you stress the aspirational over the practical?  At what point do you reverse them?  It all depends on the nature of the narrative as told by both the brand and the people who buy it.  And it depends on breaking away from a binary view of the world.

Narratives are representational forms that provide valuable data about the practices, perspectives, and beliefs people have about a brand.  In other words, these are the stories people tell, but narrative analysis digs deeper, uncovering symbolic triggers and psycho-social stumbling block. What we want isn’t always what we need (or even what we really, truly want).  Understanding the narrative being told and the one we wish to create means thinking about more than a message.  It means thinking about marketing as a story and that is never an either/or proposition.

The Stories WE Tell

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When research folks talk to clients about their findings they, we,  frequently take on the role of omnipotent, unseen author and expert. The text, sound clip, or video narrative is filtered through his or her eyes; eyes that are, if trained properly in the tenets of the anthropological discipline, self-reflexive and committed to the honest and ethical treatment of the information gathered.  And in this lie the subtle politics of power and the subject/researcher relationship.  Our words alone, for right or wrong, frequently lack credibility in the minds of business executives and designers who are intent on validating their work or personal views.  What we have to say can be ignored in the light of “common sense” experience held by the business and design teams.  Conversely, while the statements of participants have credibility, their thoughts are often seen as disjointed, irrelevant, or dismissible as singular anecdotal moments.  By constructing stories, both parties (researcher and participant) gain credibility and influence.  The narrator/editor gains the status of author and guide, moving from being perceived as irrelevant to the business situation to a position of authority.  The participant is given greater significance in that he or she is understood as representational of a wider range of meaning, cultural patterns, and behavior.  The participant or participants used in a final work convey a coherent message that can, when the “story” is told well by the author/editor, be implemented by members of the audience.  Video in particular serves to provide specific direction while enticing the audience to tread into deeper waters, thus sparking greater innovation.

In conducting fieldwork, we as anthropologists are asked to share the concrete experiences of the participants’ environment, shared behavior, language, social relations, etc.  In sharing that rich and complex world, new ideas and deeper understanding emerge on the part of the client.  We as the experts see, hear, write, and film what are the most important aspects of the field experience and distill them into something that can be used by the various members of the business, development, and design teams.  And because video is such a potentially influential tool, showing the drama of daily life, the dramatic and artistic side of the story can create waves in the business community that the traditional, omnipotent style of presentation cannot.  Presentation styles, choices of material and stories, lighting, viewing angles, organization, etc. all work to structure the portrayal of a culture or population in ways particular to the ethnographer or team of ethnographers and in ways the client can relate to.  There is an inherent story-like character to all ethnographic accounts of the field.  This is doubly so when research is presented in the video format because of limitations of the lens and the limited timeframe of most cinematic pieces; the convention of film is to present information to an array of senses in a relatively short amount of time.  This does not imply that the videos we create are fictions or that the goal is simply to dazzle the audience.  It simply means that ignoring the story-like nature of the video results in dry, dull work that does little to impact the attitudes, expectations, and development directions of our clients.

As with the impressionist tale (see VanMaanen  1988), the story is recounted including all the “odds and ends that are associated with remembered events.”  The audience is drawn into the story created both by the author/editor and participant(s).  They hear, feel, see what the researcher experienced – the audience is meant to relive the experience, insofar as that is possible, rather than interpret it.  The problems, issues, and meanings have largely been worked through in the background by the ethnographer and the story being told is meant to draw in the audience and build a collaborative solution to design and business issues.  The emotional impact of seeing and hearing such lush descriptions and events sparks interest, forcing the audience to more openly engage with the researcher, the research, and other members of the development team.

Ultimately, this means that the researcher applies conventions of art as readily as he or she does those of science. Tension must build, foreshadowing must occur, contextual details must be condensed without losing their power, and the story must have a logical flow as with a written piece.  Details and subtleties are set aside or given greater attention in regards to how they impact the audience’s ability to engage with and grasp a topic.  The overarching issues are how well the story hangs together, how easy is it to extract information (or inspire the viewer to read the larger report), and how believable the material is.  The issues by which the final material is judged are derived from cinematic and literary worlds as much as they are from the anthropological discipline.

The power of the emotionally influential, dramatic story in the beginning of the design process can mean the difference between seeing innovation and the dismissal of the research.  The story serves as a launching pad for teams attempting to turn qualitative data into something concrete that can in turn be productized or turned into a viable business model.  Bore them and there is almost no chance of affecting change.  Selective packaging of field data to exemplify generalized constructs is a standard practice, even though the precise empirical situations in which the field data are developed are perhaps far less coherent or obvious than the concepts they serve to illustrate.

Of course, it is certainly possible that less than ideal development and design occur due to mistakes of interpretation, both on the part of the researcher and the audience.  However, businesses are frequently concerned less with perfection than they are with getting a product to market.  If done well, it is unlikely that the story told will result in disastrous business models or product designs.  In the end, the fieldworker must decide whether the risk outweighs the possibility of having the entire piece of research dismissed because he or she failed to engage the audience.  The final decisions as to which stories to tell and how to tell them falls to the ethnographer’s ability to understand the audiences for whom the video will played.

Gavin

Story Telling And Power

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A life as led is inseparable from a life as told. It’s not about “how it was,” but how it is interpreted and reinterpreted, told and retold. Narrative – “story telling” – is a particular mode of thinking, the mode that relates to the concrete and particular as opposed to the abstract and general. Stories make brands real.

Stories serve a number of cultural, social and psychological functions that can and should be used in positioning you brand. The choice of words and subjects in a story convey to the creator and the listener what meaning a brand has beyond the surface. For example, a sporting goods store like Cabela’s may symbolize father/son bonding, a sense of shared identity around which a they can distinguish themselves from the rest of the family, a repository for cultural ideals like fair play and what it means to be a man. While none of these directly reflect the products being sold, they are the underlying currents that draw people to a store, to buy gear, and to get their children involved in little league. These aspects of what a brand is emerge in the telling of a story.

But from a business perspective, why bother? Defining what the brand means to the customer allows the marketing and creative teams to speak to people on a much deeper level. Simply, increased brand relevance and market share.

Wired for Symbolism

Stories are conveyed through language, which is by definition a symbolic system. The key to successful engagement is to move from structural aspects of a story to the symbolic, uncovering systems of meaning that resonate with potential customers and compel them to action. Conceptualizing your brand through narrative ties the signifying components to a powerful symbolic system.

These symbolic dimensions that emerge in the narrative add value to products by fulfilling culturally constructed concepts (quality, status, age, belonging, etc.). A brand is a signal that triggers a field of meanings in the consumer’s mind. These meanings are conveyed directly and inferentially through stories. By harnessing the symbolic power behind these meanings, strong brands move beyond the codes governing a product category and enter the personal space of the consumer.

As each narrative unfolds, it is contextualized by the purposes of the interviewer in terms of the research and of the participant in terms of self-presentation. The story may not represent reality from an external perspective, but is an attempt on the part of the teller to reduce information into something meaningful for the outsider.

The use of a narrative inquiry and the development of case stories offer multiple perspectives in understanding a practice, social group, etc. This process gives meaning to tan audience; it yields history, myth and function. No single story provides a full understanding of the meaning of an event, activity, etc., but it provides pieces for a total picture of a concept. Repeated patterns of behavior and repeated storylines are important in uncovering the meaning of your brand. Patterns lead to those experiencing them incorporating the stories, and as a result the brand, into the fabric of their lives. We don’t tend to remember a sequence of numbers when we read them. We do remember the simplest of stories.

Loyalty and commitment to a brand comes into existence when humans give meaning to it – they control the brand, we do not. Any time a brand is identified, given a name, or designed to represent a known storyline it is separated from the undefined world around it. The sense of brand commitment is strongly enhanced the stories handed down over time and being portrayed part of the collective myth.  Doubt it?  Look at the lines outside the Apple Store the day the iPad 2 was released.

Creating a Mental Framework

The first step in building a story-based strategy is recognizing that descriptive and symbolic systems that are conveyed through stories serve different but equally important functions in developing a brand identity. Descriptive aspects of a brand come out through stories and provide a narrative frame. The goal in a narrative frame is to provide as much information as possible to a creative team or marketing team so they can incorporate subtle triggers into messaging and the overarching brand experience. Narratives give meaning to the world, both for the individual telling the story and the social network consuming it.

The audience, the shopper and the consumer, is drawn into the story created. They sense what the characters experienced – the audience is meant to relive the experience, insofar as that is possible, rather than interpret it. The emotional impact of seeing and hearing such lush descriptions provided through story telling sparks interest and long-term associations with the brand. They do more than remember you, they come to associate your brand with themselves.

Ownership is a key element to a story gaining ground. Feeling directly invested in the story and the people in an environment allows people to feel a personal connection. With ownership comes the need to share your experience and the desire for collaboration in the retelling of the story. Shoppers who are encouraged to interact with others in a non-transactional way, creating new configurations of the story collectively and dynamically, are more inclined to interpret themselves as part of the storyline. The contextualization of these actions by location provides a deep and varied “space.” This has implication well beyond how we tell or clients to sell their products.  It gives us a new tool to understand what matters to people and uncover those triggers that have a major, often unconscious, affect on their buying decisions.

The power of the emotionally influential, culturally relevant, dramatic story in the beginning of the retail branding process can mean the difference between seeing innovation and failure. The narrative serves as a launching pad for brand devotion. Bore the shopper and there is almost no chance of affecting change and growing revenue. Story telling makes points clear in what might otherwise be murky waters. In Gary Witherspoon’s book Language and Art in the Navajo Universe (1977) he wrote, “The greatest value of learning the language of another people does not come from being able to interview informants without interpreters or from providing native terms in ethnographic writings; it comes from being able to understand what natives say and how they say it when they are conversing with each other.”  This holds true equally for the people who buy our products or shop our stores.  People are often thinking about things other than the goods they need to procure when shopping.  They are thinking and living out the experiences of motherhood, play, obligation, etc.  In other words, people are part of a complex system of meaning and behavior. Learning the communicative norms and processes of the individual groups allows us to better grasp and define our audiences, adapting our methods of presentation to be understandable and meaningful.  That translates into meaningful insights, rather than superficial anecdotes, and more strategically relevant information.

Well So What!?!

Take the Sam Adams brand as an example. The authenticity of brand is not a set of traditions in the standard sense.  They talk, of course, about the product and the flavor, but they reach beyond that to explain the story behind the beer. They humanize and historicize the company and its people, turning beer into a way of life rather than an object. Marketing becomes less about selling a product than it does about ongoing engagement between the people buying the products and the producers themselves. Rather than being a purely transactional engagement, the consumer and the company, the brand, become part of a shared interaction. In breaking down the Us/Other interaction the company becomes a member of the population rather than an external force with whom people interact only at the cash register. Those sorts of findings can have a powerful impact on how we interpret what we see and hear. And that can change everything about how we understand and talk to people.

 

By Gavin