Culture of Storytelling. You canโt separate the human experience from storytelling. It doesnโt matter whether youโre connecting with an old friend over a drink on a dark and cozy fall night, or youโre pitching a product to a business or consumer. Stories are how we make sense of the world. Theyโre how we entertain, educate, and humanize our audience to our experience, whatever those experiences are. If you want to run a successful startup, then you have to bake storytelling into your business from day one. And it all starts with creating a culture of storytelling. In this guide, we will tell you how to create this storytelling culture through 7 easy to execute steps. Letโs take a look.
What is a Culture of Storytelling?
A culture of storytelling in the context of a business can mean many things. It can mean you create an open and honest atmosphere where employees feel comfortable sharing their experiences. This kind of open dialogue lays the foundations for effective decision making becauseย employees feel confidentย in calling out their concerns.
But more importantly, it means the shared story that all of your employees believe in. Itโs a collective narrative about the brand and the โwhyโ and โhowโ behind the work you do. When all employees have a shared understanding of the story, they feel a greater sense of belonging. Studies have repeatedly shown that a sense of belonging is strongly linked toย employee happiness, productivity, and efficiency.
Having a shared story is also what helps you sell more effectively and secure buy-in from investors. In the next section, weโre going to look at how you build a compelling story for your start-up. A story that will make your company memorable and differentiate you from your competitors. And one that will make your business into the kind of company people want to work with or buy from.
7 Things You Must Do to Create a Compelling Story For Your Startup
1.ย Build Your Mission Around Customer Conflict
Thereโs often a multitude of reasons someone created a startup. It could be because you came up with a flashy new idea and saw its potential in the market. It could be because you have a passion for something and want to see it realized in a business. Whatever the reason is, your startup canโt exist without customers, so customers should be a focal part of your mission statement.
In Dale Carnegieโs book titled How to Win Friends and Influence People, he sets out rules for how to present yourself in a way that best connects with other people. There are two points from the book Iโd like to touch on here because I think they help people write excellent mission statements,
Talk in terms of the other personโs interest
When we talk about what other people are interested in, they feel valued and appreciated. Additionally, they pay more attention.
Letters that produce miraculous results
Deliberately describe information in a way that puts the other person in the picture. When discussing your skills or accomplishments, tell them in a way where itโs obvious how your skills can fix their problems. Customers are interested in what you can do for them, not what you can do.
Customers love to deal with companies that put them at one center stage. By placing your customers in your mission statement, you are signaling that you are aย customer-centric companyย โ everything you do is because you want to add value to their lives.
Itโs a good idea to build a habit of including customers in all of your business communication, even as an exercise. Always think about how your product or brand is solving a problem for the customer because that is your customerโs story. The primary customer story is I found a problem > I need to find a way to fix this problem to improve my experience > X company looks like they have a product that will solve my problem > I try the product > It met my expectations/It didnโt meet my expectations.
2.ย Humanize Your Brand
Stories are intrinsically human. When people take center stage in our stories, we find it easier to connect with the story and empathize with the characters.
With the fast-paced digital world we live in today, it would be easy to think that people want less contact with others, not more. While itโs true that our devices allow us to go solo and interact with others only when we feel like it and only in the way we prefer, Itโs not true that this endeavor is about reducing contact. The modern world allows us to have greater control over what content and people will engage with. As a business, itโs your job to grab the userโs attention through your appeal. You canโt force a consumer to pay attention to you, but you can make them want to.
An excellent way to do this is by humanizing your want. People in theย digital ageย still crave sincere connections with others. Your business is made up of people, so these people should be visible.
Tips on humanizing your brand:
- Educate:ย Focus more on educating than selling. Learning is something that all people do, and all people want to do. If you can teach consumers something, theyโll look up to your company as an authority. Educating others, either through blog posts or videos, also communicates that youโre interested in othersโ personal development. You donโt just want to sell a product; you want to help people become better.
- Show off your employees โ When you create content, it should feature your employees. Blog posts should have an author with a photo. Videos should feature different employees speaking parts of the script.
- Use positive language and emojis โ Ensure that your content, Tweets, LinkedIn posts have flow and showcase what kind of person you are.
3.ย Focus on Warmth Over Competence
Over time, there has been extensive research into what makes someone more successful, competent, or warm, and the results are surprising.
Warmth is made up of the following traits:
- Cultivating positive relationships
- Being open toย feedback.
- Building trust with others
- Ability to motivate and inspire.
- Honesty and integrity
- Collaboration
- Encourage input from other people.
- Willingness to change.
Competence is considered:
- Problem-solving
- A drive to get results
- Technical expertise
- Ability to drive change
- Taking charge
- External perspective (seeing the bigger picture and ability to become emotionally detached from the issue at hand).
Most people mistakenly think that competence is more important than warmth, but the opposite is actually true. Studies repeatedly show that people overestimate competence vs. warmth in relation to high-ranking executives. They think that executives should be more competent than warm, but executives actually rate higher in warmth.
As for why, it dates back to our evolutionary history. When you meet a new person on the savannah, itโs more important to know whether you can trust them than if theyโre good at hunting. A good hunter who is untrustworthy is a liability to your tribe โ they can hunt you just as well as animals. Of course, we donโt have the same worries today, but weโre still wired to trust warmth over competence in our leaders. We want to know that weโre safe because they have our best interests at heart.
When it comes to storytelling, displaying warmth is paramount. Thatโs not to say you shouldnโt focus on competence at all, but rather that you need to get the balance right. Weave your displays of competence into a story thatโs brimming with warmth. It will make yourย customers trust you.
4.ย Show Donโt Tell
โShow donโt tellโ is a fundamental rule of storytelling, and it goes for business storytelling too. Thereโs a reason that weโre often bored by long descriptive scenes in books that are devoid of action and dialogue. The exact same events can occur in the book, but youโll be more engaged if itโs being conveyed to you through conversations between characters or action taking place around you.
In business, you show through your customersโ experiences. Instead of saying, โOur product allows users to edit videos from any device.โ
You say:
Tom is a documentary filmmaker and is always filming on the go. Sitting in a cafe one day, he was eager to edit an exciting interview segment he just filmed, but he couldnโt. His device wasnโt capable of taking raw video footage and manipulating it in a way that didnโt require further editing later on.
This is just a random example of how โshow donโt tellโ works, but you can apply it to any feature you want to showcase or any story you want to sell. Thereโs a reason that many people are familiar with the stories behind the worldโs biggest businesses. For example, Reed Hastings, the CEO of Netflix, said he was inspired to create the company after being charged a $40 late fee from Blockbuster. Steve Jobs said he was inspired to create a more beautiful operating system for the market because he developed an appreciation for calligraphy when he dropped out of college.
5.ย Strip Back the Jargon
Itโs essential to communicate to your ideal buyer persona. If youโre showing your business to an investor, then sure, you might want to include key industry words that let them know you know what youโre talking about. However, remember to tailor your story to different audiences. If youโre a B2C company, then you need to strip back the jargon when telling stories to your consumer base. They need to understand why your product is a good fit for them without seeing phrases like โproduct to market fit,โ โcustomer segmentโ, market potentialโ, and so on.
6.ย Create a Message that is Concise, Clear, and Repeatable
Your stories need to be catchy and memorable, and above all, transparent. Thereโs no use telling a story so complicated that only a fraction of your users will understand it. Remember, in the digital age; people want information fast. They want to skim over your content and digest it quickly. The more effort you require your customers to exert, the less they will engage with your content.
Try to practice stripping your message back and conveying the same sentiment in the fewest amount of words possible. The goal here isnโt to destroy its original meaning but rather to see whether youโve been more wordy than necessary.
7.ย Align Your Storytelling Across All Channels
One of the most important things forย startupsย to do when communicating with the outside world is consistency. Your message, voice, tone, and style must remain consistent across all channels. When youโre consistent, you inspire more trust in your brand. People take comfort in things that feel familiar to them โ itโs just how our minds work. You can hack their brains by creating a sense of familiarity through your language and stories.
