Storytelling everyone can use to engage customers
Add some movie magic to your content
Have you ever noticed that when you watch a great movie, time flies by and your brain absorbs an extraordinary amount of information effortlessly? Think of the complex techno-philosophy of The Matrix or the far-reaching story universe of Star Wars—and the amount of detail audiences walk away with.
Wouldn’t it be nice if the tech marketing audience could gain that same level of clarity? Or if we could get executives and decision makers to engage to such a degree that they stop thinking about time?
It all comes down to story, and the level of engagement we can earn through our use of it.
Story is human nature | From prehistory to science fiction
Before written language, stories were used to convey complex ideas, pass information down through generations, and warn of danger. We piece stories together in our minds and use them to relate our experiences to friends and family. We tell stories without even thinking about it: it’s how we create relevance, resonance, and connection in our daily lives.
That’s why classic narrative structure is often used in presentation decks and marketing assets. It’s so woven into the way we process information that using it naturally makes complex concepts easier to understand.
But we can go beyond the structure, using story to create personal emotional connections with our audience that elevate solutions to feel tangible, meaningful, and real.
Show, don’t tell | The power of character-based stories
You don’t need to be a cinephile to know this golden rule of filmmaking. In The Princess Bride, the audience discovers an imaginative, fairytale world with different rules than our own, masterfully and gradually through the very human experiences of its characters. The skill of the Man in Black, Inigo’s tragic backstory, the complex love story between Westley and Buttercup, and everything from magic potions to fire swamps makes perfect sense because it comes to us through lived experience.
That connection with character is what dilates time and opens our minds to understand onscreen worlds with such detail.
Using a named character with a real-world problem to show the transformative value of technology can bring that “show-don’t-tell” magic to marketing assets. At Sappington, we call this persona-based storytelling, and here’s why it matters:
Illustrating technology through story allows us to show it in action, so the audience understands what’s happening without having to actively learn about it.
Character provides a means of connecting concepts—like departments in an enterprise or even intricate cloud environments—in ways that bring abstract ideas to life.
Named characters inspire empathy, triggering neurotransmitters like dopamine and oxytocin that enhance the encoding and recall of memories.
Story engages more of the brain, including sensory, motor, and emotional cortices, creating deeper intellectual engagement with the material.
Persona-driven storytelling for everyone
Storytelling can be intimidating. When you’re relating a story to complex product truth, balancing the human with the technical makes this difficult task even harder. That shouldn’t be a reason to abandon persona-driven stories.
At Sappington, we’ve developed a streamlined process to identify, develop, and execute persona-based storytelling to drive audience engagement. There are dozens of ways to use it, from engaging the audience at the beginning of a presentation to articulating product truth in the most meaningful way for each of a diverse set of stakeholders.
A pro tip: play more
As you’re absorbing these ideas, here’s some advice from the trenches of the film industry: great writing doesn’t necessarily come from great thinking or great structure. The best writers are unrelentingly playful and endlessly inquisitive. They’re unafraid to keep asking questions, knowing that if they’re curious enough, the story’s shape will naturally evolve.
In product marketing, applying that playful curiosity and sense of wonder to your users’ experience will make persona-based storytelling easier to achieve. As a bonus, it will likely also open up new ways of thinking about your product that can make even highly technical concepts easier to articulate.
Try it and let us know what you think!
In addition to his role as Creative Content Director at Sappington, Eric has spent more than 25 years in the film industry, delivering rewrites that get projects greenlit and original films that have attracted stars like Gabriel Byrne, Richard Dreyfuss, and Jared Harris.
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