Storytelling has run through business, branding and comms for decades. But there’s always been a smokiness to it. It feels hard to grasp what people are talking about when they speak about story. You see brand stories, case studies, mission statements, TikTok’s… all ‘stories’.
Are they even talking about the same thing? And for my organisation, what does that have to do with the problem sitting right in front of me?
This matters. The science is clear: storytelling is an immensely powerful tool for persuading, engaging and inspiring people. But if we don’t agree on what storytelling is in practice — or what’s needed to make it work — we risk paying a lot of money for a yarn. Something we can’t use. Or commissioning a string of content pieces that unspool without a purpose.
That’s why we should think about story-telling at three levels: identity, experience and narrative. These levels cover the foundational business strategy, lived experience and the execution. When storytelling is done well, each of these levels are defined and aligned.
It’s relevant to your business goals, and true to who you are. It’s presented in a way that works for people. And the way it’s expressed is utterly compelling.
Let’s start with the foundation.
Identity
Identity stories are the narratives that define who we are: as individuals, organisations and communities. Our values, our goals and our gifts are encoded in these stories. They show where we’ve come from, and what we’re reaching towards.
Getting identity stories right gives you integrity, authenticity and distinctiveness.
You can arrive at these stories through brand-led activities, but the value of identity, and their potential impact, can span every aspect of what you do. They become Master Stories.
For example, the Canberra Story project, with our client Brand Canberra. A lot of the thinking has been about how to express that story through campaigns. But the Canberra Story is also being used as a resource to inform policy and program decisions — will taking this course of action make us more or less the city we want to be?
A well-researched narrative is often more powerful and resonant than a standalone creative concept. A creative concept is one idea. A story is a treasure chest of compelling ideas, drawn out of listening to real people, connected together through time, with forward momentum.
Start with the story — then find your creative concept from there.
Experience
These are stories of what happens for people out there in the world. It’s about bringing a narrative lens to designing people’s experience. Human-centred design has a raft of disciplines that use narrative devices to understand and improve experiences. You’ll see customer journey maps, behaviour flows, storyboards, and more.
Think of a student’s first day on campus. What do we want them to experience first? Where do they go next?
Or think of a person renewing their driver’s licence? What’s the inciting incident – the trigger that gets them searching online? Do they search or jump straight into your site? What do they look at first? What’s next?
What defines this type of story is that these stories happen in someone’s actual experience. The story is acted out, like a play. Our job as organisations is to write a good script, and set a good stage.
This matters especially in digital storytelling. So much content creation I see falls down because it doesn’t take the experience layer seriously. Not enough attention is paid to how a piece of content fits into someone’s bigger life story. What else is going on for them? When they look at this content, where do they go next?
I see series of discrete ‘stories’ commissioned and published to a website or socials. But often they’re just things — like disparate posters stuck to a wall on a busy street.
Narrative
Finally, we get to the stories we tell. These are the stories people read, watch and hear through our videos, our case studies, and our articles. Here too, there’s a craft to doing it well. Stories work when they show people you can identify with, working towards a goal, with something at stake.
A story must be more than one thing happening after another.
The narrative layer is just as important as identity and experience. Without narratives — stories we share with intent in a format — our identity narrative is just aspirational statements without proof. Without crafting narrative content, the service or digital experience we design is just a shell.
But here too, I’d like to leave you with a challenge. So often, storytelling is seen as purely a brand, comms or marketing exercise. There are many other opportunities for storytelling to transform the way your organisation creates value: by bringing clarity to the way you explain your services, your policies, and everything you offer.
I’ll cover that next post.
Get in touch
If you have a story that you would like a hand with telling, please don’t hesitate to get in touch.
