Bromford Lab logo on a white background advertising the date and time of #blabchat twitter chat.
Humans have been telling stories for millennia. Long before stories were first written down, people passed down oral narratives from generation to generation or used art to communicate visually. Rock art is one of the oldest material forms of human storytelling in the world and dates back over 30,000 years, but it wasn’t until relatively recently in 700 B.C, that what is believed to be the first written story, the epic of Gilgamesh, was created and began to spread from Mesopotamia to other parts of Europe and Asia. Even more recently we have exploited new forms of storytelling media such as film, video, photography and digital in ways which enable us to not only document what is currently happening and what has previously happened but also speculate on what could happen in the future.
Historically, storytelling has been largely used for the purpose of entertainment, education, cultural preservation or instilling moral values. However, in the 1950s, Madison Avenue advertising agencies started to see the power of leveraging the emotional effects of storytelling to propel consumerism by selling people the opportunity to buy-in to a dream. Advertising executives such as William Bernbach realised you don't always need a big narrative to tell a story -The famous Volkswagon ‘Think Small’ and ‘Lemon’ campaigns used a punchy slogan, basic imagery and some simple narrative to great effect. This form of advertising has proved so successful in the intervening decades it is still in use today and has transcended into other areas, such as politics. The slogan used by the BREXIT leave campaign, ‘take back control’ or that used by Donald Trump in his U.S Presidential campaign, ‘Make America great again’, used an implied narrative to communicate a story of what might be, and regardless of our own individual political viewpoints, it’s hard to deny that as a method of evoking an emotional response, they were successful campaigns. In contrast, the Clinton campaign used over 80 slogans, which might well have made the campaign story somewhat less compelling to voters?
Today, many organisations are beginning to understand the power of storytelling, with most publishing mission statements to convey their purpose and offer a story which both colleagues and customers can buy-in to. The rise in popularity of human-centred design and design-thinking has also raised storytelling higher up the corporate agenda. In the social sector, organisations such as Shujaazinc (formally Well Told Story) have successfully used storytelling as part of an innovative 360-degree cyclical engagement model with citizens - combing ethnography with storytelling, co-design and service prototyping to radically improve outcomes for young people in Africa.
We’ve been thinking a lot about storytelling recently, so we thought that it would be the perfect topic for our next Bromford Lab Twitter chat. We would very much like you to join us on Wednesday 7th October when we will be exploring how organisations might use storytelling to improve outcomes for both their customers and business:
Question 1 - What place should storytelling have within our organisations. Bromford Lab Twitter Chat Logo on a white background stating question one of the twitter chat #blabchat
Question 1 - What role should data play in storytelling? Bromford Lab Twitter Chat Logo on a white background stating question two of the twitter chat #blabchat
Question 3 - Who should be responsible for storytelling within our organisation? Bromford Lab Twitter Chat Logo on a white background stating question three of the twitter chat #blabchat
Question 4 - What are the best examples of organisations leveraging the power of storytelling to improve outcomes?. Bromford Lab Twitter Chat Logo on a white background stating question four of the twitter chat #blabchat
Join us for some thought-provoking lunch-time chat on Wednesday 7th October from 12 - 1 pm. Looking forward to chatting with you all!
Please remember to label your answers A1, A2, A3, etc and most importantly, don't forget to use #blabchat when you respond, even if it’s replying to someone else's tweet.
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