OH WHAT A FEELING!

There’s something not quite right with messaging.

[Don’t get your hackles up, please.  We’re not maligning words or choices or their arrangements.]

In every map, every grid, every page in which we capture the essence of a business, it falls flat.  Sure, we can add emotional words, even exclamation marks (though save us from too many).  Yet the story is somehow lacking.  Words alone aren’t working … at least, for us.

Of late, we’ve been applying an idea from the design world.  Which is, the creation of mood boards, once assembled from a bunch of oversized, colorful magazines, even photography books.  With a glue stick, scissors and a generous foam core board, a collage develops that reflects themes and a vague essence of feeling.  Interior designers, artists, creative directors, fashion folks use these liberally; in fact, they guard the completed boards with their lives, keeping them ultra-confidential until the project has been revealed. 

So what stops us – communicators and branding experts – from starting our stories this way?  It connects the heart and the brain.  It helps coordinate a corporate tale.  And it quickly lets others know exactly where we’re going.  Yup, a series of pictures (yes, with words) relates the beginning and middle and ongoing events that make up a business’ life.

No Moody blues, here. 

THE ELEMENT OF SURPRISE

              Raised eyebrows.

              The Trojan Horse.

              A wrinkled forehead.

              Japan attacks Pearl Harbor.

Today, our lives are spattered with surprise – whether we express it verbally, facially, through startled or synchronized actions.  Nothing says that better than dialing into the news or following a particular account through all its iterations.  [Think of the latest Netflix phenomenon, the Making a Murderer.]

On the other hand, our work lives, for many reasons, are fairly immune from surprises.  We’re informed about company happenings, exchange information with colleagues, and labor pretty hard to get our jobs done well.

Or are we protected?  In days of mergers and acquisitions, of stock markets reacting to every little up or downtick, and of corporate cost consciousness infiltrating many activities, surprise has got to be a staple of our lives – and managing it, commonplace. 

How to do that?  Obviously, reinforcing good words on how to deal with change is a given.  Many learning and development gurus usually recommend a basic course or book or module.  Or exploring on your own and with a team.

There’s also another path – one that can be embedded weekly.  Which is the telling of stories with a surprise element.   It can be communicated in a series of narratives or ongoing conversations.  Or simply a look at the business’ history to demonstrate how surprise is usually not, really truly, an out-of-the-blue startle.

Shock, after all, is not a strategy.

PRESIDENTIAL PARALLELS, THREE (AND FINAL)

“It’s too much hype and hyperbole.”

“Employees don’t want to be marketed to.”

“We get a lot of pushback if we don’t stick to the facts and make our media as objective as possible.”

Those are the responses we hear when broaching the idea of an internal campaign – to drive behaviors, get buy-in, encourage adoption of new technology, and, in general, asking employees to know and feel and act differently.

Serious objections, we admit.  On our side, these rejoinders arise:

• How to gain attention and capture hearts and minds when today’s society is afflicted with ADHD?
• What are results to date using straightforward no-nonsense media?
• How many employees respond to emotional stories versus statistics and studies?

The issue, we believe, isn’t so much with the idea of campaigns as it is with the recent quality of American political crusades.  Mud-slinging.  Slight un-truths or un-remembering.  Slogans with little reality and less soul.  In short, glitz without substance.

There’s a place and time for campaigns inside.  There’s also care to be taken in creating and delivering the exact right messaging, based on the appropriate business case with the perfect (okay, almost perfect) blend of tools.  Scientists respond to stories just as much as facts.  And vice versa for marketeers and HR pros.  Bottom line, it’s all about actions. 

Our thanks to Ross Perot, former Presidential candidate:  “The activist is not the man who says the river is dirty.  The activist is the man who cleans up the river.”

MINDING OUR STORIES

With stories now becoming the center of what we do, everyone has an opinion about best ways, best techniques, best values.

Visual storytellers insist on incorporating principles like authenticity, relevancy, sensory and archetype.

Community organizers, long-time astute power users of tales, propose three interlocking circles:  the story of self, the story of now, and the story of us.

And (not to be forgotten) corporate types espouse messaging and expression as part of a strategy that considers goal and audience front and center.

To be honest, everyone’s right.  And wrong.

A brain researcher (Princeton neuroscientist Uri Hasson, to be precise) is showing us new ways to think about creating compelling narratives. 

Which is:  It’s all about how our brains react and respond to stories. 

In a series of incredibly complicated analyses and tests, he and his team reveal that different people respond in remarkably similar ways to great stories, no matter what the media.  Using MRIs and other medical technologies, the scientists prove that the best of storytellers have gotten into our minds and altered them in some predictable ways.  Even better:  That the storyteller somehow makes the listener’s/viewer’s brain match his/her own.

You heard it here first:  We predict soon we’ll be taking our ads, messaging, and digital promos to the docs for brain imagery … not just copy-testing.