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Having stories these days is very important. The role of storytelling isn’t restricted to marketers alone but everyone across roles need it. From Product Managers while explaining their products to users to insurance agents demonstrating their policies; from trainers who need stories to explain a topic to start-up owners aiming to pitch their idea to Venture capitalists… Everyone needs stories. In this blog, let’s try to understand the role of Storytelling in Design Thinking.
Why do you need Storytelling in the Design Thinking journey?
Design Thinking will give great path-breaking ideas, but ideas can’t explain themselves. Every idea/solution will need the guidance of proper communication to create an impact for all the stakeholders. That proper communication is storytelling. It will develop a buy-in from the audience who will be your stakeholders. History is full of examples where ideas failed to trigger excitement from the audience because they were not told correctly.
We at School of Design Thinking, feel that every Design Thinking process shouldn’t end only at testing or prototyping the idea. It should also involve communication (storytelling) as a critical element. Else, the Design Thinking practitioners may come up with a great innovative idea but if that doesn’t resonate with the audience; their entire effort would literally go wasted. And that’s why in our indigenously developed ‘5-Step Process of Design Thinking ©’, we culminate the Design Thinking application in Storytelling.
Examples of Storytelling in Design Thinking
It is very important to understand the persona of the audience to whom Design Thinkers’ would be sharing their stories. Persona is an important Design Thinking tool that helps to capture the ‘personality’ of the audience. It captures the key insightful details of the user which focuses on their background, aspirations, goals and challenges faced by the respective persona along with some peculiarities.
A persona can be of a specific person as well as of a particular demography. In the case of the latter, the persona is called a ‘Cluster Persona’, meaning the persona of a cluster/group of people. Though there will be differences in minute elements of each person within that group/demography, yet at a group level, almost all of them will have the same characteristics.
Let’s focus on the few examples across sectors and let’s try to understand the persona in each example.
1) Pulse Polio Campaign by Amitabh Bachchan
India became a polio-free nation in 2014, but the ‘Pulse Polio Campaign’ started way back several years ago with Mr.Amitabh Bachchan, a well known Bollywood face, as the protagonist of the advertisement which was aired frequently across multiple media channels. The screenplay of the ad most of the time involved Bachchan making an emotional appeal to parents to bring their kids to the booth to administer the preventive polio drops. But during one year, there was a spike in cases which was unexpected since year on year, the cases dropped. This time, the screenplay changed. Bachchan was shown to be extremely angry and his anger was directed towards the parents (the customer of the product) and not towards the kids (the consumer of the product). It is important to note the difference between customer and consumer in storytelling, where you can make an emotional appeal to the customer (who will buy the product) by keeping a focus on the consumer (who will consume the product). As is the case with any household, where the elder (grandparent) scolds the parents for not doing a particular thing as expected, Bachchan (in his 70s) began to be seen as an elderly person (grandpa) who would get angry if his kids (parents of his grandchild) don’t take care of the grandchildren. The screenplay showed him scolding the audience for being lazy, careless and unbothered towards the well-being of toddlers.
Guess What!! The enrollment in the next polio drop administration day was huge with some of the parents of toddlers mentioning to the media about the impact of the ad. They said they didn’t want to anger Bachchan again and that’s why they were at the booths. You can go through the advertisement here – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QEqPQ6kmJUQ
2) The Samsonite Advertisement – Kerala is Open
Kerala faced the wrath of nature in 2015 during the floods where the State saw loss of lives and property of huge proportions. Kerala is one of the few states of India known for tourism. With its pristine beaches, sea-food variety, art(dance in particular) forms and importantly temples such as Sabarimala and Guruvayur that attract devotees, the tourism too got hampered thanks to the calamity.
And that’s where a reputed traveler bag brand Samsonite decided to promote Kerala tourism by actually educating the audience about Kerala. One of the greatest lessons for the marketer in this ad (Link to https://youtu.be/gpTMhLWUZCQ) is that Samsonite doesn’t promote the bag but celebrates Kerala. The persona in this advertisement was those audiences (India & abroad) who know Kerala only for beaches. But beaches are not the be all and end all…. Kerala has a lot to offer.
With the names of characters of multiple faiths, the ad tried to show the diversity of Kerala in terms of population. There is a small sub-story of each character (a dancer, a hawker who cooks tasty fish & a cab driver, a boat house owner) and all are nicely woven in the video with the theme of tourism, all eager to welcome the tourists. Each of the characters represented a facet of Kerala culture.
The advertisement garnered wide attention across the mainstream and social media. Beyond the promotion of the brand, Samsonite also garnered goodwill for helping the revival of tourism that bore the brunt of floods.
3) Cadbury’s – Blending Emotions with Chocolate
After an advertisement of a public campaign and FMCD brand, let us take a look at an FMCG household brand name – Cadbury. There are lots of sweet and confectionery makers in India which involve big MNCs as well as regional names too. Every State of India does have a local confectionery, indigenous to itself. But none of them were able to match the pan-India presence of Cadbury because the latter tied ‘eating sweets’ to ‘celebrations’. Typically in India, eating sweets is tied to celebrating something. That celebration can be an individual affair, a matter of a couple celebrating, a family or even a societal aspect.
Most of the Cadbury ads involve some sort of celebration (involving happiness as an emotion and an occasion to consume sweets). Cricket (synonymous to religion in India) and cricketers are worshipped in India. A batsman nearing his century means the entire household is glued together. His century means a sigh of relief and a moment to cherish. One of the iconic ads involves a young doting girl rushing to greet her cricketer boyfriend who scored a hundred. Cadbury’s most famous Stock Keeping Unit (SKU) is its assortment of various kinds of chocolates nicely packed in a box. The name of that SKU is ‘Cadbury Celebration Pack’.
Most of their advertisements are tied to a moment of celebration. Notably Diwali. Some of their Social Media promotion to make a mark to promote this SKU during Holi and other festival seasons.
For additional reading, we would request you to go through another detailed blog on Storytelling and how it helped to remove the vaccine hesitancy in India during the critical COVID-19 pandemic era.
In each of the examples, there was a targeted cluster persona. The Pulse Polio was targeted towards typical Indian parents who often get scolded by Indian elders whereas Samsonite focused on tourists who knew nothing about Kerala beyond the beach. Finally, the Cadbury Ad focused on the aspect of celebrating joy by consuming sweets, a trait commonly found in Indian households.
Each of the ads focused on something peculiar about the targeted persona and the screenplay connected the same with the product.
To summarize, having a beautiful idea/product is not enough, a great story is equally important to win the hearts of the audience. The key here is to understand the audience/consumers and customers of the product and accordingly work backward to stitch the story with the personas of the audience.