Significant Stories

Have you ever been to SignificantObjects.com? This isn’t an ad to help drive their clicks. You’ll notice right away their site is not sleek. It’s not guerilla marketing, and they are not trying to sell you anything (well, not since 2009).

They’re actually more like a case study. In their own words they’re: “A literary and anthropological experiment.” What’s the opposite of buzz words?

The concept is quite simple. They collect found objects; knickknacks from yard sales or home craft items, all of them second-hand, none of them costing more than $3, and most of them plainly hideous and clearly useless. Then, they ask a writer to give it a back story before posting it on eBay, and those suckers sell.

In the language of business, we’re talking MASSIVE returns. 300%, 400%, even 10,000%. Think of the margins! Don’t worry, it’s all for charity.

One particularly hideous armless plastic doll bought for $0.25 sold for $25, even though in the words of the writer who gave it its custom-written backstory, it had lips like “rotting guavas mashed by the fist of an angry Mexican servant”

In the hands of the right storyteller, the ugly can become sublime and the worthless can project immense value once it has been imbued with the magic of story and meaning.

There is a constant bombardment of factums and data points for those of us in the marketing, sales, and product management space. We parse through case studies trying to find meaning in numbers, we scour the marketplace for every edge in clicks, engagements, conversions, and immersions, sometimes forgetting that behind every click, engagement, conversion, and immersion is a living, breathing person who is hungering for a story and a meaningful connection.

“Humans are not ideally set up to understand logic; they are ideally set up to understand stories.”

-Roger C. Schank, cognitive scientist

If you, like me, are prone to the occasional philosophical mood, you might take a moment some day to consider those things that feel true to you, and why that may be. Stephen Colbert brilliantly took this idea to its logical conclusion when he explored the devastating consequences of “truthiness” in our national discourse. But this is not a new bug in our code, some kind of unforeseen consequence of the digital age; this is a feature of humanity. We are, by our very nature, inclined to look up at the stars and see gods and beasts; to find stories and divine meaning from tea leaves and tarot cards. Similarly, when we collect our favorite data points about our service or our business, and put them together on a few slides, most of us think we think we are painting a picture, as clearly as we see it mapped out in our own mind’s eye.

Often, when a data point really resonates with us, it’s either because it exemplifies something we already thought was true (validation provides some of the very best fuzzy-wuzzies), or it connects two things we already had thoughts about in some interesting and novel way. It just rings true! We might share that data point, thinking we are sharing that feeling, just like you’d create a mix tape for that crush in middle school, with each song so carefully laid out one after the other in a symphony of feeling! And perhaps, at first, that’s exactly what we are doing—at least within our own industry. We’ll test out this message and receive positive feedback from like-minded individuals and professionals who share our passions, perspectives, and goals. However, once you pivot that message out, you may find that the constellation of information and data you so carefully built just isn’t resonating. That message which rang so undeniably true to you might get altogether lost, leaving you bobbing your head to a beat only you can hear while you’re reading off lyrics that barely make any sense at all. Disconnected from story, data is worthless. You might as well throw it straight into the bin.

People are hungry for stories. It’s part of our very being. Storytelling is a form of history, of immortality too. It goes from one generation to another.”

–Studs Terkel

I think many of us know this on some level. It feels true to almost all of us. Part of why must surely be because storytelling is so baked in to what it means to be human. And yet, we ignore this truism constantly. We run up against this wall time and again. We argue with that uncle every Thanksgiving, when we’d be better served telling him an anecdote of lived experience. We send angry e-mails to customer service starting with our expectations rather than our experience. We ask the people we love “Have you tried this?” when we should just say, “I’m still listening.”

And we do the same thing in business. We assault the eyes with numbers. We bullet point our way through meetings as though the next slide might have just the right percentage-based promise or datapoint that will wow the customer and end the meeting with that handshake deal. That’s not how lifeworks, and in our experience, it’s not really how business works, either.

“Facts don’t persuade, feelings do. And stories are the best way to get at those feelings.”

–Tom Asacker

Now, are we saying fill your slides with fluff? Of course not. Are we saying style supersedes content? Get outta here! However...what we are saying is that style, beauty, and emotional appeals are all too often playing second fiddle (if they’re given a fiddle at all!) in how companies present themselves. Messaging doesn’t trump content, but surely it should at least have equal weight!

So, if you find yourself stuck in the weeds, unable to reach your audience because you can’t quite get your message to resonate, chances are good that if you were to pivot your message away from data and towards inspiration, stories, and maybe a few eye-popping visuals (courtesy your friends at GhostRanch) it will surely pay dividends. We guarantee it.

“In order to win a man to your cause, you must first reach his heart, the great high road to his reason.”

–Abraham Lincoln