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| Mental Protein:Can you tell a good story? |
| Written by Dr Kamal jit Singh | |||
| Monday, 13 April 2009 00:00 | |||
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Entrepreneur, Kedah. Let’s be brutally crude about it — the objective of business always has been (and always will be) to transfer money from the customer’s pocket into yours. You are not allowed to put your hand into the customer’s pocket, for this is tantamount to theft. You have to make the customer willingly put his own hand into his pocket, take his money out, and hand it over to you. The customer has to perceive that he has got the upper-hand in the deal, for a win-win situation means that he should have (and could have) pushed you further. His emotional satisfaction is paramount, so you have to make him feel good with the transaction. This, in effect, is the business model invented around 15,000 years ago when man first learnt to trade. You are not allowed to shortchange the customer, as this is nothing short of a different type of theft. The long arms of the market will probably catch you before the slightly shorter arms of the law do. Regardless of the product or service you are hawking, these fundamentals are prescribed in stone. You say that the commercial environment has changed. Has it really, or have you assumed that it has, just because certain factors that were previously hidden have now bubbled to the surface? Conventional wisdom does states that markets frequently change but conventional wisdom is what leads (or misleads) you to mediocre performance and results. If you want to get to the truth of the matter, you have to learn to ignore conventional wisdom and seek out the less travelled path. Let’s start with one of the most important skills that you need to build. Conventional wisdom calls this marketing but in reality, it should be storytelling. Unless you can create a powerful and engaging story around your product or service, why should a prospective customer give you a second glance? While marketing is centred on communicating the features and benefits to the customer, storytelling is about soliciting an emotional response from the customer that makes him reach out to you. You could say that it is almost the reverse of marketing as it inspires the customer — the customer becomes your salesman and marketer, feeling satisfied only when he has purchased your product or service. A well-told story sets people on fire. Conventional marketing certainly does not achieve this. Hasn’t Apple managed to ignite the passion in the masses? Its customers are its biggest marketers and function as product evangelists. This is because Apple knows how to create a strong emotional bond with the customer, using storytelling as the basis. Apple’s Steve Jobs knows that if he sells his products the same way as other companies do, he will get the kind of results that they get. Apple can be accused of being many things, but being mediocre is not one of them. Neither is conformance to popular belief. It can be difficult for knowledge workers, who are predominantly left-brainers, to understand the concept of storytelling. This artform, once popular decades ago, has been abandoned by our education system that focuses on technical skills from an early age onwards. Storytelling is viewed as a playful waste of time, suitable at the kindergarten level but no further. This is a reasoning flaw, for storytelling is what differentiates good marketers from the second-rate ones. The West has already woken up to this realisation — corporate executives are enrolling in storytelling programmes for the business world. A paper published in the June 2003 Harvard Business Review goes so far as to urge the business community to forget PowerPoint or statistics and to use storytelling as the means of persuasion. Not just for marketing but to learn the elusive skill of leadership too. Every great corporate leader (and political leader) is an accomplished storyteller. Just look at the likes of Jack Welch, Andy Grove and Bill Gates and you can see how they have relied on the persuasive power of storytelling to rally both their staff and customers. Cast your mind back to your own childhood days, when you were quite at home listening to stories like Jack and the Beanstalk, Puss in Boots and Goldilocks. Who did you support — Jack or the giant? In spite of the fact that Jack was nothing more than a thief who took the giant’s belongings on no less than three occasions, you supported Jack and were thrilled to watch or read of the giant’s fall from the beanstalk. Why? Wasn’t it because the story was very engaging, in favour of Jack? Because of a good storyline, you sided with the thief instead of the victim. Similarly, in Puss in Boots, the hero of the story was a conman who deliberately misled the king into believing that he was a very rich man and ended up marrying the princess on this pretext. Yet, to you and everyone else, he was the hero who deserved to live happily ever after with his ill-gotten gains. Goldilocks, on the other hand, broke into the bears’ house, destroyed their furniture and ate their food. In real life, she should have been jailed for breaking and entering but due to the storyline, you clapped when the three bears could not catch her. While we are no longer children and (hopefully) have wisened up, the power of storytelling continues to wield its influence over us in the business and political worlds. Whether the commercial landscape has changed or otherwise is debatable. What is not, is how you connect to your customers. As commoditisation sets in, what will differentiate you from your lower-cost competitors is the sophistication of your bond with your market. Left-brain skills are more easily learnt than right-brain skills, so you have to decrease your reliance on competitive factors that can be easily duplicated or re-engineered. Focus on what your competitors will have difficulty emulating. So, if you want to learn a new skill, relearn an old one that has been long forgotten. Datuk Dr Kamal Jit Singh is executive director of Global Innovation Resource Centre, a think tank set up to spearhead innovation in industry, government and academia. Prior to that, he led a team of 50 researchers when he was the CEO of British Telecom Multimedia Malaysia. Email your questions to This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it This article appeared in NetValeu2.0, the technology pullout of The Edge Malaysia, Issue 750, April 13-19, 2009.
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