I have a personal interest in storytelling, and this year, I would like to share that interest with you.
With ‘storytelling as a form of nudging’ I mean that I tell you a story about how the protagonist, display or adopted a desired behavior, and how she has experienced that. For example, I may tell you how she has started eating fruits instead of candy bars as snacks, how she liked it and how her health has benefitted. The idea is that you relate to the protagonist and her cause, copy her and start displaying the same behavior. This definition of storytelling may be considered a form of ‘messaging’.
Storytelling is the fundament of several tried and proven marketing approaches, e.g., product reviews, testimonials, YouTube videos, or the works of influencers. I extend the approach by introducing ‘real’ storytelling principle of the nature of “once upon a time in a country not far from here …”; Joseph Campbell’s ‘The Hero’s Journey’. I can share examples of how I use stories instead of traditional job descriptions to support HR and recruitment, of futuristic scenarios to inform a company’s innovation roadmap, or to convince consumers to adopt a product that nobody wants. I invite you to work with me take ‘storytelling as a form of nudging’ to a next level, by studying how stories work, and use that insight to actually writing them and test if they work to persuade people to display the “desired behavior’.