Challenge

So, a few months back, I had chosen to intern with a start-up that was just three months old  to understand the nitty-gritty of the initial phases of an organization set-up. We were given  the challenge to formulate a Business plan. The challenges they faced were Brand positioning,  market penetration, and customer segmentation of the target market. As the start-up was  targeting a very niche market, there wasn’t much data available on the same. So, we faced a  challenge wherein no other similar business was in-place to take as a reference. The outline  of the project was to get candidates specifically from PSU (Government-run organization) to  enroll for the mentorship program to pursue higher education

Selection

Due to a lack of data and a similar business model, we realized that Storytelling would be a  crucial tool in conveying our project effectively. We felt that we need to ignite and unite our  mentors to make our customers believe. We also felt that connecting with people and their  emotions, as conveyed in the Storytelling tool video, would enable us to understand them  better and our project as well.

Application

Since there was no data available with us, we decided to perform some research and generate  our data by interviewing some immediate stakeholders like current PSU employees and  mentors since mentors have traversed through the same path. We found many crucial  insights through this activity. We also got some hard facts based on which we started to build  some recommendations. By the time we came up with some suggestions, we had realized we  need to build suspense to develop their interest. Therefore, we started re-collecting the  “Ahaa” moments that we experienced while solving problems related to various aspects of  the B-plan discussed above. We began to design our presentation by making a concerted  effort to get our audience in the frame of mind, which we required them to be.

Through these insights and planned efforts, we were able to deliver a presentation that  connected with our mentors who had been through a similar path. Before addressing every  problem (Brand positioning, market penetration, and customer segmentation of the target  market), we built suspense before addressing that issue. Hence, our panelists were always  interested and on the edge of their seats. Due to this, we were able to deliver an effective  solution to our panelists and deliver it in a way that connected well with the mentors as well.  We eventually won a pre-placement offer from the start-up.

Insights

After the presentation, we saw that some other submissions had similar recommendations,  but the way we designed and conveyed our work, in the form of a story with spikes laid out  in between, was admired and valued by the panelists and mentors. Hence, we realized that  the effective communication of an idea plays a vital role in conveying an idea.

Approach

After completing the course, I realized that we could have used Mind-mapping in conjunction  with Storytelling, which could have aligned our thoughts in a better way, and we could have  come up with better insights through structured thinking.

