Challenge:

I have worked many jobs in various fields.  From website development and grant writing to working in  bakeries, at summer camps and even maintenance at art museums, I have found that one tool that will  always help push work to the next level is the storytelling tool.  Naturally, the business of writing would  lend itself into storytelling.  However, writing for businesses is different than writing for personal  expression or artistic endeavor.  When developing text for a new company, the writer acts more as the  interpreter, taking the mission, values, and goals of the startup and creating a relatable, engaging  context that can be easily understood by the target audience.  Basically, the job is constructing an  identity from raw material and translating that data into a friendly, approachable image that will engage  the audience and direct them to the organization.  For this assignment, I will explain how this process  was done for a dermatologist located in Columbus Circle, New York.  She shared her practice with her  father, but was seeking to distinguish herself by focusing on the cosmetic side of the practice for a more  upscale clientele.

Selection:

When creating an online identity for marketing and business purposes, each step covered in the class is  necessary to optimize your work and create customer satisfaction.  In fact, when applying the  storytelling process in relation to generating text, one of the first steps is often mind-mapping in order  to get a “top-down” contextual idea of what material or data needs to be integrated into the story.   Storytelling is necessary for all industries that provide products or services to customers, since  customers need to be persuaded.  In today’s market, competition is fierce and it is easy to be lost in the  crowd.  Businesses need to operate as distinct individuals, able to stand out among the sea of choices.   Since we live in a web-based society where more of our purchases and interactions occur on the  Internet, websites are the primary source of establishing this identity for small businesses.  Audiences  connect to story.  What a story does is validate the shared values and beliefs of the audience, creating a  mutual passion for a specific cause.  Often, businesses cater to the values of community and  compassion, linking their company to environmental endeavors or family-oriented beliefs and practices.   A good story, told in text, logo, color, and design, will strike an emotional chord with the audience and  they will be more responsive to how you made them feel as opposed to what you sold them.

Application:

In order to create the identity and essentially shape the story of the doctor, the first step is an informal  interview in her office.  As the interpreter, meeting in the environment of the client is extremely  important.  People express themselves in their surroundings, often unconsciously.  What they find  pleasing or comforting tells an observer much about their cultural upbringing, beliefs, and nature.  Since  this office was her established professional site, it was the main physical environment in which I could  gauge what message or tone that she was setting with her clientele already.  From there, I could ask her  what she wanted to modify about it.

Another important step in storytelling is the act of listening.  During interviews of this nature, questions  need to be open-ended, so that the interviewee can fill in the gaps based on what information they feel

is relevant.  Most people have something to say, even when it doesn’t appear to be directly related to  the subject at hand.  In this case, the doctor already had a website in mind that she wanted hers to be  modeled after.  It was a simple, elegant website that looked like it was designed for a spa rather than a  doctor’s office.  It was a nice, professional, informative website.  However, it was bland and generic.  It  did not stand out and would have made the doctor’s website look like one of the thousands of salons in  midtown Manhattan.  In order to get the real story from her, I had to dig deeper in the questioning.  I  had to get the doctor to tell me the why behind her decision to create a website, when her practice was  already advertised on the main office website.  This opened a floodgate in which she relayed her own  struggle for a sense of identity as the younger sister working at the family practice.  Her older sister was  an optometrist and had her own practice.  The doctor felt that she was always belittled for supposedly  “riding the coattails of her father” as she put it.

Insight:

As she was talking, my mind was making connections that she herself couldn’t see.

-  Wants to establish her own identity to stand out but also wants it to look like everyone else.

-  Skin care and cosmetic enhancements are used to stand out and allow the world to see you as  your true, pure self.

Her story was there and could be placed within the context of her business.  Her message, to stand out  and distinguish herself, allowing the world to see her, was engaging, relatable, and powerful.  I  incorporated all of this data into a condensed, sketched out identity, aesthetically based on what her  office looked like and textually based on the story of identity and being noticed.

For this project, I only worked on the writing side.  However, I told the programmer to add an online  forum for users to interact with each other, so that the doctor’s clientele could share their own  experiences of identity.  This feature would also allow for the learning launch process, designating a  space for users to offer feedback on the site, the doctor, their overall experience, and their critiques.

Approach:

Even though the project I was working on did encounter mind-mapping and learning launch, the process  of storytelling was the most important part in getting to the best end-product that could be created for  this particular doctor.  When my job on assignments like this generally does not conclude with follow- ups unless edits need to be made, I usually check in to make sure the customer is happy with the results.   In this instance, the doctor actually emailed me after the assignment was over to thank me for not giving  her what she wanted.  Seeing how connected her own story was to her business, and how that naturally  relates to the rest of her clientele had been exactly what she wanted, but could not articulate.

