Challenge:    Many years ago, I was part of the New Business Development team at a large multi-nation  corporation that made cameras. While a proud camera brand, the company had seen better  days and I was part of a team that was tasked with providing potential ideas to invest in that  could change things around.    Selection:  I along with a few collogues spent 3 months deep diving trying to understand the company, the  market, and the customer and we put together a case. The day was appointed when we would  pitch to the executive team and the approach we all landed on was a power point presentation  (can’t escape that) but inspired by the tool of “Story telling”.  Why did we land on this  approach? Because it wasn’t about the numbers. It never is. We realized that if we’ve been  given an opportunity to present, it must be done right and deliver the appropriate emotion.  Otherwise you might as well just e-mail a report over to the CEO.     Application:    We structured the story appropriately with a lot of video content -> Interviews and concept  description. We started with the “What is” state of affairs of the company backed with data  that showed the decline.  We had interview with a top sales person who delivered the message  that the products weren’t innovative/didn’t deliver what the customers wanted. So everything  was pretty dreary at this point. Then we showed how the market had developed and focused  on a few of our competitors, smaller guys who seemed to have increased market share. It was  important to focus on these little fellows because they were similar to us as also rans but they  seem to be doing something of late that’s giving them a boost. Then we double clicked on  what’s been working for these companies. The seeds of what we would present as the solution  was laid here. We then jumped into understanding the customer. We ran a 3 min video on the  persona, what his use cases were (detailed workflow) and what he valued. This also contained  information on how the changing market influenced this buyers buying decisions. This then set  the scene for our Product proposal. This was delivered as another 3 min video of the concept  (finished end product and how it fit in beautifully in the life of the protagonist).     Insight:    It went down much better than a 50 page deck. All the supporting research was obviously part  of the deck. And what it did was kept the audience engaged and built a common understanding  of the proposed solution. That they decided not to go down the path was a different matter.     Approach:    Would I do things differently another time. I really don’t think so. I just hope I will have the  resources, like I did this time, to work with a creative to build the visual (video) assets to tell the  story.

