Design Thinking Reflection: Storytelling

Challenge    I am currently interning as a content and marketing strategist for a startup based in  Rotterdam in the Netherlands whose key product offering is a social bookmarking platform  that allows easy organization and discovery of knowledge online. The challenge I face  currently is to be able to create a uniform and unique brand messaging for the company  that not only does complete justice to the platform on offer but also allows for all the team  members to build a narrative they identify with and are inspired by.     A few weeks ago, we as a startup knew what the product did but we couldn’t zero in on the  one thing that makes our value proposition unique. As a result, we couldn’t come up with a  brand message that encompasses what the product could do for all possible users in our  target audience. As the person in charge of delivering a Go to Market plan by the end of  October, it was necessary for me to be able to build a brand message and narrative that  could guide the marketing strategy and plan in coordination with a team of 3 other people.    Selection    I felt quite stuck for a while since all 4 of us could never see eye to eye on any one narrative  that was generated basis product offerings. That is, we spent a few weeks trying to look at  the product offering and find ways in which we could sell the product as opposed to looking  at customer need. This led me to recognize the fundamental error we were making vis a vis  the Design Thinking principle of Customer Empathy and I decided to implement storytelling  as a tool that could help each one of us create a storyline that could place consumer need at  its heart and talk a listener through how our product helps fill that gap.    Thus, storytelling can be summarized as a tool that brings customer need to the center and  helps a listener relate to the story and follow along the journey. As Zach Rocha from Mars  Inc (Storytelling video Week 2) said, the aim of storytelling is to create a ‘good cause’. This  inspired me to use storytelling as a tool to arrive at a good cause collectively and use that  knowledge to build a brand image, messaging and values.     Application    As a team, we first decided to work individually and come up with most compelling stories  or use cases of people who faced issues while gathering knowledge on the web. Each of us  decided upon what the most challenging portions about surfing the web effectively for  knowledge building purposes were. Once the biggest challenge was identified by the  individual in their opinion, they were asked to craft a use case or story of who this person  could be. For example, some of our teammates saw that perhaps a student or researcher  might often get lost in the bulk of resources available online and would require tools to  streamline their findings. In such a way, each one of us came up with our stories and then  decided to discuss them as a team exercise.

We were then able to see similarities and differences in how each one of us perceived the  product and decided to create personas that helped us as a team come to a common  conclusion of who are the target customers we are looking at, what they need and how our  product services that gap. The implementation of the tool was effective as each member  felt autonomy while creating the first narrative allowing them to be creative, free of  judgement and then were finally able to collaborate with the rest of team to come to  concrete conclusions.      Insight    The key insight that I derived from this design thinking tool implementation was that  storytelling indeed helped me get everyone on the team get involved and pay attention to  the problem at hand as opposed to only being dismissive of others’ pitches. Secondly, I was  able to see that it helped us as a team translate our product strategy into a simple, relatable  story that all of us were able to see potential in. This in fact helped all of us to move away  from the status quo we had been experiencing when it came to finalizing on a value  proposition. Additionally, it helped me appreciate how thinking in a customer focused and  empathetic manner can indeed help companies build and market products more effectively.     Approach    Going forward, when we are in situations that feel like a deadlock because team members  can’t agree upon something, I would like to continue using this tool of storytelling to arrive  at a ‘higher ground’ as opposed to a compromised ‘common ground’ in the true spirit of  design thinking. Furthermore, I do see merit in supplementing this tool with mind mapping  and visualization techniques that can help the team clearly picture customer requirements  and make conversion of data into patterns and insights in a shorter turn-around time along  with making it a process that’s fun and not energy-sapping.

