If your strategy includes a new service, product or platform, one of the best ways to get started is not to tell a story! Instead, it’s with a well-designed experience that adds value to your customers, engages your employees, and then benefits the bottom line. It’s essential to focus on making a profit last in the design process, so you stay focused on what customers want and genuinely want to adopt.
Once you’ve designed the customer experience in a way your employees want to deliver, you can tell their story. Some of the most successful business stories in the world are about what will happen to you as a customer when you deliver a specific brand. Remember the social media stories shared online and Disney Theme Parks advertisements. Remember the last Coca-Cola® ad you saw with sweat running down the bottle and a person tilting the bottom of the bottle and sharing a renewed smile. These types of stories are imaginative, preferable, and make promises using a brand that the company must maintain. It’s essential to include more details and that those details show up in the experience when customers nominate them.
We know this idea works! After all, about half of Storyminer’s businesses use a narrative for innovation and development of new concepts: think about stores, services, platforms and franchises.
Mike’s tip – concept with your forward-looking imagination, then work from there.
FUTURE HISTORY
Here’s the cool part: When you tell a story about the future, before you spend money on contracts, building, or software development, you can keep your development costs as low as possible and your schedule as short as possible. You also reduce your risks.
It turns out that storytelling is the fastest, most efficient, and most cost-effective prototyping tool in anyone’s business toolkit.
Using just your mouth and adding a few images, you can quickly develop version after version of viable futures. Then, using standard agile, software development, and project management tools, you can fine-tune your project until it’s ready for prime time.
Case Studies: For an optical glass manufacturer, the Storyminer team prototyped its Future Store concept entirely on paper. In just a few months, customers can walk through a full-size store prototype and make critical design and scale decisions. This physical story took place before financing expensive leases, construction, or development. The entire project started with stories from a client and an optician. The subsequent sharing of that story and the interactions between them put everyone on the same page.
This article is part of the Luminary Learning Solutions Guru Guide. You can read the complete guide here.
