Stories

How do you articulate complex ideas in a simple way that’s guaranteed to win the hearts and minds of any audience?

Often the organisations we work with are struggling to define their positioning or articulate compelling content to captivate key audiences. We help them improve their strategic messaging and shape stories about some of the most critical topics facing the public and private sector today, like sustainability, equity and the future of technology.

We do what copywriters can’t: we bring together a genuine knowledge of content and communication with a deep understanding of the human and organisational dynamics required to make messages land – and stick.

We create simple yet impactful strategic storylines in which all stakeholders recognise themselves – allowing everyone to identify with even the boldest of stories.

How is our work in stories differentiated?

We start with the human dimension.

For stories to be effective, we believe it’s as important to focus on people as on content. Who is telling the story matters, as does who they are telling it to. We conduct deep research into our storytellers and their audiences and use these insights to create memorable and impactful stories.

We create custom methodologies.

We have a highly successful theory and framework for storytelling that has been used by thousands of our clients, with consistently positive feedback. The beauty of our framework is that it invites full engagement and participation from the user to create completely customised stories. We continue to bring fresh insights to our storytelling work by mining the fields of literature, psychology, history and the arts, and by infusing new technology into our storytelling tools.

We ground our solutions in reality.

We always get into the details of the stories we craft with our clients, whether that means conducting our own primary or secondary research or working with our clients’ data. Stories need to be real to be relevant and they can only be real if the content is right. Our clients appreciate our ability to immerse ourselves in their content and to collaborate to create winning stories together.

Read a case study on our work in stories

How do you reposition a core product that was once key to people’s lives but is suddenly at risk of irrelevance?

One of our most interesting storytelling challenges came about when the division CEO of a cosmetics company asked us to help them re-enchant consumers with their core product. The company’s sales had been declining, especially with women in their key markets. They had tried to understand what was going wrong but all of the traditional, marketing-based methods had failed to shed light on the problem.

We stepped back from the challenge and instead asked the question: what is going on with women today that might mean the old stories and positioning of this product are no longer resonating? Through this broad lens, we discovered some very unique insights about why women were turning away from the product and how they might change their minds. Using our new narrative, the company was able to reclaim its position as an industry leader, including in thought and creativity, and to boost its sales significantly.

Results we achieved:

Created a compelling story for the core product that the company’s sales, marketing and creative teams rallied behind globally

Provided a boost of differentiation that helped the company sweep their industry awards that year

Propelled sales growth of 4% in a tough market, outpacing the competition

What were some of the unique contributions we made that led to success?

We started with the human dimension.

Rather than considering the product, we looked at the audience: women. And we didn’t just consider women in relation to the product. We took a wide-ranging look at women’s lives, their needs and their interests. This helped us get to the heart of why women were falling out of love with the company’s core product – and how they might be convinced to see its relevance once again.

We created custom methodologies.

Using methods from anthropology and psychology, we created intimate workshops where women were glad to open up and talk about themselves in a very genuine way. We took the rich insights from these workshops and created fresh stories to engage core groups within the cosmetics company, including Sales, Marketing and the creative teams. We worked with each of these teams to incorporate their knowledge and wisdom into the narratives, and to ensure they felt ownership over the new story that was emerging.

We grounded our solutions in reality.

While at first we cast our net wide to understand the lives and motivations of women, we then brought our focus back to the challenge at hand: re-enchanting women with the company’s core product. We reflected on everything we’d learned about the lives of women, the product, and the company’s inner workings. We infused these insights into the narrative we created to reposition the company’s core product as something that could be as mutable and vibrant as the lives of modern women are.

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