At Channel Marketing Creative we love Stories that sell. Here are some tips on how to get your message across using story frameworks.
The Dragon & the City
Explain your project as if it’s an epic adventure. Get people excited about your plan of action.
You need to get people excited about your work. Turn your project goals into an epic story about a City (the status quo, safe but limited) and a Dragon (threatening but full of potential).
1. What is your City?
- What is good and valuable in the status quo?
- What is wrong, unfair or wasteful?
- Who’s in charge: Who do you need to persuade to act?
2. What is your Dragon?
- Where is the threat coming from?
- How has it been allowed to get this bad?
- Is there an opportunity here: (Dragons hoard gold!)
3. Escape
- Where would you go?
- What should you take with you?
- What’s the cost of abandoning the city?
4. Defend
- What is worth defending in the old city?
- How can you strengthen your walls?
- Walls protect, but they also restrict. What’s the cost of staying put?
- There’s a dragon outside the city walls.
- Your world is no longer safe. What should you do?
- Escape: find a safer place to live.
5. Attack
- What’s your best line of attack?
- What are your chances of winning?
- What’s the reward and is it worth the risk?
Defend: strengthen the city walls.
Attack: take on the dragon before he gets stronger.
Each option has risks and rewards. Just like your project.
Three Great Conflicts
Show how your work helps people with life’s great battles. Conflict drives your story forward, because we want to know how it resolves. In a perfect world, life would be a dream. You would do the right thing, other people would be nice and life would be fair. Then there’s the nightmare: flawed individuals, fighting each other, surrounded by natural disasters and bad luck. Reality is somewhere in the middle, and we get there by resolving lots of conflicts.
Hollywood loves a good fight. Most movies centre on one of three Great Conflicts:
- Hero Against Nature: fighting monsters, animals, disease, weather, accidents and Acts of God. For example; Jaws (1975).
- Hero Against Society: fighting other people over resources, goals or values. For example; Black Panther (2018).
- Hero Against Self: we are our own worst enemy, struggling to do what we know is right. For example; Trainspotting (1996).
Self – I will be perfect.
Society – Others will be nice.
Nature – Life will be fair.
Conflict – I am proud, lazy, selfish and flawed.
People are hostile, competitive and unkind.
Life is cruel, random and heartless.
- What would the Dream version of your project look like?
- What’s the Nightmare version?
- Where are the points of conflict between Dream and Nightmare?
- Which is the greatest conflict that you – or your user – must fight?
This should be at the heart of your story. - How could this conflict resolve?
Tip: shape the ups and downs of your conflict with A No Easy way.
Order & Chaos
Show how your project can impose order on a chaotic mess—or disrupt a system that’s too rigid.
Every story contains three elements: The Known, The Unknown and The Hero.
The Known world is orderly, safe but restricted.
The Unknown world is chaotic, risky but full of potential. The Hero (that’s you!) must explore both worlds and find the right balance between chaos and order.
Order & Chaos
1. Order: describe the Known world: e.g.; the client you’re working with, their existing products and users.
- What’s positive about this world? (utility, predictability, safety)
- What is negative? (boring, incomplete, imperfect)
2. Chaos: describe the Unknown world; e.g.; competitors, changing technologies, changing user behaviours, Acts of God.
- What is negative about chaos: (threats and unpredictability)
- What is positive? (potential for renewal and opportunity)
3. How does Chaos disrupt Order?
- How does the Unknown world create sudden change in the Known world? (for example; a natural disaster)
- What new info becomes available? (anomalies, new patterns)
4. You are the Hero. How do you respond?
- Are you helping your client impose order onto a situation that is too chaotic and threatening?
- Are you injecting some much needed new life into a situation that is too stale and rigid?
Turn this insight into a conversational story
Secrets & Puzzles
Make your story stick in our minds: promise a secret waiting to be revealed or a puzzle waiting to be solved. We are social creatures, always wondering what other people are thinking and doing. And we are curious creatures, always wondering why things work. Put these elements together and you have powerful attention hooks that can keep your audience with you until the end of your story.