From story-making to communicating insights

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From story-making to communicating insights
Posted on November 1, 2012 by Iosetta Santini

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Market research industry commentators are increasingly throwing around buzzwords like  “story-teller” and  “storymaker” in association with brand. In a post-advertising world where engagement with consumers comes more from brand authenticity and personification, than from didactic brand messages, story telling is the new mantra. A recent blog by Added Value outlined how various brands, like Coca-Cola & Revlon, are adopting the “story-telling” approach. Brand story-telling even made headlines in the Entrepreneur in an article published this past April, calling it a booming business.

While story-telling is often contextualized hand-in-hand with branding, Mustard’s very own Lucy Davison has a similar argument for a different kind of story-telling that can, and should, be used in market research: communicating insights.

Much of market research discourse is getting the ball rolling by identifying story-telling as essential for brands, but few are taking it one step further to realize its enactment, to connect the dots, to move from conceptualization point A, to execution point B.   So, what is the action point to bring story-telling into communicating insights? Davison writes, “The ‘story’ is not the output or result of a research project.  It is the communication of the output and as such should be treated as a distinctive ‘project’ in itself.”