Data analysis and storytelling techniques may seem like contradictory marketing approaches. In practice, however, they complement each other beautifully — data insights can ground a brand narrative, while storytelling enhances hidden meanings within your data. Leveraging each technique will ultimately make your campaigns more effective and impactful for customers.
Human brains are hard-wired to respond better to stories than to facts. Stories about people, even fictional ones, trigger a release of the neuropeptide oxytocin, which is connected to empathy and cooperative behavior. Narratives dealing with conflict or challenge produce the stress hormone cortisol, which focuses our attention. A good story not only dramatically increases the chances that an audience will pay attention to your message, but also makes it more likely that they’ll take the action you want them to take.
A story isn’t just a chemically-driven method for getting your point across, however; it’s also the best way to provide context for your data. Statistics and information points are only actionable if you understand their meaning in the context of to your particular audience. A graph illustrating the cost of US movie theater tickets relative to inflation, while interesting, is little more than a curiosity without supplemental information.
Functional magnetic resonance imaging shows consumers favor emotions over facts when considering brands. Moreover, positive sentiments about a brand influence customer loyalty more than the brand’s particular attributes. Unemotional information — also known as facts — triggers language recognition centers in the brain, but nothing else. In other words, your audience has retained the desired information, but they’re not necessarily inspired to do anything with it.
Another perk of data-driven storytelling is that it doesn’t necessarily require a large amount of data. To return to the movie theater example: a single data insight, such as a substantial increase in the number of moviegoers age 55 and up, could be shaped into a variety of different stories, tailored toward the needs of different audiences. Data collection and analysis is both time-consuming and expensive, so the ability to create messaging that doesn’t rely on vast swaths of information is vital for maximum agility.
Well-told stories also tend to take on a life of their own as they spread from storyteller to storyteller. You could talk about how the Girl Scouts earn more than $800 million in revenue from their famous cookies each year, but it’s far more fun to tell the story of the smart scout who rebranded her boxes of Samoas as “Momoas,” complete with pictures of the actor. If your story is entertaining or informative (or both), your audience will happily retell it for you, increasing your reach with no extra effort on your part.
Storytelling is the oldest form of human communication, used to educate and delight since before recorded history. Harnessed to your advantage, storytelling can take your message places mere data could never dream of traveling.
