Stop for a moment and recall the last good novel you read or the last good movie you saw. What do you remember? Perhaps some plot details come to mind, but more likely you recollect, or even re-experience, your emotional state after reading or viewing. You enjoyed the experience because of how it made you feel.
This is the power of stories. Back in 2006, I wrote about BJ McCabe's take on storytelling and its role in business strategy (Discoveries, November 2006) as presented at the Institute for International Research's 12th Annual Innovation Convergence Event.
Now, having recently returned from the PDMA/IIR Front End of Innovation conference, I can tell you that the storytellers are at it again. The conference featured a keynote by Peter Guber, chairman and founder of Mandalay Entertainment, whose screen production credits stretch back to 1977's Oscar-nominated "The Deep."
Guber proposed infusing some "MAGIC" into product innovation. In this scenario, "MAGIC" is an anagram for Motivation, Audience, Goal, Interactive, and Control. Each has a specific relationship to storytelling. Without going into the details, suffice it to say that his message boiled down to the importance of creating an emotional connection with your audience (customer).
There are two sides to using story in the context of product development: storytelling and story listening. Storytelling as a tool for business leadership has been well discussed by authors such as Stephen Denning in his 2005 book The Leader's Guide to Storytelling: Mastering the Art and Discipline of Business Narrative and by consultants such as the UK's The Storytellers. These books and Web sites explore the magic of telling a story to connect with your constituents.
But story listening is where the magic happens in the product development process. Why? Because if you train your ear, you can hear the stories your customers are telling. And through these stories, gleaned from immersion in your customers' experience, you extract the essence of what they're looking for in a product or service.
You can't hear stories by looking through one-way glass at a handful of users comparing products. People don't share their stories in online questionnaires. You and your team need to be with customers in their environment.
Take, for example, the experiences that led the Honda designers to create the Honda Element. "For the Element, the design concept emerged from direct observation of Gen Y tribesmen in their natural habitat. And what better place to do this than at the X-Games, which feature daredevil competitions in 'hot dog' skiing and snowboarding, dirt course motorcycle racing, skateboarding, and other hair-raising extreme sports. Armed with cameras and camcorders, field researchers headed to the games, where they closely observed what people were doing before, during, and after the various competitions." (Marc Meyer, "How Honda Innovates," Journal of Product Innovation Management, May 2008.) And, we might add, listening to the Gen Y-ers telling their stories.
Product developers and marketers often find their own enthusiasm ignited when they begin thinking about customer stories. But then what? Hearing all these juicy stories can be a rich experience, but the next step is crucial. Techniques such as image diagramming give you a practical way to distill what can seem like chaotic and wildly disparate bits of information into a coherent picture to guide your development efforts. Imagine the images that might emerge from the stories the Gen Y-ers told: "Man, that last run was serious. When I got done, every part of my body felt like jelly. I was shaking so hard I couldn't get the key into the damn lock to open the hatch and stow my bike!" (Direct, word-for-word transcription is critical if you want to capture the passion of your customers' stories. "Trembling rendered subject unable to fit key to lock" just doesn't carry the emotional weight of the direct quote.)
Aggregating images from many customer stories begins to build a bottom-up picture of the world your customers live in. By gathering enough images, you eventually create a "mega customer story" that incorporates all the relevant quotes and offers a basis for moving on to the next step: creating customer requirements.
If you think listening to stories is helpful only to developing consumer products, think again. In an upcoming Discoveries, we'll feature an interview with Stephen Scharf of Applied Biosystems, who talks about how this type of in-depth, open-ended customer research can be applied in a business-to-business setting to create products with emotional resonance.
Once upon a time, there was a company that began working with storytelling as part of its arsenal of tools for understanding customers. It heard what its customers needed, its product designers created great products, and everyone lived happily ever after.
Are you ready to write your new innovation story?
