Thursday, January 4, 2018

I've Been Telling the Wrong Product Stories

This post has nothing to do with Delphi other than it's the software development tool I use. In November of last year I finally purchased Microsoft Office 365. A couple days later I received a promotional email introducing me to Microsoft Virtual Academy (https://mva.microsoft.com/).

I visited the MVA site, signed up for a free account, and by pure dumb luck stumbled across an amazing set of videos designed to teach you how to create stories. The video series is called "Crash Course: Analytics Storytelling for Impact". (https://goo.gl/oFEc9F) This video series was put together to teach people how to present data analytics in a very impactful way. Although it's focus is on how to present data analytics, it has a very unique set of videos all about stories and storytelling.

The storyteller is Mario Juarez and he is phenomenal. The third video "Definition of a Story" (https://goo.gl/L5e1g8) hit me like a ton of bricks. It was as if everything all of the sudden fell into place. All the previous stuff I had read or heard about marketing such as; don't sell features sell benefits finally made sense.

In the past no matter how hard I had tried I always wound up telling what Jaurez refers to as "transactional stories". The description of the thing I did. The transaction or process. What I built, how it works, the sequencing of events. Sound familiar.

The stories I need to tell are what Juarez calls "transcendent stories". These are stories of how human life changed because of the interaction with your product. Transcendent stories go to the place of human experience and human values and human meaning.

Watch this video series. They will change they way you talk about your products.

The first story I'm working on is for my Credit Card Math product. I've created a fictitious customer persona called Kate. The story I'm creating is "How Credit Card Math Saved Kate's Marriage." The story model I'm using is defined by Kurt Vonnegut as "Man in hole". (https://youtu.be/oP3c1h8v2ZQ)

Here's a sneak peak at Kate:


My first video is taking me longer than I expected. Hopefully it will be completed soon. I'm very excited to see how this whole process goes.


Semper Fi,
Gunny Mike
zilchworks.com

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