If you’ve ever been to a Disney park, you’ve witnessed the power of storytelling. While amusement parks existed before Disneyland, Walt Disney took standard rides and attractions to a whole new level by adding stories to them. No longer was it simple enough to have an indoor roller coaster that made you scream; it had to be an indoor roller coaster that took you to the far reaches of outer space…and made you scream. He turned a simple children’s turntable ride into a story about a Mad Tea Party attended by Alice in Wonderland. He took another spinning ride and transformed it into a means for children to fly with a baby elephant.
If you ever get the chance to take a behind-the-scenes tour of a Disney park, you will learn about the stories hidden in each nook and cranny of it. You’ll also learn that the only thing separating the ordinary from the magical is a wonderful story…powerfully told.
Which brings us to the question: How do you go about doing this?
Let’s start by saying, “Thousands of years ago, in a galaxy far, far away…”
If you’re a small business owner (and have been for a while), you’re used to having two things happen:
- People ask how your business came into existence.
- The story changes multiple times due to word-of-mouth (or the grown-up version of the Telephone Game).
In Silicon Valley, they call these fantastical backstories “founding myths,” and typically a successful company will have multiple versions of a founding myth, each with a different person in the starring role. The best founding myths, though, are the ones where customers turn out to be the ones saving the day.
Which segues nicely into our first key element of storytelling: Choose a hero
Remember that term from high school English relating to the main character of a story—protagonist? Yeah, it’s back.
When telling your small business’ story, you need to think about your protagonist. Even if you’re a humble person, the story needs to be about someone. So if you are the founder, go ahead and take the role, at least for the first part of the story. People have an easier time accepting and getting behind a story if they can focus on one protagonist. So…who’s yours?
Next, ask the question: What do they want?
Here’s a good question: When’s the last time you read or watched a memorable story where the protagonist didn’t want something?
Most likely, never. Why? Because one of the key elements in storytelling is the protagonist’s desire—what they want more than anything in the world.
In a business proposal, or in your “About Us” section on your website, it’s easy to say you’re addressing a problem or something that’s missing in the market. Which might be entirely true, but it’s more powerful to present it as something you or your protagonist wants more than anything. Think of the journey, the quest; and don’t just try to sell to customers, try to get them involved in the narrative—the want.
Keep the struggle in mind
We love what Paul VanDeCarr had to say on this:
There’s a Twilight Zone episode in which a career criminal named “Rocky” Valentine is killed while robbing a pawnshop. He finds himself in a place where his every wish is granted by a smiling man in a white suit. Eventually, Rocky is bored with getting whatever he wants, and says he doesn’t want to stay in heaven anymore but instead go to “the other place.” The man in the suit replies, “Whatever gave you the idea that you were in heaven, Mr. Valentine? This is the other place!”
Hell is knowing exactly what’s going to happen.
The bottom line is: Give us some tension. Throw some obstacles in the way of your protagonist. (Again, if it’s you, you know full well what you had to go through to get where you are. Give it to us!)
Last but not least: Resolution
A “sun came out and a peace fell over the world” kind of thing. We want to see your character go through trials but know that they’ve been redeemed. They’ve found a new lease on life, or a new mission. Essentially we want to know this journey wasn’t all for nothing. So prove it to us.
And, oh yes, this is where the customers show up on rocket ships and flying elephants.
(Feature image: Joe Penniston via Flickr)