Character and Plot
Below is an excerpt from our book Growing up Fast.
In their book Rework, Fried and Hansson suggest that, all other things being the same between two job candidates, you should choose to hire the better writer. Why?
Because of story.
For all our multimedia, words are still the seedlings of new ideas. Words help us to organize, express and vet. Writing things down makes sense of what we think — even before we know what we think. Writing is a way to figure out story.
Storytelling ability on your agile teams always pays off. As Fried and Hansson write,
“That’s because being a good writer is about more than writing. Clear writing is a sign of clear thinking. Great writers know how to communicate. They make things easy to understand. They can put themselves in someone else’s shoes. They know what to omit. And those are qualities you want in any candidate.”
As you collaborate on your marketing and innovation teams, always think, “Who are our customers, vendors, and partners — the characters in our story? In fact, what character are we?”
Working with agile teams, where the stakes are low and the dialogue more open than the hierarchy, helps train you to see the world from different perspectives.
Try browsing customer segments from companies like Nielsen. That won’t answer all your questions about your customers, but it will spark debates in your agile group and get you to start understanding different customers:
Are they “Young Digerati” or “Fast-Track Families”? Do they “order from Expedia and go water skiing” or “order from Buy.com and watch Country Music Television”?
The customer names themselves can elicit immediate characterization and images:
“Gray Power”
“Shotguns and Pickups”
“Beltway Boomers”
Fun stuff!
Plots
Joseph Campbell says our whole human narrative repeats itself. We repeat the same stories, whether in a cave in Sumer Valley or a cube in Silicon Valley.
And if we do have a mythology in the U.S. today, it surely runs through Hollywood and our cultural export in narrative: the movies.
As you think about the characters involved in your business, put them in context using the narrative plots that Hollywood uses over and over:
- Love — boy meets girl, loses girl, wins her back
- Success — the lead character has to win at all costs
- Cinderella — an ugly duckling is transformed into a beautiful swan
- Triangle — three characters in a romantic entanglement
- Return — an absent lover, father or spouse returns after wandering off for years
- Vengeance — a lead character seeks revenge
- Conversion — bad guy turns into a good guy
- Sacrifice — the lead character gives everything up for someone else’s benefit
- Family — the relationship of characters in a single place or situation (e.g. hotel, office, prison)
- Forbidden liaison — social taboos, closeted relationships, adultery
- Jeopardy — a life-and-death situation calls on the survival instincts of lead characters
Think of the customer you’re trying to reach as perhaps a “Young Digerati” character in a “Family” narrative. Give him a setting and a stride. Walk in his or her shoes to understand what happens to y and z in his world when x changes.
Authors Strunk and White criticize the businessperson’s language in The Elements of Style. But they also touch on why business customers yearn to be cast in story:
“The executive walks among ink erasers, caparisoned like a knight. We should tolerate him — every man of spirit wants to ride a white horse.”
Agile marketers and innovators know action when they see it, and they use the strength of character and plot to their advantage.
Agile marketers are the curators of a company’s story. They listen for the story. They track the story. They tell the story. They test to see if the story still matters. They put the story into new forms with new information. They keep the story safe when times get rough. They follow the story as it emerges and evolves.
- How someone finally seeks your services
- What a vendor goes through to manufacture part #45–334 for you
- What an investor hears in the quarterly stump
- What a four-year-old does when she picks up your product
- User stories require expert telling and responsive listening. It helps to think of where customers are in the purchase cycle not as linear, but as a networked model where customers jump around.
Reaching a decision to buy is not a logical progression, but a blurred set of blended stages a customer can be in simultaneously at any time.
- Awareness — Do customers know they have a problem we can challenge them to act on?
- Comprehension — Do they understand we can help solve the problem
- Interest — Do they care?
- Intention — Are they considering buying from us?
- Action — ey bought from us. Would they recommend us or buy again?
Customers can go straight from awareness to action in an impulse buy. Customers can go from comprehension to action in a must- have purchase they have little interest or intention invested in.
They can make a brand buy based on pure interest alone.
Buying is Emotional, Not Rational
Purchasing something is rooted in the brain, which does not function like a box factory conveyor belt. “Oniomania” is the compulsive desire to shop, and it’s more related to mood- enhancement and identity-seeking than intention, awareness, or problem solving.
Even normal buying behavior creates an associated “buyer’s high” and “buyer’s remorse” in the mind, as summarized in the article “e-Relation to Money as a Factor of the Consumer’s Behavior,” by Zorica Marković and Iva Antanasijević:
“In the phase before purchasing, a prospective buyer often feels positive emotions associated with the purchase (desire, a sense of heightened possibilities, and an anticipation of the enjoyment that will accompany using the product, for example).
Afterwards, having made the purchase, they are more fully able to experience the negative aspects: all the opportunity costs of the purchase and a reduction in purchasing power.”
Emotion plays the same role in business purchases. Perhaps that’s why “decision-makers” like their work and why problem/solution has always been the holy grail of B-2-B commerce:
Because process devotees love to have an objective, rational justification for buying something that gives them a deep, subjective thrill.
An agile marketer and agile innovator knows this about her customers. Agile understands character.
