The power of storytelling in achieving your business’ bottom line.
Understanding how curated meaning helps achieve business goals through research and design, with MakeReign and Thea Sokolowski.
Human beings have an innate desire for meaning. The ability to create a sense of intention [or a desire for engagement] through the work that you do is an immensely powerful skill, and is an undeniably important aspect to the way any business functions, because meaning is closely associated with one’s sense of purpose.
Within the digital design and technological spaces in which we operate, the narratives that we construct are formed from the basis of meaning that works in conjunction with a brand’s vision, and the fundamental needs of their users. This is what drives people to engage with a product or service offering, and can ultimately help a business achieve their bottom line. The acquisition and retention of users can be attributed to a specifically targeted and strategic brand narrative applied throughout a product or service life cycle.
When people feel like they know you [or can connect to the meaning associated with your product or service], they are far more likely to buy into what you have to offer.
As a result, story-telling is a critical part of helping people feel like they belong to your brand’s journey.
Thea Sokolowski has spent her career honing in on the art of storytelling to create meaning for both individuals and enterprises across the globe. Growing up in the United States (US), her path has been an adventurous one. She has travelled across various continents, gathering insights and growing her knowledge base on how to best curate experiences through meaningful storytelling in a variety of fields, while maintaining a beginner’s mindset every step of the way.
On the 8th of September, Thea joined us to share some of her learnings that have helped inform her current role, and highlighted pivotal moments along the way that have led her to where she is now as not only the head of marketing and communications at Stitch (a financial payments and data API company), but also a co-founder of both Venture for Africa and Women Who Build Africa.
Making the time to chat to us about her life and career learnings, all the way from London, Thea explained that writing was always something she had been drawn to. She believed that the craft of writing and effective storytelling is a powerful tool in building strong foundational narratives for any business, narratives that intertwine between almost every discipline and ultimately form the primary building blocks of how an organisation can achieve their goals, simply by creating a meaningful purpose for users to engage with their offerings, and a meaningful experience for employees to create around.
One of Thea’s first milestone learnings came from her time at Point-One-Percent in New York, where she learned how to “leverage research and question [her] assumptions for everything that you build for a product. [Research] has a really big role to play in everything; from your messaging, to the way a brand looks and feels, you want to always check your work and make sure your audience is perceiving it in the way that it was intended.”
What we came to understand from Thea’s experience was that the role of research from the onset of a project proves pivotal in creating the correct meaning for your brand’s vision. Adopting a research-first mindset helps not only in guiding your business objectives, but also in identifying and optimising your strategies in order to execute those in an efficient and sustainable way. From this, we understood that the ability to adapt and work across a hyper team of inter-disciplinary experts is crucial within the digital landscape in order to see a product or service from concept to completion.
“Being adaptable goes hand in hand with a willingness to view things from a different perspective.”
Adaptability, and thus the inevitability of change, only reinforces the importance of cultivating one’s ability to deal with an ever-changing workplace environment. This became clear for Thea when she started working in Ghana, facilitating a training program for technological entrepreneurs in Africa for MEST, a branch of Meltwater. Moving to Ghana and integrating into this program required her to be adaptable to a new environment’s cultural differences, workplace expectations, and every-day life, as she engaged with different people from around the world to achieve collective goals.
During our live Q&A, Thea was asked about her experiences with imposter syndrome as a young woman leading technological entrepreneurs in a foreign country. She explained that; “I regularly ask myself ‘who let me in here?’ I’m well aware that I am an American woman who had no business teaching people in a completely different market, so I had to force myself to re-think and frame [the role] as more of a thought partner than a teacher”. The thought partnership approach helps create empowerment by “[simply being] another brain in the room [in order to help] people discover things on their [individual] journeys.”
This mindset shift helped Thea and the program participants learn from one another, and explore adaptability in practice to create meaning in the learning experience and outputs for these emerging entrepreneurs.
The concept of thought leadership starts to tie together ideas around organisations’ ability to successfully partner with specialists in order to achieve end goals that facilitate the best user experience of a product or service offering.
The more businesses engage with the people to whom they are directing communication, the closer one gets to understanding what it is that users truly need. Human beings are subconsciously biassed, and as a result, different viewpoints are essential in avoiding assumptions through bias. Rather, we want to work on curating stories that meet direct needs of multiple audiences.
An impactful experience starts with the story you want to tell and the people you want to tell the story to, followed by ensuring the outputs match the narrative that you have set, in order to create an experience that is both true to the brand and memorable to the user.
The more we listened and engaged with Thea’s story, the more we understood that communication is key to creating meaning in a successful way, one that lends itself to achieving end goals for everyone involved. Constant questioning and collaboration are clear mechanisms for solution-based thinking.
Challenging thought-processes, modifying assumptions and provoking creativity is what thought-partnership is all about. Fostering communities that actively practice these aspects of thought-partnership is what ultimately leads to innovation — innovation being a core focus within the design and technology spaces in which we operate.
Venture for Africa and Women Who Build Africa , born as passion projects from Thea’s desire to bring about connectivity and meaning between individuals and opportunities, are organisations that bring people together from around the world to facilitate growth through open discussion, action that is governed by intent, and cross collaboration throughout the technological and business landscapes.
Both organisations focus on creating a community of consistent and constructive support, with a strong slant toward female empowerment, as well as encouraging and facilitating spaces in which equal opportunities become available and accessible to all. Here, her notions of thought leadership become critical to merging the gap between ideas, and the reality in which they could exist.
“Talent is equally distributed around the world but opportunity isn’t necessarily distributed the same.”
Both Venture for Africa and Women Who Build Africa are organisations that aim to bridge the gap between talent and opportunity across the board and foster a community of innovators and thought partners, that everyone can benefit and learn from in real-world applications.
After unpacking her experiences within both organisations, one starts to value not only the role of research in design and the importance of constructing sustainable and authentic narratives — true to a brands identity and users needs — but also the qualities that help foster that creation. These qualities include adaptability, a solutions-based mindset and a desire to learn and share your learnings, all of which are cultivated by paying specific attention to deep consumer insights that generate a solid comprehension of pain points, needs and challenges of customers and communicating those with your team in order to have an impactful influence in both marketing and design outputs.
Thea Sokolowski represents an influential thought-leader, one who has actively taken her learned experiences, identified gaps in which to create sustainable solutions for key problems, and taken tangible steps to bridging those gaps through a solutions-based, beginner’s mindset. Knowing that learning from your experiences goes hand in hand with learning from the experiences of others is what helps foster your own growth and the growth of others within your community and beyond.
Storytelling is an essential part of curating meaning. However, in order to be an effective storyteller, one needs to be an effective team player.
At MakeReign, we pride ourselves in our people, and their ability to transform narratives into products and services that bring value to clients, and their end users. We are a team who consciously grows and learns in order to create and curate the best product and service experiences across a variety of platforms, using the power of storytelling to guide and achieve the bottom line across the board through the stories we execute against.
MakeReign helps connect brands with consumers through digital interfaces. Combining research, data, user-centered design and testing with real customers, they create interfaces and experiences that reach millions — transforming business and delivering growth for their clients.
Website: www.makereign.com
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