I remember going through a monthly stock report that described my investment portfolio. There were layers of data to it and more. My mind drifted for a second and the thought just caught me in a jiffy. I was bored! The report was great, per se. It told me everything about the ‘what’. But it still left me wondering about the ‘why’. It was number-heavy and gave me cognitive nausea.
I find this quite standard with data that is trying to tell stories. It doesn’t really tell a story at all, in most use-cases! It is often detached, leaving the reader dulled. Just like this report left me.
Hard-wired for stories
We are humans! We are hard-wired to register stories because we have an innate tendency to make sense of things around us. That is how we have evolved. That is how our communication cultures evolved, around the world. We tailor our message to the person we are talking to, including oneself, to share the ‘why’, ‘how’, ‘when’ along with the ‘what’.
Then why are research processes and outcomes still laden with just data and negligible human perspective?
Despite the recent advancement in data-led solutions for businesses, there are many hidden opportunities to cultivate a storytelling culture. Data is not just numbers and charts. These lack the component of a narrative for communicating insights, and the reason is overemphasis on tools and analytics that make scaling of information to the masses difficult. Most teams working on data also often do not have the resources to present insights in a way that makes it an advantage. The language and format it is shared in often lacks a customized connection and tonality.
Stories – they strike a chord!
What could be a great way to understand the actual context behind why something is selling or bombing? Delineating personalized statistics of consumer experience with a product, for instance, immediately shows how much impact it has made on one’s life. Global diaper brand Huggies’s ‘No Baby Unhugged’ campaign utilized the power of data-storytelling to increase sales by 30%. Why? It struck a chord with the masses. More and more brands are repurposing data to reach the last mile to get real actionable insights.
Data has become inadvertently critical to innovative solutions across the board. But it has to be amplified with a narrative to drive impact.
Value of insights
LinkedIn recently reported that data analysis is one of the most sought-after job categories. Data has made amazing changes to our lives in the past decades, making us better prepared for informed decisions. And that is the science of it. Experts who are magicians with tech, tools, and tally. But I am piqued about the ‘tale’, both as an entrepreneur and a consumer.
What makes you sign up for a survey and why? Why do you enjoy ads on TV? Do you want to watch a movie without a great story? With more and more channels serving content now, which brands do you think stand out and create a recall for themselves?
From paintings hung in museums to fiction novels to sci-fi movies, stories are epicentral to sensemaking. Data science simply presents facts but stories provide context, which augments the value of insights.
Context for real change
Data-based storytelling is a powerful, yet, underutilized method of marketing. Consumers prefer to learn about a brand through content, especially visual. Hence, stories make up at least 65% of the content today. The psychology of storytelling engages more parts of the brain, making the story, and its elements, easier to recall.
Companies are deploying more AI-led natural language generation technology. While we try to develop products – we put the context of the problem we are trying to solve and the psychology of the audience we are trying to cater to at the crux. This makes communication simpler and uncomplicated – to tell stories with data, not just present facts. Weaving language in a way that is tailored to our consumer’s needs, we employ data as proof points to convey insights and give it a voice.
Data storytelling has the power to shape values, determine preferences, and influence our aspirations. Collecting, engineering, and delivering data is a skill, no doubt, but leveraging it from insight-to-value to communicate true understanding of stories hidden in it, is an art. And this is what brings real change. Any PaaS company that is committed to an end-to-end, real-time data integration and analytics platform, will transform data into optimized relationships to bridge gaps between data, insights, and action.
