Could you write a compelling six word memoir for your business? It gets you thinking, doesn’t it? What a great way to bring clarity, simplicity and power to your brand story!įor the record my six word memoir for Story IQ would be: “Transformed B2B marketing with powerful storytelling” Now, this would be a useful short form brand storytelling exercise for your business. Stephen Colbert’s six word memoir was “Well I thought I was funny.”Ĭelebrity chef Mario Batali’s was “Brought it to a boil often.” “Barrister, barista, what’s the diff, Mom?”
More than 15,000 entries came in from around the US. We need to practise the art of short form brand storytelling, where we can pack a punch in short, emotionally evocative formats.Ī number of years ago Smith (an online magazine devoted to personal storytelling) started a contest in which people wrote six word stories of their own memoirs. We are living in an age of short form snackable content where attention spans are rapidly diminishing, and short snippets of information rule. Customers are also more likely to share your story if they can project themselves into it. So, we need to structure our business stories in such a way that our customers can entwine themselves into the narrative, fill in the missing gaps and own the story. (As my Uncle Rob used to say, “Never let the truth get in the way of a good story.”) When we gossip, we often do this. As we are a storytelling species our cognitive systems are well versed at filling in information gaps, and sometimes simply making stuff up to round out the story. The second lesson is that good stories use emotional and sensory language that inspires the reader or viewer to fill in the gaps. As they say: facts tell, but stories sell. The first lesson is that stories are simply facts wrapped in emotion, so think about how you can wrap up information about your business or brand in an emotional package. Since we launched the Six-Word Memoir project, educators of all kinds have found six words to be a terrific classroom assignment and catalyst for self-expression. There are three lessons here for business and brand storytelling. Celebrating students’ work from classrooms across the world. We imagine the anguish of the mother as she writes the ad for the tiny, unworn shoes. The brilliance of Hemingway’s rather dark six word novel is that we can insert ourselves into the story, and fill in the details about how the death might have occurred. Hemingway disagreed, and after offering a simple wager, leaned over the bar, picked up a napkin, and wrote six words on it… “For sale. He believed there was no way that Hemingway could write a six word novel that had the depth and emotional resonance of his more famous novels. The bar patron had read some of his novels and was a fan of his work. There’s a literary legend that Ernest Hemingway was once sitting in a bar in the Florida Keys and got into a fierce debate with one of the patrons that he could write a novel using just six words.
0 kommentar(er)
