The power of telling stories with data
Editor’s note: Michael Callero is founder, The Big Blue Crayon, Minneapolis.
When I was a child, every Thanksgiving my family would prepare a huge meal that included all the usual dishes that you’d expect at most holiday tables. We had turkey, gravy, stuffing, green bean casserole, mashed potatoes. And then there was a lone bowl of cranberry sauce. That singular dish of cranberry sauce would end up sitting in the fridge for a week or so after Thanksgiving, ignored. This happened each year without fail. We’d purchase the ingredients, prepare the dish, serve it, store it and then throw it away, unused. One year I asked my mom, why do you bother to make cranberry sauce if nobody eats it? She didn’t hesitate with her answer: “Because we’re supposed to.”
Too often companies treat market research like cranberry sauce. It’s done because we’re supposed to do it, but it has no impact on our decisions. We spend millions on intelligence that is analytically elegant, leverages the latest techniques and involves countless data interrogations. It’s often great research. And we do it because we know we’re supposed to. But then we set it aside for a while and eventually we throw it away – only to repeat the process again next time.
Simplifying the research
In my experience, there’s one primary reason so much market research goes unused. Those conducting the research don’t know how to translate its implications for those making the decisions. They are speaking two different languages. The researchers can’t speak decider, and the deciders can’t speak researcher.
Some deciders have argued that research needs to be simpler. They’re wrong, and sort of right. The solution isn’t to simplify the research itself. The research should be as complicated as it needs to be. Some of the most powerful insights require complicated analysis. No, it’s not the research that we need to simplify. It’s the communication.
The entire point of any piece of research is to influence the decider. The best way to influence anyone is to tell them a story. In fact, the more complicated the research becomes, the more we need to simplify with storytelling. We need to start communicating research the same way we communicate stories. Storytelling creates influence.
When research has no impact
Let me share a story. I have a researcher friend named Ed whose first position out of graduate school was for a small Wisconsin company called Mercury Marine. Mercury makes outboard motors for boats, and for most of their history they grew steadily. When foreign competition and product innovation threatened that growth, they realized they needed to understand more about their customers. They hired their very first market research professional: Ed. He was there to tell them why their share was waning and how to win consumers back. He was eager to show off his skills. For the first six months, Ed pulled out all the tricks. His segmentation was unstoppable. His consumer persona were magnificent. His choice drivers were both unexpected and intuitive. He created a beautiful package of research that Mercury had never seen before. This stuff was going to blow their minds.
Ed took the results on a tour of the C-Suite. He presented deck after deck, sweated meeting after meeting, answered question after question. And each instance was the same. The deciders nodded throughout his presentation. They asked inquisitive questions. They smiled at each key fact. They proclaimed the information was unlike anything they’d seen before. And, when it was all over, they continued making the same decisions as before. His research had absolutely no impact.
It wasn’t long before he couldn’t stand any more of this cycle. Ed sat down with his CEO and asked him why everyone was ignoring the research. The CEO answered immediately. “It’s not that the research isn’t wonderful,” he said, trying not to hurt Ed’s feelings. “It’s that I can’t understand what to do. You need to present your information like you’re using a big blue crayon.” He explained that at home his daughter likes to draw pictures for him. She’ll draw a house, a tree and a sun. They’re not elegant and don’t have any artistic value beyond sentimentality. But, each time she draws, he knows exactly what it is. He sees a house, a tree and a sun. When she uses her big blue crayon, he can see right to the meaning, right to the story, and he isn’t confused by any of it.
Hearing this story was a lightbulb moment for me. We need to simplify our storytelling.
Marketing research, data and storytelling
From that point forward, I began honing my storytelling skills. With each project, I sharpened my big blue crayon. As my career progressed, I learned new and better ways to conduct research, and I developed simpler ways to tell its stories. I realized that my goal was to become a master influencer, and that I needed both better research and better storytelling to do that – neither without the other.
Just as Ed had done at Mercury Marine, I started including a feedback loop into my research presentation process. I wanted to know whether my insights were being used. And if not, then why not? How had I clouded my data with unnecessary detail? How could I have simplified my storytelling to be more influential?
In my days as a market research supplier, nothing was more frustrating than to understand that the results of my work were being ignored. And too often our great work was wasted! Maybe you’ve been there before. Oh, the exaltation of a beautiful analytic approach unearthing a new insight! The glory of triangulating several techniques to spotlight one key truth! When it’s done right, this sort of insight discovery was enough to make me cry with joy. Which is why it would make me cry harder, in frustration, when my insight was ignored, casually tossed aside like cranberry sauce.
I had an economics professor tell me that “every profession is a conspiracy against the laity.” He would point to all the complicated symbolism and confusing words that we’d invent for our specializations as a means of intentionally keeping outsiders out. He cited the bewildering language that doctors use when diagnosing an illness, or the headache-inducing forms that accountants reference when preparing a tax return. As if complicated words and graphs somehow elevate the work or make it seem more sophisticated to those who don’t know better. This, he believed, was there to create job security. The more challenging a profession seemed, the more elite it would appear and its perceived value would increase.
I remember a time when research suppliers also believed this. Early in my career, I was trained to create dense, paper-gauging decks with complicated graphs and endless appendices. All of the complexity was supposed to make the research seem more sophisticated. After all, who would be willing to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars for research results that fit on only one slide with a clear, concise recommendation? Today, I know that this is exactly what’s most effective. Deciders want a story that will influence them to make better decisions. They wanted the Big Blue Crayon, not a research reference manual.
We all have war stories. I remember a particular project that ended in disaster. My clients insisted on recruiting respondents and then no one showed up for the focus groups. We scrambled for solutions, quickly sending a street team to a nearby mall with a revised screener and creative incentives, heroically saving the day. And with some quick thinking and additional tweaks on the fly, we generated real insights from the research. But the project was a disaster anyway. Our presentation was muddy and dense. The client was confused and bored.
And as a client myself, with each project I braced for the inevitable final step of extracting usable insights from the research I’d commissioned. With many of my projects, I would budget an additional last phase that I’d devote specifically to rewriting “final” presentations. It became so common that it ended up reshaping our roles. The supplier was there to deliver the research. I was there to convert the results into a language that my business team could understand. I became the interpreter. Without the translation, the research would be worthless.
And it worked. Throughout the years as I continued to hone my Big Blue Crayon technique, I started finding personal success. I spoke a language my business leaders could understand. I could share research in a way that drove decisions. It built my reputation and helped propel my career.
During my time at Best Buy, Walgreens and Allina Health, my reputation grew beyond the market research group. Other departments started asking me to train their teams to become better storytellers. It appeared that overly-complex communication is a disease that has infected many areas of business – from finance to operations to human resources.
All audiences are lazy
Over almost 30 years, throughout these experiences, I’ve expanded and refined the Big Blue Crayon technique. Today, when I share it with others, I use 11 simple guidelines. They’re powerful, in part, because each one is fairly intuitive. You know you should be doing these things – you’re often just not deliberately remembering to do them. Together, they make a powerful checklist that has helped hundreds of professionals turn their insights into stories that influence.
All audiences are lazy. You can put a ton of work into your research, but your audience doesn’t want to work to understand the results. When you share a piece of information with them, they should immediately get what it tells them and what they should do about it.
Too often, our instinct is to clutter up our message. Why do we do this? Much of the time, it’s because we’re seeking validation instead of clarity. I often have team members who are discouraged by sharing work that seems to them overly simplified. They’ve put countless hours into this project! They’ve employed sophisticated techniques that few others would have even thought to use! They’ve adeptly steered past analytic traps and miraculously massaged a real, powerful truth out of a cloudy puddle of data! And they’re right – it is disheartening to distill all that work down into one simple story. But when they include the complicated path in their presentations, all they do is confuse the deciders.
This isn’t always easy. It takes real skill to make an insight jump off the page. But it’s entirely possible in every single case. And when you do it, it works every time.
Here’s a Big Blue Crayon technique that’s so simple you can start immediately: stop randomly capitalizing words. Most Audiences have cognitive challenges processing Information with unnecessarily Capitalized Words and knotted Sentences. And stop confusing people with that strange business-speak. People will understand your story better if you tell it like a story. Even better – present like you talk. Use common dialogue. Say it out loud. Does it sound like something an actual human would say? Because it’s an actual human that you’re trying to influence.
And remember, all research is designed to influence. One year my mom stopped putting cranberry sauce on the table. At some point, if you’re not effectively influencing, the deciders are going to decide they no longer need research.
Research, no matter how well designed or brilliantly executed or elegantly analyzed, is worthless if it doesn’t influence a decision. It’s not enough simply to do great research. You also need to use Big Blue Crayon to communicate it. Start telling stories that influence.