The power of storytelling
Editor's note: Sam Myers is the head of insights at Sympler.
A therapist once told me that therapy is storytelling – that she listens to the stories her patients tell her for the first year or more of any therapeutic relationship. It’s as much for the person’s experience in telling their story as it is for her to gain a deeper understanding of the person to guide them in healing directions. Storytelling captures the need and wants, the pain and euphoria of a person’s experience and the depth of being each person has inside them.
Stories are powerful, but often, we subconsciously edit them. We gloss over details, skip past sensitive moments or emphasize parts that feel comfortable. A skilled therapist knows this and they gently pull at these threads to reveal deeper truths. In the process, a more honest story emerges – the parts we exclude that become as telling as those we choose to share.
Everyone is a storyteller and there’s nothing more powerful, insightful and transformational than hearing yourself narrate your own story or having someone narrate their story to you. Engaged in storytelling, you come to understand yourself in a much deeper way. You stumble into the points in your life that are difficult to narrate and the parts that need storytelling the most. The things that we exclude from stories – skip over, cover beneath the surface, deny – are just as important as the things that we include.
Telling stories to someone you don’t know can often lead to more meaningful truths and insights. The anonymity of it can provide a sense of safety, freeing up the need to worry about the other person’s response. Better qualitative research can be practiced in the simultaneously anonymous and intensely personal aspect of both the content and the narrative experience.
This understanding of storytelling as both a personal and insightful act deeply influences our approach to qualitative research. We’ve built methods to invite participants into storytelling spaces that, much like therapy, poke at the lies to uncover meaningful truths that drive powerful insights.
How to initiate storytelling
Asking respondents to tell you about a specific time in their lives is a wildly open prompt that catapults them into both a reflective state where they’re thinking of a moment in their life that responds to the topic of your prompt and invites them into the natural creative process of shaping the narrative of their life. They think carefully about what elements of their story need to be shared, where they’re leaving us without the information we may need and how to fill those gaps to cultivate the most powerful level of understanding. “Tell me a story…” invites people into a world-building activity where they share their dreams, the crushing weight of defeat, the minutiae of relationships that are core to their survival and flourishing, etc. With this loose prompt, everything a person wants to share comes alive in the most compelling way, which is good for both respondents themselves and their experience of research (it can then be a transformative process) as well as for the quality of the research process and product.
Sharing personal stories in research settings
The environment of qualitative research, especially in an anonymous context like chat messaging, offers respondents the ability to share private stories; the ones they’re desperate but terrified to tell. It’s often easier to tell a stranger something deeply personal than it is to tell someone you love or know well. You can tell your story, revealing every detail without fearing judgement or the chance of offending or hurting another person. There’s freedom and healing in telling untold stories, especially when you are telling a researcher (or bot) that you will never see again. Respondents will say “Well, I’ve never told anyone this before, but…”, followed eventually by, “Wow, I had no idea how good that would feel to tell someone about this.” You can get depth and searing honesty, accessing the complex foundational context within which life itself as well as consumer decision making unfolds.
Ask about future goals
Dreams and aspirations can be an incredibly vulnerable thing to share. Respondents often express fears about being laughed at or belittled when people tell them it’s an unrealistic goal. We ask participants to share their wildest dream in story form – prompting them to narrate the dream itself as well as to imagine the journey it would take to get there and what their life would be like if they reached this aspiration.
In the process, we learn about the nature of their lives and their hearts, the way they make decisions, the steps they need to take and how others (including brands) can support the fulfillment of their dreams. People can dream big, and when they do, they enter an open-hearted state where their deepest needs and desires come to life, guiding ways to resonate most powerfully with the consumer experience.