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Kick Them in the Feels: Why Numbers Need a Human Face!

18th March 2016 By Jonathan Crossfield

Kick Them in the Feels: Why Numbers Need a Human Face!

Content marketers often rely on numbers to convey information and motivate consumers: web pages devoted to lengthy tables of technical specifications; white papers packed with charts and graphs; blog articles that reduce complex topics to lists of statistics. And there’s no doubt that such data-rich content can work – to a point. However, numbers aren’t nearly as persuasive, nor as easily understood, as we would like to believe.

In short, numbers exist in a different reality – at least as our brains perceive them. It doesn’t matter whether you’re a dab hand with a calculator or hold a doctorate in advanced mathematics, no amount of numbers and statistics will have the same impact on your beliefs or decisions as a well-told story or a human face.

Numbers dehumanise; stories humanise

Last year, the Transport Accident Commission of Victoria released a new initiative to educate the community and lower the road toll. The first stage involved a campaign to tackle how people perceived the annual road toll.

I still get chills watching this. The video is so powerful because it shows the emotional impact on one person when he sees beyond the numbers to the people they represent.

Numbers and statistics are useful, of course. They allow us to measure improvement (or otherwise), identify trends, predict likely outcomes and a host of other useful applications. However,  they force us to think in the abstract—we see the numbers and not the people behind them. We certainly don’t see the stories behind the people behind the numbers.

Logically, we know a road toll statistic represents people, but we’re emotionally disconnected. Also, most of us, thankfully, haven’t experienced a major accident on the road. With no direct impact on our lives, it’s easy to dismiss such numbers; “I’ve never had an accident, therefore, I never will”. Our subjective experience can override what the numbers tell us, despite this being quite illogical.

These heuristics and biases (and we all have them) make an abstract concept such as a statistical road toll much harder for us to imagine, let alone inform our decisions. That’s why almost all of the vox pox responses in the wider campaign confidently suggest the road toll will be fine if the number was just a bit smaller. They’re treating it as a numbers problem and not a human one – “Bigger number bad, smaller number good”. Any improvement in the number is seen as positive or even acceptable, while forgetting that any number other than zero suggests we are willing to allow people to continue DYING in return for the convenience of being able to drive.

“I am not a number! I am a free man!”

Psychologists have proven this dehumanising effect of numbers in experiment after experiment. Paul Slovic achieved some startling results in his research, as described in Rolf Dobelli’s brilliant book How to Think Clearly.

Two groups of people were each given $5.00 to complete a short survey. Once each group had completed the survey, Slovic then asked for donations to a charitable cause. He showed the first group a picture of Rokia, a starving child from Malawi. On average, each of the group members donated $2.83. The second group was given the statistics about famine in Malawi, where more than 3 million children suffer from malnutrition. The average donation dropped by 50 percent.

Mr. Spock may have famously said, “The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few,” but then he has a purely logical brain. For us, the plight of one boy can outweigh the statistics of three million equally afflicted children. Slovic gave a face to the problem, allowing the first group to relate to a story instead of statistics.

Another example. In 2009, defence secretary Robert Gates lifted an eighteen-year ban on media showing images of the coffins of fallen soldiers – a ban intended to conceal the human cost of war. The statistics were freely available, of course. The numbers of war dead were still widely reported throughout the years of the ban. However, as Dobelli writes, “… statistics leave us cold. People, on the other hand, especially dead people, spark an emotional reaction.”

Counter-intuitive, I know. The facts are exactly the same in both cases, whether we read a number from a graph or count the coffins marched across the tarmac at an army base. However, the way we apply meaning to those facts – and therefore how we react to them – is dependent on our ability to personify the information.

It’s just how our brains are wired. We evolved in a world where knowledge was restricted to what we experienced first hand through our five senses and survival depended on empathy with the group. And we developed a rich storytelling tradition to pass on knowledge and experience in ways our brains could imagine and understand. Numbers – particularly large ones – really didn’t matter to us until our individual worlds grew so much larger and more complex that we needed to create abstract concepts to make sense of what our brains couldn’t process through those five senses. But no matter how complex the world and abstract our thinking becomes, our brains are still the same parochial, emotional and self-centred grey blobs as before.

As marketers, we have to stop treating people as logical Mr. Spocks who can be convinced by facts and data alone. Evidential proof – including data – is still important to give our stories authenticity but it is the human story that our brains latch onto.

So, avoid using too many statistics and spreadsheets in your content, except to back up and qualify your stories. Instead, personify your message by telling the story of one person really well – someone the reader can identify with – and you may find your content is more persuasive and memorable than any number of graphs, surveys and tables of numbers.

Filed Under: Featured, Storytelling

Stories on the Brain: How to Get Your Message Across

3rd February 2016 By Jonathan Crossfield

Stories on the Brain: How to Get Your Message Across

When I went freelance in 2012, the question arose of what I should call myself. (I know what some other people would like to call me, but I’m being professional here.) Over the years, I’d become known (and employed) as a copywriter, social media manager, blogger, journalist, digital marketer, SEO writer, event speaker, workshop trainer and communications manager. Popping just one of those titles on my business card or LinkedIn profile could seriously limit how people viewed my abilities.

The title I eventually chose was “Storyteller”. At some level, each of these roles drew upon my ability to build a narrative to get a message across. Storytelling was the common thread that inspired my approach to most situations. The worst that could happen, I told myself, would be that someone would see my card and ask what I meant by “storyteller”, giving me the opportunity to explain.

Unfortunately, “storytelling” went on to become one of those horrible marketing buzzwords I despise. By 2014, digital storytelling was definitely a thing; which, because Gartner’s hype cycle is also definitely a thing, led to the inevitable trough of disillusionment and backlash in 2015. Suddenly, there were articles arguing that storytelling was merely the latest fad with no strategic value; an overstated trend in marketing creativity that should go the way of flared jeans and platform shoes. Sure, the critics agreed, storytelling has been with us since Ugg first decided to depict his hunting adventures on a cave wall; but that doesn’t mean we should take it seriously, they said.

Meh. I’m not about to redo my business cards (I’ve still got a couple of boxes to get through yet). Yes, storytelling shouldn’t be defined in relation to the latest app or other digital development; that’s something the critics and I agree on. However, that isn’t because I think such claims overstate the power of story, but that they greatly understate it.

The Language of the Brain

I still believe storytelling is far more than just another optional creative choice. It goes beyond language (something else increasingly treated as an optional extra in some places).

Stories tap into the ways in which our brains process information by interpreting context, relevance and meaning. Without meaning, we can’t predict possible outcomes, and our ability to imagine and predict outcomes is how we make decisions. In many ways, stories replicate the brain’s continual hunt for meaning, providing a framework to guide our attitudes, beliefs and decisions.

What is a great value proposition if not a basic form of story? When M&M’s uses the line “The chocolate that melts in your mouth, not in your hand” the brand has told you a very simple story, complete with a protagonist (you), a goal (chocolate) a barrier to overcome (messy hands) and an outcome (yummy). It could have just listed the candy shell and left it to the reader to interpret the significance, and many brands do just that. They list features and even describe vague benefits without relating them back to the specific and personal experience of the reader.

Storytelling is the language of experience, whether it’s ours, someone else’s, or that of fictional characters.

Lisa Cron: Wired For Story

The Internal Storyteller

Even when we’re not presented with a story, our brains create one to help us to interpret the information, fill in the gaps and find relevant meaning.

If I’m shopping around for external hard drives, I might assess the various pieces of information provided to me by the marketers. Unfortunately, IT products are particularly notorious for providing raw information without any true context. They often rely too heavily on the technical specifications to sell the product. While I can compare price, appearance and other such features, these don’t tell me a great deal about my potential experience of the product. So how does my brain assess this raw information to decide which hard drive to purchase?

While the 3TB drive looks like a good deal, the 2TB drive is cheaper, leaving me enough to buy that new Doctor Who DVD as well. Tempting …

Hang on, though. Perhaps I’m working with more video than before, requiring me to store many larger files. So, if I buy the 2TB drive, I will probably fill it up and need to buy another drive in just a few months. The 3TB drive should last me longer, putting off the need to buy another drive until next year and stretching my dollar further. Maybe I should choose the 3TB drive …

But … I’m not familiar with that brand. I might not get the performance I’m used to. Having had a hard drive fail on me before, losing valuable data, this leads me to imagine a third option. Because the 2TB drive is cheaper, I could spend a bit more and buy two, allowing me to set up a redundant backup routine to protect my data if and when one should fail.

My brain just imagined three different scenarios – stories – to make sense of the information, apply context, assess its relevance to me, attempt to predict future outcomes and thereby help me to form a decision. If you were the marketer of the 3TB drive, you would prefer me to consider and imagine the second scenario. But because I’m only presented with raw information without context, the marketer has no way of ensuring I even think of that scenario, let alone consider it.

The decision isn’t based on a rational, dispassionate comparison of product specs. Most product comparisons are apples and oranges when it comes down to it. Do you care more about price or size, appearance or performance, colour or shape, trust in an established brand or the need to support new local startups? And how do you prioritise each of those? There is no right or wrong here, but by only providing raw information, the marketers of these hard drives have far less influence over the purchasing decision than they might hope (or their job description would suggest).

That’s why marketers need to tell stories, to suggest a relevant context that mere ‘facts’ such as tech specs and comparisons lack.

Within the brain, things are always evaluated within a specific context. So, as marketers and public relations specialists have long recognised, it’s important to always retain control of the context in which information is first learned.

Richard Restak, The Naked Brain

We’re not even always conscious that our brains are doing it. We remember the decision we took and may even remember the information that informed it. We may believe that a decision was entirely rational—the inevitable result of cold, hard logic. But that’s simply a form of choice-supportive bias.

In reality, stories are the working-out-in-the-margins that arrange the mess of information into an argument or idea that makes sense to us.

Our brains are storytellers, not computers

The M&M’s tagline might not have three acts and a complete hero’s journey structure of villains, mentors and obstacles. But those things only become necessary when your story is more complex, conveys many points or has to keep your attention for a longer period. There are many, many examples of short stories told in just a few words. Just because they don’t follow the same academic structures doesn’t make them any less so. Why? Because the story doesn’t exist on the page, but in the mind.

This is why I regularly use anecdotes and scenarios in my content, to give context to my information and ideas, including the opening of this post. Sure, I could have written this post as a banal five point listicle on why storytelling is important, sticking to the facts and statistics while linking to a few well-known examples, all presented with a clinical objectivity – but the irony would have killed me. From experience, I also know it would be far less readable and persuasive.

As the old writer’s maxim goes, “Show, don’t tell”. Instead of simply presenting the facts or stating what I think in the hope you will understand, I illustrate with stories.

Storytelling is part of the comprehension process, whether you like it or not. If stories are the language of our brains, how else should we want to communicate?

Filed Under: Featured, Storytelling Tagged With: brain, Lisa Cron, psychology, storytelling