The pitch

 

Vox Populi captures and presents stories with strategic purpose.

Whatever you’re trying to communicate – a brand message, a sales pitch, a social idea, a new corporate direction – stories are the most powerful way to engage people.

Why stories?

Data and analysis are the standard tools for business and public policy. They’re useful for acquiring information. Essential for protecting your posterior. But useless for actually communicating anything. You can ‘present’ facts and figures all day, but you won’t get action until you engage people’s emotions (and that is a neurological fact!*).

Evidence of the power of stories is all around us: in TV news and current affairs, Australia’s top five magazines (food comes next), virtually every successful TV commercial.

Stories engage people intellectually and emotionally. So they tend to stick.
And they lead to action.

Stories also have a long life. Unlike last year’s ad campaign, they don’t go out of fashion or get boring. In fact they get re-told. Over and over again.

  1. ✴Neurologist Donald Calne puts it like this: “The essential difference between emotion and reason is that emotion leads to action while reason leads to conclusions.”
    You don’t need to be a brain surgeon to get that.

Authentic, relevant, well told.

  1. “Authenticity is the post-modern elixir. In an age of …mass-marketed pop product - we have a  longing, a craving for… authentic people.”
        Po Bronson: best-selling social documenter

At Vox Populi, we don’t make up stories. We find them. We start with your strategic objectives; research potential stories; capture those stories in personal or telephone interviews; then, edit, craft and present them.

A real story is a world away from those canned ‘feel good’ quotes you’ve skimmed in a million annual reports – and promptly forgotten

When a story belongs to a real person, in a real situation, it has real power.

  1. In just a few more years, the current homogenized "voice" of business—the sound of mission statements and brochures—will seem as contrived and artificial as the language of the 18th century French court. Already, companies that speak in the language of the pitch, the dog-and-pony show, are no longer speaking to anyone.   
    Cluetrain Manifesto www.cluetrain.org


So what do you do with these stories?