Robert Wilson

#364: How to Make Your Complex Story Simple and Compelling

#364: How to Make Your Complex Story Simple and Compelling

Albert Einstein reportedly once said, “Everything should be as simple as it can be, but not simpler.”

The same can be said for communications.

How do you share a complex idea as simply as possible while still communicating the depth of your knowledge or offering? As a business communicator, you no doubt tackle this complex-to-simple challenge every day.

So in this episode, we will explore how academia uses storytelling to engage students studying complex subjects, in this case, geography.

Robert Wilson is an associate professor in the Department of Geography and the Environment in the Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs at Syracuse University. He teaches courses on environmental history, animals and society, and climate history and politics. 

Learn about the popular storytelling course Bob created called Writing Geography, a creative non-fiction writing seminar for MA and Ph.D. students. Not only does his course serve geographers but also attracts students from the social sciences, humanities, natural sciences, and business.

We explore how to use stories to convey abstract information and how scientists, academics, engineers and other professionals dealing with complex subject matter can use narrative to captivate their audiences and move them to action.

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Jim Kraus

#363: How to Use Storytelling to Create Authentic Buyer Personas

#363: How to Use Storytelling to Create Authentic Buyer Personas

You know that the deeper you understand, empathize with, and appreciate your prospects and what they want and need, the greater success you’ll have converting them into life-long customers.  

But you’re not a mind reader.

So how do you take the guesswork out of truly connecting with your buyers from their point of view?  

You use storytelling methods to truly embrace the stories your prospects are telling themselves about you, your offering, and even your competitors.

Known as a creative, result-oriented market insights professional, Jim Kraus shows you how to use storytelling to truly understand what your prospective customer believes and values and what motivates them to buy your product or service. As President of the Buyer Persona Institute (BPI), Jim is currently focused on enhancing the value its core buyer persona business delivers to clients.

He has three decades of experience managing high-performing market research teams on the supplier and client side including IBM, Prudential, and Guardian Life. In that time, he’s worked on hundreds of studies that directly inform marketing, sales, and product strategy with a particular focus on understanding buyer attitudes and behaviors in markets involving more complex purchase decisions.  (more…)

Abbey Lunney

#362: How to Avoid the Cost of Miscommunication

#362: How to Avoid the Cost of Miscommunication

Earlier this year, The Harris Poll and Grammarly published a startling report that found American Businesses losing $1.2 trillion annually because of miscommunication. And as our hybrid work world grows, effective communication is more important than ever…and more costly than ever if you don’t get it right. 

But you can overcome these communication challenges by knowing where to look for them in your organization and by learning how to become a more confident and compelling storyteller.

A data-driven storyteller, Abbey Lunney, co-author of  The State of Business Communication: 2022 Trends, highlights what miscommunication might be costing you and your business. Abbey is the Managing Director of the Thought Leadership Practice at The Harris Poll, a global consulting and market research firm that delivers social intelligence for transformational times.

She builds research-driven insights for clients across industries such as finance, automotive, education, health, and entertainment. Designed to capture emerging tensions and trends from a future-forward lens, her work has been featured at Davos, Cannes, and SXSW, among others.

Tune in as Abbey discusses the findings of two recent studies, The State of Business Communication and The Future Ambition. She shares how these two reports portend the future of business and how clear, confident and compelling communications through storytelling is the way forward.

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Bob Hoffman

#361: Ad Contrarian Bob Hoffman on Brand Storytelling

#361: Ad Contrarian Bob Hoffman on Brand Storytelling

Ask 100 marketing consultants how to build a successful advertising and they will give you one thousand ways to do it. But today’s guest suggests that branding success comes down to one thing: fame. He’ll even give you three ways to achieve the fame for your brand you seek. 

Bob Hoffman is a best-selling author, speaker and advisor and one of the most sought-after international speakers on advertising and marketing.

Bob has made a second career calling B.S. on the ad industry’s rush to digital mediocrity. As a grizzled veteran of the advertising front lines, Bob Hoffman has written five books about advertising, each of which has been an Amazon #1 seller. He has graced the stages in 24 countries sharing his own lovably caustic insights on the advertising world. Hell, in 2021 he braved COVID to speak to members of the British and European Parliaments.

Before leaving the advertising business, Bob was the chief executive of two independent ad agencies and the US operation of an international agency.

Business Insider named Bob’s blog, The Ad Contrarian, one of the world’s most influential marketing and advertising blogs. His commentary has appeared in the BBC World Service, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, MSNBC, The Financial Times, New Zealand Public Broadcasting, Fox News, Forbes, Canadian Public Broadcasting, and many other news outlets throughout the world.

One of his books, BadMen: How Advertising Went From A Minor Annoyance To A Major Menace exposed many of the dangerous privacy abuse practices that have gone on to make international headlines. It was selected “Best of Marketing 2017”. (more…)

Jason Falls

#360: How to Use Storytelling in Your Influencer Marketing

#360: How to Use Storytelling in Your Influencer Marketing

So many brands are counting on influencer marketing for business success. But how do you determine whether a creator is a good fit for building awareness about your brand and will tell your story the way you intended to tell it in the first place?

It’s not about the influencers, but the influence. It’s focusing your efforts on collaborating with people who are persuasive to your audience.

He’s called a thought leader and an expert but has also been called bad names by trolls. Jason Falls, is a leading digital strategy for Cornett, a full-service advertising agency based in Lexington, Ky., named the Southeast’s Small Agency of the Year by Ad Age in 2021. 

There, Jason leads digital strategy and hosts two marketing podcasts, Digging Deeper and Winfluence. His work has touched a number of major brands and has been recognized with several national and many regional awards including a 2020 Shorty Award for his influencer marketing work. 

His third book, Winfluence: Reframing Influencer Marketing to Ignite Your Brand, was published in February 2021 from Entrepreneur Press. He is also the executive producer of the Marketing Podcast Network.

Listen as Jason shares how to use storytelling to ignite your influencer marketing success, why you need to shift your thinking from “influencer” marketing to “influence” marketing, how to leverage influential people to help tell your story and the two major shifts he sees coming in influence marketing. (more…)

Richard Newman

#359: How Body Language and Voice Skills Make Your Stories Sing

#359: How Body Language and Voice Skills Make Your Stories Sing

It doesn’t matter how seasoned a presenter you are whether you’re presenting on a large stage, delivering a speech in a boardroom, or preparing for a critical sales pitch in a virtual chat room  – presentations require an incredible amount of skill. But it means absolutely nothing if you lack the congruency in your delivery. You need to stop discounting your non-verbal cues to motivate your audience to take action.

Communication expert, Richard Newman demonstrates how to use body language and voice skills to create greater impact with your business and leadership storytelling in his best-selling book, You Were Born to Speak. Richard is the founder of Body Talk, a global leader in evidence-based courses on the psychology of communication helping business leaders around the world with their communication skills on the biggest stages. He even had one client win over $1 Billion in new business in one year, using his own techniques. 

Richard had to learn all this from scratch because he is not only highly introverted but was diagnosed with high-functioning autism. He was painfully shy as a child, at age 18, he started his mission to discover the core communication principles. He went to live in the foothills of the Himalayas with Tibetan monks, who spoke no English. They had to communicate non-verbally to understand each other. He then worked as a professional actor, studying how to walk, move and speak to increase his impact on an audience. He became a keynote speaker, coach, author and speechwriter, winning the coveted Cicero Grand Prize for Best Speechwriter of the Year. (more…)

Brad Smart

#358: How to Use Storytelling to Recruit and Retain High Performers

#358: How to Use Storytelling to Recruit and Retain High Performers

As a leader, your goal is to recruit and retain the best talent. If you can truly believe the career stories your prospects tell you then you can confidently add the right A-players to your team. 

But you may be miss-hiring more often than not because you’re buying into the fictional story your recruit is pitching you. In fact, today’s guest suggests that more than half the time you are hearing untruths about a person’s background.

Therefore, you can attract and retain only top performers using the five simple techniques that we will explore on today’s show.

Better known as the #1 expert in the world on hiring, Brad Smart is the founder of Topgrading Inc. and author of six best-selling books on hiring. Brad completed his Ph.D. in Organizational Psychology at Purdue, worked for a firm of psychologists that assessed candidates for senior positions, and left to start what now is Topgrading, Inc. Topgrading is known for having dozens of case studies, documenting small and large companies that have tripled their success hiring high performers, A Players. 

He is recognized as an expert on hiring, having written 6 books on the subject, all bestsellers. His 7th book, Foolproof Hiring, will be released in early 2023. This book distills Brad’s experience into the 5 simplest, most effective ways to avoid costly mis-hires.

Join us as we dive deeper into these five common-sense solutions to hiring top performers to grow your business, how storytelling plays an important role in the hiring process, how to use the Truth Motivator and his amazing technique of teasing out a prospect’s origin story that reveals the truth about them. (more…)

Richard Gillingwater

#357: Which Personality Archetype Best Tells Your Brand Story?

#357: Which Personality Archetype Best Tells Your Brand Story?

Just like us, brands are a complex expression of many different personalities and behaviors depending on what we’re communicating and who we are communicating with. If you can unearth your personality archetype, then you can tell your stories in more powerful ways that make it more believable, distinct and emotionally engaging for your audience – better connecting with them in a honest and primal level.

The Managing Director of Emotional Branding, Richard Gillingwater shows us the importance of defining the authentic character archetypes for your brand to enhance your business storytelling. Richard is also the founder of RADNB, a personality archtyping mapping tool and database of over 2,000 brands. Each brand is mapped through the lens of 60 archetypes and their unique look and feel. Developed with Imperial College London, this is a tool for Researchers, Creatives, Strategist, and Brand Managers alike to help you find your primary and supporting archetypes. 

Richard was trained as a graphic designer, as an experienced marketer and brand consulting working with some of the largest ad agencies in the UK, and he’s an ardent student of behavioral science. This gives him the advantage of having both a foot in the creative and strategic world of branding.

Richard’s new RADNB is the first database of its kind that “tunes into” the look and feel of a brand’s communication and it’s narrative to identify the 60 unique archetypes. The traditional model was too limited and inflexible for brands that had multiple sets of core values and needs. He not only found that these archetypes were out of date, but they weren’t reflecting the core needs of a brand if it was multifaceted.database was born out of the frustration of what currently exists and the lack of credibility. (more…)

Jeramie McPeek

#356: Telling the Super Bowl LVII Story in Social Media

#356: Telling the Super Bowl LVII Story in Social Media

The Super Bowl is one of the most anticipated sporting events of the year. Getting the audience excited about the big game all year round isn’t the easiest thing to master. But for the story to win and not fumble on game day, it’s all in the conversation that you’re driving in advance of and after the Super Bowl.

One man who knows the high stakes involved in being fully in charge of keeping the premier sporting event’s story alive way before, during and after the big game is Jeramie McPeek. Jeramie is an award-winning thought leader, journalist, speaker and digital consultant, with more than two decades of experience telling stories and achieving business objectives through traditional print, online, social and mobile channels.

After spending 24 years with the Phoenix Suns, most recently as VP of Digital & Brand Strategy, Jeramie launched his own consulting business in October 2016, Jeramie McPeek Communications. He has worked for such iconic sports brands as the NFL, NBA, WNBA, Fiesta Bowl, YouFit Health Clubs, Talking Stick Resort Arena, as well as non-sports entities including Dignity Health AZ, FamilyLife ministries. He has also worked with a number of high-profile individuals such as a U.S. Senator, a celebrity chef and a pro wrestling legend.

Named one of the country’s top 30 online sports marketers in 2014, Jeramie has been a featured or keynote speaker at more than 30 conferences throughout the country, as well as overseas in Amsterdam, Melbourne, Dublin, London, Berlin and Slovenia.  (more…)

Jay Steinfeld

#355: How to Leverage Brand Fiction for Real ROI

#355: How to Leverage Brand Fiction for Real ROI

No matter your role, everyone is in sales. You want to be able to draw your people into your vision so you can inspire them to action. But it all starts by getting them to buy into a fictional story. A story they can truly live into that will soon be reality.

Then your job is to turn that fiction into reality.

Founder and former CEO of Blinds.com, Jay Steinfield demonstrates how to cast the spell of storytelling to grow your people, ignite your revenue and achieve the impact in the world you seek in his book, “Lead from the Core: The 4 Principles for Profit and Prosperity” a Wall Street Journal Best Seller. 

As the former CEO of Blinds.com, the world’s number one online window covering retailer, it was boot-strapped in 1996 for just $3,000 from his Bellaire, Texas garage. Blinds.com was acquired by The Home Depot in 2014. Jay remained as its CEO and later joined The Home Depot Online Leadership Team. After stepping away from these roles in early 2020, he teaches entrepreneurship at Rice University’s Jones Graduate School of Business and has increased his involvement on numerous private company boards and serves as a director of the public company Masonite (NYSE: DOOR). He also supports numerous charities.

Jay is an Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year and has earned a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Houston Technology Center. He is active as an industry speaker on topics including corporate culture, core values, how to scale a start-up, and disruption, he has more than 100 published articles and writes a column for Inc.com. (more…)