Hello, my fellow product marketer! I'm Pedro Bojikian, and I'm super pumped to share my storytelling advice with you. I consider storytelling a big force in my career as a PMM. I love to take the stage to deliver product demos or talk about our product vision – always with a passion and curiosity for storytelling.

I’m going to share some thoughts on how I approach storytelling, but before we begin, I want to let you know that I based today’s case study on Shawn Achor’s TED Talk, ‘The happy secret to better work’.

If you haven't watched it yet, please do; you’ll get much more value out of this article. Plus, it's really funny.

My favorite storytelling books were also a huge inspiration for this article.

  • Invisible Ink: A Practical Guide to Building Stories that Resonate by Brian McDonald
  • Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die by Chip Heath and Dan Heath
  • Pitch Anything by Oren Klaff
  • The Catalyst: How to Change Anyone's Mind by Jonah Berger
  • Making Numbers Count: The Art and Science of Communicating Numbers by Chip Heath and Karla Starr
  • The Power of Myth by Joseph Campbell

I’ll only get into the first three today, but I highly recommend that you go and read them all.

A lot of people read these books, and a lot of people read articles like this one. However, reading is not enough. In my experience, the PMMs who excel at storytelling are the ones who keep these books close. They're constantly consulting them, rereading them, and applying what they learn every day.

It's a constant exercise. With time, you’ll find the frameworks you like the most for different situations until, eventually, you create your own framework that borrows a little from each. That's when the magic happens.

Let's get started.

Opening your narrative

We’re going to dissect the most important storytelling devices of this talk.

My first question to you is, what do you think is powerful about the way Shawn Achor opens this narrative?

When I was seven years old and my sister was just five years old, we were playing on top of a bunk bed.

When you start your narrative, it's like you have permission to put VR goggles on your audience. You need to invite them to embark on this adventure with you and share your worldview.

That’s exactly what Shawn does here. People are wired to listen to stories. It's how we survived as a species, sharing knowledge from generation to generation through stories told by the fire.

People are wired to listen to stories. It's how we survived as a species, sharing knowledge from generation to generation through stories told by the fire.

A good example of how stories help us to think about a subject is the legend of the apple falling on Isaac Newton's head. It paints a picture that invites us to learn more. That's why teachers around the world start with the apple story and not with “The particles attract each other with a force that is directly proportional to the product of their masses.”

Framing is key

If you take just one thing away from this article, make it the concept of framing. To win your audience, you need to control the narrative frame. People receiving your message have different narratives in their minds.

For example, the price might be top of mind for your audience, while you are interested in highlighting the superior quality of your product. From the beginning, you need to establish a worldview that will favor the point you want to make.

Chekov, the brilliant Russian writer, said that if you show a gun in the first act, you have to use it by the third act. The opening sets the path for your narrative to resonate with people. If you walk off that path, people are no longer going to be sure that they’re super excited about your story.

Let’s get back to Shawn’s story. At this point, according to his version of events, Amy has fallen off the bunk bed, without any help from her brother at all.

I saw my sister's face, this wail of pain and suffering and surprise threatening to erupt from her mouth and wake my parents from the long winter's nap for which they had settled.
So I did the only thing my frantic seven-year-old brain could think to do to avert this tragedy – and if you have children, you've seen this hundreds of times – I said, "Amy, wait. Don't cry. Did you see how you landed? No human lands on all fours like that. Amy, I think this means you're a unicorn."

Shawn does a very subtle but brilliant thing: he frames the story as being about human nature. This talk is about scientific research. It could be full of data and analytics, but he's not talking to a technical audience, so that wouldn’t land well.

Instead, when Shawn says, “If you have children, you've seen this hundreds of times,” he's inviting the audience to trust what they know to be true, rather than needing to be convinced by research data. That's very intentional, and he stays on this path over the course of his talk.

If you take just one thing away from this article, make it the concept of framing. To win your audience, you need to control the narrative frame. People receiving your message have different narratives in their minds.

Making your case

Let's move into the second act of this narrative and see how Shawn makes his case.

When I started talking about this research outside of academia, with companies and schools, the very first thing they said to never do is to start your talk with a graph.
The very first thing I want to do is start my talk with a graph. This graph looks boring, but this graph is the reason I get excited and wake up every morning. And this graph doesn't even mean anything; it's fake data.

We all receive more messages than our brains can process, and our attention quickly wanders when we’re overloaded with information. Saying or doing something unexpected is a great tactic to win that attention back.

For example, most people tune out when they listen to the safety message on the plane, right? But if the flight attendant changes the script and says something like, “There are 50 ways to leave your lover but only three ways to leave this plane,” people will notice and they’re more likely to remember what the flight attendant says.

We all receive more messages than our brains can process, and our attention quickly wanders when we’re overloaded with information. Saying or doing something unexpected is a great tactic to win that attention back.

This is connected to how our brains work. If you want to get people to consider what you have to say, you need to get your message to the neocortex, which is the more rational part of the brain.

First, though, the message needs to go to the reptilian brain, the one responsible for fight-or-flight behavior. If something's unexpected, the reptilian brain may perceive it as a threat, which you of course want to avoid.

When you use humor, as Shawn did, you show your audience’s reptilian brains that you're not a threat, so they lower their defenses and open up to what you have to say.

And it's not only humor that works. There are a few different tactics you can use; you can show vulnerability, for example. What's important is that you put your audience at ease and show that you're not a threat.

A good story has armature

This is the second most important idea in this article: a good story has armature. I’ll show you what I mean with an example from our friend, Shawn.

During the first year of medical training, as you read through a list of all the symptoms and diseases, suddenly you realize you have all of them.
I have a brother-in-law named Bobo, which is a whole nother story. Bobo married Amy the unicorn. Bobo called me on the phone from Yale Medical School and Bobo said, “Shawn, I have leprosy,” which even at Yale is extraordinarily rare, but I had no idea how to console poor Bobo because he had just gotten over an entire week of menopause.
See, what we're finding is that it’s not necessarily reality that shapes us, but the lens through which your brain views the world that shapes your reality. If we can change the lens, not only can we change happiness, but we can change every single educational business outcome at the same time.

I’ll give you another example, this time from Steven Spielberg, one of my favorite storytellers.

In his movie Jaws, the main character is afraid of the water right from the beginning. The notion of conquering his internal fears is what connects the whole movie. The shark is really an external representation of his internal fears.

A good story has armature.

In Shawn’s TED Talk, all the anecdotes that he uses help to build the notion that it's not reality that shapes us; it's how we view the world that shapes our reality. It's both his main point and the connecting tissue throughout the presentation – that's a very good best practice.