It’s New Year’s Eve night! My kids are bouncing around, yelling, and screaming — excited because Mom and Dad have agreed that they can stay up till midnight. The living room is loud, commotion everywhere. Annoyed, I grab the Roku remote, go to our Disney+ channel, and begin playing our movie. Within 30 seconds, the house is silent except for the movie playing. Everyone is engaged. If you think about it, that’s amazing. How can the family dynamic of a household of screaming kids and annoyed adults completely change in just a matter of seconds? It’s the power of storytelling in action.
Stories are so ingrained in our lives that for adults and children alike, a good story will stop us in our tracks and entertain to our delight. So what makes a good story related to your product(s) or service(s)? Let’s get started and dive into the elements of a good story.
The first step in our process is to have your hero (a.k.a. your customer) in mind. Before we go through the story’s framework, you need to have identified who your customers are and what problems and headaches occur in their lives. Click here to learn more about the customer discovery process.
Now that we have our hero in mind, we should focus on the SCQA framework. SCQA stands for situation, complication, question, and answer — essentially, this is our formula for building our story. Here are details about the four categories that are the focus of this framework:
Situation
The situation is a clear, crisp statement of the facts. It’s the current state of affairs as they are right now. It explains what’s going on in your hero’s life before the conflict.
Complication
As the conflict or problem, it’s the circumstance that has changed the situation that makes things harder for our hero. The complexity should cause concern for your customers.
Question
The question revolves around what our hero should do to solve the complication. What can our hero actively do to take part in resolving this issue?
Answer
The answer is the answer to this question — it resolves the complication. Yes, the solution involves your product or service, leading the way to solve your hero’s conflict.
That’s the formula — it’s pretty simple. Talk about the current situation from your hero’s perspective, identify your hero’s complication or problem, ask the question of what your hero should do, and conclude the story with the solution or answer to your hero’s dilemma.
In the next few articles, I will have some practical examples explaining the storytelling process. Stay tuned.
