Stories that Move Mountains: Storytelling and Visual Design for Persuasive Presentations

Personification

More than half the visual stories we've been involved with have included at least one character that is a personification of a problem people face: a force of nature, corporate culture, business processes, or government regulation. Usually, this character is the villain, but in some cases, it has also been the hero. Where we want to show the conflict between two forces, such as the drivers for centralization or federation of a business, we've created these opposing forces as hero and villain, and influenced the audience to support changes required for a change in direction.

In 1967, Komatsu was a fairly small Japanese manufacturer of earth-moving vehicles, with a vision to transform itself into a global business. A major global player called Caterpillar already dominated the industry and was targeting the same market. Komatsu created a corporate story based on the “Overcoming the Monster” basic plot and portrayed Caterpillar clearly as the monster or villain. They created a story and a slogan, “Maru-C,” which means Surround Caterpillar, to remind their employees of their strategy to capture territory in markets where Caterpillar had not yet become established. Today, Komatsu is the second largest manufacturer in the industry.

We often hear that we should not judge a book by its cover. This phrase exists because that's exactly what we do most of the time. A study in 2012 by Dr. Simon Laham at the University of Melbourne identified that people are more likely to ...