The chronicles of the consumer

Before the internship course started I was already an intern at Sumting for about 2.5 to 3 months. I started earlier because I wanted to test whether or not I wanted to do an internship at a starting organisation and because I wanted to be familiar with the people and the system before starting the internship. During this period of time I worked on some other projects that were really exciting but I did not mention them as they were not part of my ‘official’ internship. So see this as the director’s cut or bonus content of my internship.
During my pre-internship days at Sumting I helped them create personas and a storybrand. Personas are essentially segmentations of their audience. You start out with a demographics such as age, occupation, geographical area and socio-economic status. Afterwards you dig a little deeper and you try to find what they could want and like. For instance, if you are the clothes brand Nike. They could have a persona which is, 35, consultant, lives in Amsterdam and is highly educated and hails from an upper-middle class family. Now that they have the demographics, they should go deeper. Now they can split this persona up in two categories, someone that sports as a hobby or someone who sports because they want to live more healthy. To decide on this and how you are going to help the persona with your organisation is decided by the story book. During one of the meetings on the project of creating the personas, one of the supervisors mentioned that we needed to create a storybrand and showed us what it was.
The concept of a storybrand was created by Donald Miller, it is a way of storytelling for marketing communications. He suggested that the story of marketing messages should not be focused on the perspective of the organisation but from the consumers point of view. He said that the consumer should be the hero of the story when creating marketing messages. The chronicle of the consumer goes through seven chapters or steps: Our hero (1), has a problem (2), but meets a helping guide (3), who gives them a map (4), calls them to action (5), to avoid the failures (6) and help them to success (7). According to Miller, every ‘chapter’ must be present in your marketing message for it to work.
So the next friday, one of the supervisors had gone to an office supply store to get all the necessary stuff for a workshop. We had food, beers, markers, post-its and a huge sheet to write down ideas. It was a perfect way to mix both bonding events and work together. Eventually, we had written down a full stack of post-its with everyone’s ideas and started to filter them on whether it was relevant and actionable leaving the sheet filled with all sorts of ideas. That same sheet now hangs in the HQ room of the office to remind us of both the functional information it holds while writing external communication messages and how much fun we had while making it.