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

Repetition

When we discussed the delivery plan in Chapter 13, we made a big point about planned repetition of the story. If you want to influence behavior, you must keep telling the story using different approaches, different media, and at different times, long after you might have thought you would be finished. Advertisers know this. To get a message to stick so people take action requires repetition. This probably sounds obvious to you, but again and again we see senior managers say something a few times, send a follow-up email, and then wonder why people do something other than what they clearly said should be done!

Many parents would recognize that repetition can sometimes lead to the recipient tuning out the message. You avoid this, firstly, by using as many different approaches and variations as possible, and secondly, by always asking the audience to do something at the end of every telling of the story.

When you've gone through the CAST process to work out what you want to do, the story will seem reads the story, they're doing so without the benefit of all that time you had to process it, and they must handle other distractions at the same time. To you the story is important. Your audience must take it in and believe in the sense of urgency you portray. There's a big difference between you saying something and your audience actually hearing it.

So when you think the repetition is getting excessive, hold that thought, and tell the story just one more time.