Elias Veris
Recently, I had to give a presentation to a couple of my friends. Most of them don’t give a lot of presentations, and the closest memories they have to presentations are those given by professors at university. Some exceptions excluded, most of them are not the greatest storytellers.
So I set out to show them what tricks we can learn from the greatest storytelling Walhalla in the world; Hollywood. And quite frankly, I think a lot of researchers can learn from them too. How many times have you started off a presentation with showing the main conclusions, before going into detail? Not a bad idea, if you have only 5 minutes and you want to get a key point across. But if you want to grab the attention of your audience, if you want them to eagerly await every next slide in search for a resolution of the tension that you so cunningly built up, don’t start with a conclusion. Start with showing them how much they should care about your presentation. That they have a problem, a huge problem, and that there are some solutions to their problem, that they can only find out if they listen closely to you. Ask questions, put challenges before them and unwind the solutions carefully. That is what market researchers can learn from Hollywood, where people get rich by making variations on the same basic theme. They’ve even consolidated it in a formula, that I use in the presentation.
Maybe it’s not always feasible to tell a story instead of showing results, I’m willing to accept that. Yet if we want to be a cool industry, let’s learn from Hollywood before our next presentation. It might help us, even if it’s just a tiny bit.
Elias Veris is a research consultant at InSites Consulting
