3 Reasons Your Company’s Story Isn’t Creating an Experience

Good stories transport an audience somewhere else. They captivate their minds and senses. However, this is a tenuous grasp — it’s far too easy to break the spell and people’s attention. This could be from an external source, like a ringing cell phone or a crying baby, or your story itself.

If you confuse your audience or offend them with an inappropriate joke, it’ll be that much harder to land your message. There are three primary barriers we’re up against when it comes to trying to get an audience to experience a story: distraction, doubt, and disconnection.

1. Distraction

In the Disney-Pixar film Up, the two protagonists travel to South America where they meet a special golden retriever named Dug. Dug is special not because he’s unlike other dogs, but because he wears a special collar that translates his thoughts into speech. And his thoughts are very much what we might imagine hearing from a typical golden retriever.

Dug’s catchphrase, which has morphed into an online meme, is interrupting his own train of speech with random shouts of ‘Squirrel!’ The dog has perpetual shiny-object syndrome — or maybe in his case it’s bushy-tail syndrome. Dug’s simple-minded and easily-distracted nature is funny because it also represents the shortened attention span of…