The Seven Habits of Highly Effective Storytelling IV: Follow Your Folly

By Chris Terry

Vice President, Communications Strategy

Telemetry

The fourth habit of my “Seven Habits of Highly Effective Storytelling” is one everyone can practice using their own interests and knowledge.  “Follow Your Folly” calls every PR and marketing professional to tap into their own hobbies and passions to create analogies, comparisons, and contextual links to newsmaking opportunities.

How does that work?

In story mining with Ford’s powertrain engineers, I learned that the Focus ST hot hatch had an “overboost” feature. This feature used software to give drivers an additional 15 seconds and 1,500 rpm of peak torque before the blowoff valve bled off boost.

“Get Out of the Category and Into the Culture”

In our weekly brainstorming meeting, I told colleagues that it reminded me of software available to PC gaming enthusiasts who built their own computers (guilty) and used a similar feature to “overclock” their CPU for added performance.  In both instances, performance was judiciously added, as too much overboosting/overclocking could lead to thermal failure and broken machines; such is the nature of hotrodding. 

It was a fun, roughly analogous comparison (the turbo engineers thought it was clever, if not a bit random).  Importantly, we had a reason to go after tech and gaming media — i.e., non-auto enthusiast media — to reach younger, educated drivers who otherwise might not have read about overclocking or the insane performance bargain that was the 2012 Focus ST (clean, non-clapped-out examples are still out there).

The analogy worked for enough media that our leadership thought this a success. Google’s AI Overview still connects overboost with “overclocking” the ST. The lesson here is that everyone’s own interests can be brought to bear on storytelling with enough imagination and creativity.

If you have a product or service that needs to be “overclocked” or rebooted entirely, please contact us.