No doubt, The Hero’s Journey is an interesting concept, and much can be learnt from it. Instead the theory merely lurks in the background, serving as a sufficiently complex verification that the experts do in fact have some justification for the conclusions they are drawing, even if they rarely explain the exact connection. However, the relevance of all this to the practical day-to-day job of communicating about projects, businesses, and causes is rarely unpacked. Certainly no-one who has absorbed the current wave of superhero movies would doubt the existence of a governing theory that produces a consistent narrative structure across all of them. The influence of Campbell’s work is undoubted – particularly on the film industry – where it is credited as an inspiration for Star Wars, The Matrix, and many other blockbusters. This was outlined most famously in his 1949 book, The Hero With a Thousand Faces. As a researcher, Campbell studied great myths and legends from across the world, and attempted to synthesise them all into one myth to rule them all a core archetypal structure behind all compelling human narratives. Where more depth is present, it often relies heavily on The Hero’s Journey, a ‘monomyth’ developed by the late American mythologist Joseph Campbell. More often than not, these are accompanied with dubious neuroscientific claims to the effect that we are ‘hardwired’ to find stories compelling, but rarely any real practical suggestions, or reasons why some stories might be more successful than others. However, attempts to advocate for ‘storytelling’ as a method, tend to consist mainly of paeans to the wonderful things that stories can self-evidently ‘do’ – inspire us, bring us together, help us see the future, and move us to action. That you need to gradually draw people in, make them intrigued and curious, rather than just immediately unloading your central message. Most obviously, if you are trying to connect with an audience, describing it through the lens of people’s experiences (or your own) can be far more emotive and powerful than raw information or statistics. The idea that you can just apply a simple method, and your business, your project, or your cause, could borrow some of the glamour and attractiveness of a Hollywood blockbuster, is a pretty compelling one.Īnd of course, there are many straightforward lessons here that still need learning. It’s not hard to see why this has happened. In particular, any organisation that sees itself as having a social or ethical cause is told that the key to their success is effective storytelling, though often with little definition of what exactly that means in practice. From merely being a descriptive category or an element of artistic production, storytelling has now become something we should all be doing, a method that everyone should master in the age of social media. More recently, it’s become a general way of discussing how authors create narrative forms of art across many mediums, from films to television, books to games, and the original, spoken form.īut in the last few years, a further use has emerged. In the most traditional sense, it describes the age-old act of telling tales, an oral tradition relayed in person, often involving a campfire. What exactly is ‘storytelling’? That is a more difficult question than it might at first appear. In the past, PhotoShelter for Brands has sponsored the Pioneer in Visual Storytelling Award at the HSMAI Adrian Awards Gala to celebrate a brand in the travel and tourism industry that has shown consistent commitment to using visual assets creatively in marketing and communication to tell its story.Ĭover photo by Matt Morgan courtesy of Utah Office of Tourism.It’s just a story – and it’s leading us astray It also shares practical tips for managing your brand’s media collection, strategies for sourcing, storing and organizing images and video, and examples of brands to watch in travel and hospitality. The report offers a clear picture of how hospitality and travel professionals source, share, access, use, and measure return on investment of visual assets, such as photography and video. PhotoShelter for Brands and the Hospitality Sales & Marketing Association (HSMAI) surveyed a total of 210 hospitality and travel professionals representing hotels, destinations, suppliers, agencies, and travel organizations to produce this special report, The Lifecycle of Visual Assets in Hospitality and Travel. Research shows visual storytelling is becoming increasingly important and pervasive in the hospitality and travel industry, but many brands are held back by the inflexible systems they use to organize and access visual assets.
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