If you’re in a creative or marketing role, your world has changed dramatically over the past few years. It is no longer enough to create beautiful product or a beautiful brand image: it is now critical for each discipline, in all functions, to be able to help others better understand your ideas, as the challenges presented by the new consumer and retail, present a myriad of choices and prices, and consumers demanding a meaningful connection with every brand they engage with.
As many of you know, we founded Fashion Tech Forum three years ago to address the need for the fashion and technology sectors to come together to gain a better understanding of how leaders from each sector were thinking about fashion and retail in the future. FTF was also created as an educational platform, designed to respond to the many needs of the creative and business communities KHC engages with everyday, along with the startups, that have been so key to the success of FTF.
To that end, we are very pleased to announce that on December 2nd, we are launching our Storytelling Workshop series, with the first one focused on Creatives and Marketers. Raising the voice of design has been one of the most important personal missions that Karen has been focused on, since she created this methodology as a way for creative leaders to find their own most powerful way to articulate their ideas. While storytelling has now become one of the most critical vehicles for brands to engage consumers, for creatives and marketers, it has always been an essential skill that many have struggled with.
Importantly, the Creative is always the one building the collection or product, based on his or her vision, and then he or she must work closely with the Marketer to create the experience for consumers to engage with.
As a Creative, the pressure has always been on you to "wow" the companies you work with, either internally or externally, so that the choice of which design direction to choose becomes clear. As a Marketer, you're required to build businesses with modern tools for engagement, which also makes storytelling more complex. However, designers have often believed that the work should speak for itself and that the right choice should be obvious when they present their work - unfortunately, for many reasons, this belief has always been a deterrent hindering designers from getting their best work created. Both designers and marketers need to honor their hard work by creating a presentation that is equally compelling as the product created so that selling your best ideas to your audiences becomes easier.
Today, many of you are falling into the category of hybrid talents - you might be trained as a graphic designer, but now you also enjoy UX Design, and the marketer, you may have been trained in strategy, but now you are required to drive consumers with modern tools for engagement. These are some of the issues that the Storytelling Workshop will discuss.
Topics include:
- changing mindsets: presenting innovative work to commercial teams
- connecting the dots between product creation, the consumer and brand engagement
- creating the story: how to customize presentations for each unique audience
- your own style: creating a storytelling framework that works for you
- examples, techniques and tools for effective storytelling
