Future of Storytelling and Digilogue Marketing

04 Jun 2012

When I was last in New York, I was in town for 43 hours. One of my absolute priorities was to make it into FSC Barber in West Village.

You might wonder why someone would invest 90 minutes in waiting for a clearing on a Saturday, and then spend another 90 minutes on man maintenance, when you only have 43 hours in town. And my hair wasn't even in such bad shape, and frankly, I don't have much facial hair growth to speak of.

The answer is - story. A good friend of mine in Sydney shared this video of the Sartorialist with me and said I needed to experience this little barber's shop in Manhattan.

So I did. When I reflected on my consumer decision-making, I was struck by the fact that this retail / service outlet did some things fantastically well:

FSC Barber were able to tell a story about the barber's history and artisan craft through the old school experience in-store
FSC Barber were able to entice me via the Sartorialist fashion and trend focussed blog which triggered a word of mouth recommendation from another customer (my friend Aaron) who had experienced the service
FSC Barber has such a good service and is such an interesting example of analogue, high touch, fist class service that Intel and the Sartorialist made a movie from it, directed by Tylwe Manson - big credits.

When I received this digilogue recommendation I could digitally windowshop and get a sample of the analogue experience via digital media

Whether they are aware of it or not, FSC Barber is a brilliant cross-channel/digilogue marketer, and while old histories and cultural DNA is respected, new media like Twitter and Video is also being used to engage with clients from around the world.

Without further ado, here is the Intel Video (which might make you wonder, why Intel is shooting videos of barbers and fashion photographers, but that's for another blogging moment).

What are your thoughts? What great examples of digilogue story-telling have you recently experienced? What does this imply for the future thinking of organisational thought leaders?

Think Tank

Future Thinking

Anders Sorman-Nilsson

Decoding Tomorrow:
Futurism and Foresights Today