The Synthetic Storyteller

What if you could find out the story your new brand or your new innovation will tell for consumers – before you launch it?

Every story is a remix. A chopped-up, blended-down, mixed-together, thrown-around combination of elements from every other story you’ve ever heard. There’s no Succession without King Lear; no Avengers without Gilgamesh. No Beatles without Beethoven and no Damien Hirst without Georgia O’Keeffe.

Everything new is a function of what came before it.

According to Barthes, there is no ”specific origin” to a piece of work as it gains influences across all of time and is inextricably linked to all literature, so is in no way ”original”… ”It is language which speaks, not the author” and the death of the author leads to the ”birth” of the reader (so there are infinite interpretations of literature).

So whatever narrative the market’s going to cook up about your new product is already out there. The ingredients are swirling like chemical precursors around the insides of their heads. The culture has programmed their reactions already, and everyone is ready to respond as soon as you launch. Will a pearl crystallize around your grain of sand, or will your launch pull the pin of a grenade blast?

You’d like to find out before it’s too late, right?

How about if you could reach out and examine those story elements inside people’s heads? And then use AI to forecast how they’ll come together in predictable patterns, triggered by your new concept or brand?

How about using those stories to forecast the future of your category? Look ahead through the consumer’s eyes and envision the world ten years from now?

This is what the Synthetic Storyteller can do.

How does Apple make an iPhone? It starts with a bucket of sand.

The precision machinery in Apple’s factories and its suppliers apply energy to break down that sand into its fundamental components – the silicon atoms and other minerals that make up every grain of it. Then they put them back together in the right order, power-engineered to form memory chips, processors, communications aerials, high-strength glass – ultimately creating the phone you have in your pocket.

Instead of sand, we gather consumer stories. Our AI and survey tools break them down, using the universal rules of narrative structure, into the fundamental elements of story: events, causes, actors and values.

Then we reassemble them, building a web that captures the structure of your category and the products and brands that sit within it. From that web you can read off…

• the barriers that stop people choosing your product
• the opportunities and white spaces available for your brand to access
• the races where your competitors are ahead of you
• the stories you need to tell, to win the game

The Synthetic Storyteller can tell those stories for you. Providing the genius creative input that might just make your product the next billion-dollar launch.