A recent poll stated that women spend 52 minutes a day gossiping - and before the men start sniggering, apparently they spend an average of 76 minutes daily spinning yarns with their mates. We tell stories to each other compulsively - to make sense of our experiences, to persuade others, or even just to entertain ourselves. Despite the prevalence of stories in our lives, we often don't know what to do with them in more formal situations. One response is to discount them entirely - ignore the stories, focus on the data, the evidence, the incontrovertible facts. There is nothing wrong with a focus on facts - but we've long known that human behaviour is not wholly rational. The goal of the researcher is actionable insight, not dry facts.

Another response is to focus on certain kinds of stories told by certain kinds of people - stories told by advertisers, filmmakers and professional storytellers. There are methods around for assessing the effectiveness of advertising and yet consumers do not spend all day reciting ads to each other, no matter how much some of us would like them to. Human stories are diverse and vary from the banal to the inspirational (and we should not discount the banal).

This article suggests a third way of using stories - working with the stories that consumers tell each other to understand their experiences. This approach has been primarily developed by the Cognitive Edge, a widely dispersed network of experienced professionals in private and public sector organisations, including academics, practitioners, in-house and commercial consultants (the author is an accredited member). The approach shares many similarities with ethnography and projective techniques - but also some important differences. There are two parts to the method: collecting stories and interpreting stories. However we should first clarify what a story means in this context.

What is a story?
The word story is used a lot in many different contexts. For our purposes, a story must have the three following things:

• Characters. They may not be mentioned explicitly but they are there.
• Location. It may be as simple as ‘once upon a time' but story has to happen somewhere and ‘somewhen'.
• Events. Things have to happen to the characters otherwise it is just a description.

Professional storytellers will say that stories should also include a clear protagonist, challenges and obstacles, strong emotional resonance, a satisfying conclusion, and so on. And for professionally told stories, they are right. Human beings do not, however, relate their lives as Oscar-winning movies.

There are also some common forms of speech that are not stories. Two that are commonly mistaken for stories are:

• Opinions. You may prefer apples to bananas but that is not a story. Telling us how that opinion was formed (e.g. when you slipped on a banana skin as a child) may be.
• Facts. ‘Brisbane is the capital of Queensland' is not a story. Telling us what happened to you when you last went to Brisbane is.

• Anecdote circles. You simply invite a group of people together and ask them to tell you their experiences concerning a topic for about an hour. It may look like a focus group except that you ask them not to provide opinion or analysis - just experiences. The facilitator poses the right question, steers people away from opinion and back to their experiences, and prevents one individual from dominating a group. Generally participants start awkwardly, take 20 minutes to get into the swing of things and then have to be told to stop at the end.
• Naive interviewers. Children make great story collectors because people (especially older people) will tell them anything. Equip children with an MP3 recorder and let them loose on their families.
• Mass narrative capture. People can contribute stories online. Typically when they do so, they are also asked to provide metadata around the story.

Collecting stories is not about finding the one perfect story that describes a brand or a consumer experience. Rather it is about gathering a broad spread of qualitative data. Individually a story may be seen to be banal but their power lies in the cumulative effect of many stories.

Interpreting stories
There are many opinions on who should interpret stories. These generally fall into three possibilities: experts, machines and participants.

• Experts. Semoticians often believe it should be left to the experts and qualitative researchers will be familiar with packages such as Nvivo that allow the coding of free text. The expert can identify patterns in narrative data but he or she provides only one perspective.
• Machines. Recent years have seen the emergence of semantic analysis and natural language processing tools. Such tools are still in their infancy and do not handle ambiguous texts like stories well. At best they can augment rather than automate interpretation.
• Participants. A third option involves asking the participants to find patterns in their own stories. Typically, participants identify generalised stereotypes or attributes and then create more specific archetypes from that (see Figure 1). Eager Eric (see Figure 2) is one such character that emerged in a workshop with government employees. The Traffic Jam (see Figure 3) is an archetypal situation faced by another group.

Story interpretation is best done by a range of groups (e.g. consumers themselves, a marketing department) that may have differing perspectives on the same situation. The most appropriate techniques often avoid direct analysis initially and allow different groups to immerse themselves in the stories to produce nuanced interpretations of the consumers' world.

What kinds of research questions can storylistening answer?
Like ethnography, storylistening is best used to make sense of complex, ambiguous situations. Stories are not a good replacement for choice modelling or traditional ad testing. Narrative project situations may have an emotional or cultural component. Stories are particularly good for exploring topics where direct questioning may be counterproductive - for example, narrative techniques have been used to explore drink-driving by Dutch teens and tax-evasion by tradesmen. If you want to bring storylistening into your research work then here are three suggestions:

1.    Start small - introduce story techniques as ‘seasoning' into a project.
2.    Pick a suitable topic - can you think of a story yourself related to the topic?
3.    Don't get hung up on the one, perfect story - embrace the ambiguous and the banal.

Matt Moore, from Innotecture, has a background in online collaboration and organisational development.

Extra reading
Cognitive Edge website: http://www.cognitive-edge.com/
Loser, hero or human being - Are you ready for emergent truth? Jochum Stienstra, Wim van der Noort. ESOMAR Congress 2008
Stop asking questions: Understanding how consumers make sense of it all. Jochum Stienstra, Dave Snowden. ESOMAR Congress 2007

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