Recently, I’ve been planning a business story development workshop that builds on insights from my 2022 paper in Organization Studies, with Neil Pollock and Luciana D’Adderio,”Extending entrepreneurial storytelling to new audiences.” This work has highlighted an interesting contrast between how analysts and commercial organizations approach storytelling, leading me to reflect on opportunities for cross-pollination between these different approaches. Our paper has sparked quite a discussion, with 36 academic papers already citing it.
Industry analysts and commercial organizations often approach storytelling from vastly different angles. While analyst firms’ peer review processes focus on methodological rigour, commercial organizations prioritize customer impact and actionable insights. Both approaches have merit, but there’s an opportunity for analysts to adopt some commercial storytelling practices without compromising their essential independence and accuracy.
The Traditional Analyst Approach
Industry analysts follow a research process anchored in methodological consistency. They spend months gathering data through surveys and interviews, analyzing market trends and technology capabilities. Their findings go through extensive peer validation before being presented in standardized formats. This methodology ensures accuracy and consistency but can result in findings that, while thorough, may not fully address the practical needs of technology buyers and implementers.
Commercial Storytelling’s Customer Focus
In contrast, commercial organizations often take an approach that begins with customer outcomes and works backwards. They prioritize messages based on both impact and supporting evidence. Their focus stays firmly on practical implementation steps. They connect technology choices directly to business strategy. Most importantly, they build their narratives around proven success stories. They use techniques like impact-vs-evidence matrixes to ensure messages are both compelling and credible, while maintaining strict word limits to keep communication focused and relevant.
Lessons for Industry Analysis
Analysts could enhance their research impact by adopting four commercial practices:
- Outcome-Based Structure Instead of organizing research around technology categories or market segments, analysts could structure findings around customer problems, outcomes and success patterns.
- Implementation Context Rather than evaluating technologies in isolation, analysts could more explicitly consider how investments fit into broader digital transformation journeys.
- Strategic Narratives While maintaining objectivity, analysts could help readers understand how technology choices support or constrain future strategic options.
- Practical Prioritization: Using impact matrixes could help analysts better communicate which findings deserve immediate attention versus longer-term consideration.
Bridging the Gap
The key is finding the right balance. Analysts must maintain their independence and methodological rigour while making their insights more actionable for technology buyers. This means incorporating more real-world implementation examples and providing more explicit decision frameworks. It involves offering more specific guidance on staging and sequencing technology investments. Analysts must strengthen the connection between technical capabilities and business outcomes while supporting co-creation between buyers and suppliers.
Moving Forward
We can combine the best elements of both approaches. This means maintaining analytical rigour while improving accessibility. It requires keeping independence while acknowledging practical realities. We must preserve methodological consistency while embracing narrative clarity. Above all, we need to stay objective while offering actionable guidance.
Conclusion
Industry analysts provide essential insights for technology buyers. Adopting some commercial storytelling practices could make these insights even more valuable without compromising their fundamental role. The goal isn’t to make analyst research more commercial but to make it more immediately useful for the organizations that rely on it.
The key is remembering that even the most thorough analysis only creates value when it helps organizations make better decisions and achieve better outcomes.
