"Storyscaping" ... new buzz word with worth wisdom on Storytelling

„Storyscaping“ is a beautiful designed book, written by Gaston Legorburu, World Chief Creative Officer of SapientNitro and Darren McColl, World Chief Strategy Officer of SapientNitro SapientNitro is the agency behind the award-winning campaign “The Best Job in the World” and the heafty job titel of both authors say everything about the deep thinking in this book.

Although the title of the book is a bit misleading. It gives the impression that this book is purely about storytelling. Iin some parts it refers to knowledge around crafting a great story. But after reading all 244 pages, 2 parts and 13 chapters my take away on this book is that it is more about “brand experience” than “storytelling”. But maybe that´s also the reason why Legorburu & McColl came up with the artificial word “Storyscaping”. A quite unusual word and I never fell in love with it – even after reading the whole thing.

Legorburu and McColl unveil a lot of insights around the advertising and communications business and how to come up with a state-of-the-art campaign. They talk about Sinek´s Golden Circles (“Start with Why”), they refer to Cameron´s movies such as Terminator, Titanic and Avatar and they even quote one of my favorite comedy move: L-A-Story.

Especially I love their idea of having an Organizing Idea instead of a Big Ideas as well as their preference for Systematic Thinking instead of randomly picking an insight. But I also must say some parts of this book are a bit challenging. There is great and inspiring thinking but also some kind of  “obvious thoughts”, where you ask yourself: “So what …?” and there are other parts of the book where clearly the authors have too much in mind. Just shortcutted their thoughts and leave it up to the reader to connect the dots.

On the other hand there are some cool, easy to use, pragmatic tools which marketeers and also PR people can use right away such as a”4-Step-Box to create Consumer Connections” or a “Insight Mining Map”. All this is worth to read.

The last chapter is a little bit too much “promoting their agency”. But hey, that´s the job of these too gentlemen. Overall is´s a great sneak preview into the way of working of a successful agency like SapientNitro and we should be thankful for the opportunity to look behind their curtains. My favorite quote: “”The first step to a great insight is having a very clear view of consumers.”