THE PRINCIPLE

Providing a product or service in a new medium makes it new

Juliet Huck’s company, The Huck Group, is a Los Angeles graphic design firm with a unique mission: to make complicated courtroom testimony easy to understand. To this end they use magnetic boards, slides, illustrations, sound files – anything and everything that can present information in a clear and persuasive way.

As explained on their website (www.thehuckgroup.com), their process consists of making the complex simple, identifying key factors or ‘decision points’ in the story, and bringing the story to life by building layers of visual clues. It’s all based on the premise that people comprehend and retain visual information more effectively than verbal information.

The company practises visually persuasive story-telling in marketing their own business, too, using a storybook to explain what the company does and to show samples of their previous work. It has led to work on many high-profile cases and a turnover in excess of $1 million a year.

The heart of any marketing and sales effort, whether the audience is a jury, a funding entity or a single customer, is story-telling. What story do you want to tell and how can you tell it most effectively?