Bant Breen:
Jarie, I’d love to hear your thoughts on the clients that you work with. When you’re talking about this funnel that you’ve developed, why is that important today? How are clients using that?
Jarie Bolander:
The clients that I focus on now, or I’ve been focusing on more lately are IoT smart homes and consumer medical devices. The reason is that consumer medical devices, smart homes, and IoT have a device and app cloud, it’s a very complex system. In the past, I used to invent this stuff. I intimately know exactly where things could go wrong. Funnily enough, there’s a pattern. One of the most important things about storytelling is you have to meet the prospect, the customer, the advocate, like where they are. They’re always in different stages of either knowledge, their ability to want to buy, or how they’re feeling about the product. When we map this all out, I specifically did this, because, with hardware companies, you ship a product, you get an app, you’ve got the cloud, you’ve got to log in that whole process. That whole onboarding kind of process, the whole education process is very poorly done now. What we found is that, if you say, “Okay, this is how I want this experience to be this is the story, I want my potential prospects to hear how I want to tell it,” you start to see a lot of these gaps. More importantly, you think, “Oh, how am I going to make this easier for people? How am I going to make it more enjoyable? How’s the onboarding process going to be so fast that they’ll say, ‘Wow, that was so easy.’” Then they’ll say, “Hey, you gotta try this.” right? The ultimate marketing is word of mouth, that’s the highest ROI. It’s the strongest, it’s the most loyal. Why not build a process, a framework to get to the ultimate end goal, which is like everyone says, “This is awesome” and they want to buy it.
Bant Breen:
What’s giving you the most joy these days? What’s making you happy?
Jarie Bolander:
I just love trying to figure out how to tell a better story, especially with new technology. I mean, I’m kind of a geek at heart, right? I just love gadgets and it’s interesting. I have a love-hate relationship with gadgets. There are times where I’m like, “Oh, gadget gadget gadget” then other times, I’m like, “What are all these idiot gadgets doing around that don’t even work.” What’s giving me joy right now is that I have a fiance now, which I’m so happy about. She has a daughter, an 11-year-old daughter, and she loves to read. She probably reads more books in a month than most people read in probably a couple of years. We’re starting to write together. We’re writing stories together and it’s cool because she’s a Harry Potter fan, Scooby-Doo. All those little things from our childhood. She’s watched Scooby-Doo. She’s watched the Brady Bunch. She’s watched Magnum PI, all the cool, best storytelling in the world. It’s fun to not only teach her about storytelling but learn what she likes. The broader sense of this is that I have felt this obligation. Now, it does give me joy beyond that, like is teaching the next generation coming up? My philosophy is if you’ve gone through something pretty horrible, or you’ve learned something, you’ve battled the dragon and came back with the gold, you better start telling people about it. You may think, “Oh, who am I?” I’m not some famous person or whatever but believe me, there is someone out there that’s either in the similar position that you were in struggling to figure out how to not feel so alone. Two, how to navigate this treacherous challenge in their life. Sometimes there’s this thing where you feel like a fraud or you feel like an imposter, like “Oh, who’s gonna let you know,” and just put that aside and start writing your experiences. For me, that’s, that’s been a huge amount of joy. That’s the reason why the story funnel exists.
Bant Breen:
Jarie, thank you so much for being on UNCAGED today and we look forward to having you back.
To see the full interview on the Uncaged YouTube channel, go to:
