Economic Stories Told by Silverware

Dollar Street's work to use photographs and video to extract the meaningful narrative from inaccessible economic statistics is deeply persuasive. It is essentially a work of translation, taking complex metrics and affixing them to real people. You can imagine the evolutionary tree of storytelling inherent in this work. First there are the statistics. Then the statistical results are explained in accompanying text. Then, since that text is so dense and technical, there are graphic representations - charts and graphs. But none of these actually discuss the day-to-day lives of actual human beings, and so the meaningfulness of the research to a layperson audience is weak. But the final step of putting a human face on the work and correlating the comparisons to actual snapshots of families drives the point home.

Check out this Tedx video that walks you through the comparisons. This is what brand strategy is all about - connecting with your audience on an emotional level to help the understand your value.