When Employees Reconnect With Purpose, Everything Changes.

Case Study | How Storyline Insights Sparked Unprecedented Employee Engagement

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

Market analysis uncovered a significant opportunity to grow within our client’s largest global customer segment. Realizing this potential required a fundamental shift in how each business unit understood and engaged with the customer. To drive this shift, leadership partnered with Storyline to launch a customer-driven initiative grounded in our narrative-based methodology. Through ethnographic engagements, meeting customers in their workplaces, we surfaced deep, actionable insights and synthesized them using Storyline’s proprietary storytelling framework. This revealed the full ecosystem through the authentic voice of the customer, presented in a format designed to educate, align, and inspire internal teams. The result: unprecedented employee engagement, renewed organizational momentum, and a global rollout of the approach through immersive Storyline-led workshops.

LARGEST CUSTOMER SEGMENT PRESENTS OPPORTUNITY - AND CHALLENGES

Leadership at a global B2B company turned to existing market research and uncovered a striking insight: 75% of their marketplace was reluctant to adopt cutting-edge technology. This group, typically late-majority adopters, was projected to grow nearly twice as fast as Innovators and Early Adopters.

Despite being the largest segment (45% of the global market), the company had only an 18% share. While they excelled with early adopters, they were steadily losing ground with this high-potential segment.

THE MAJORITY SEGMENT BECAME A PRIORITY

“It is our largest customer segment we have,” said the Vice President of Marketing. “If we are not successful in building products and services around their needs, we’re not going to be very successful in the future.”

Leadership recognized both the strategic opportunity and the challenge: to serve this segment effectively, the company needed to rethink how its business units understood the customer.

MORE DETAIL WAS REQUIRED

While initial assessments offered a broad view of this segment, they lacked the specificity needed to drive internal change. Most teams were still focused on the needs of innovators and early adopters, both culturally and operationally.

Statistical data alone wasn't enough. Leaders sensed they needed something more emotionally resonant and actionable to shift mindset and behavior across the organization.

A CUSTOMER-DRIVEN APPROACH TO INSIGHTS WAS INITIATED

Storyline was engaged to lead a customer-driven initiative, championed by the Senior Director of Customer Insights and Innovation. The objective: deeply understand this majority segment’s needs and buying behaviors, then use that insight to inform strategic decisions across:

  • Communication and messaging

  • Product and service roadmaps

  • Application and solution development

TIME PRESSURES EMERGED

The team faced mounting pressure to generate actionable insight fast enough to influence strategic reviews and product cycles.

“Time is marching on,” said the Senior Product Marketing Manager. “Competitors’ products are coming out and you have to feed the results down the development pipeline, otherwise you’re not going to make the next release.”

Recruitment added friction. The company’s legacy process - relying on sales reps to recruit participants - slowed the effort and strained priorities. “Everybody’s willing to help out, but to a point… it’s not their priority.”

POTENTIAL BARRIERS TO EMPLOYEE ENGAGEMENT

Driving alignment across the global organization would be critical to success, but early signs pointed to a lack of engagement.

Teams weren’t just siloed - they were disconnected from the research itself. Marketing Communications (MarCom), in particular, was expected to act on findings they hadn’t helped uncover.

“To have not seen the research, it typically takes a lot of time to get up to speed and really understand the customer,” said the Director of Global Integrated Communications. “And we didn’t have somebody looking from a communication perspective to the data that was coming in.”

Traditional methods—like PowerPoint—were seen as ineffective. Internal studies even revealed that slides had become “white noise” among field teams. 

STORYLINE BEST PRACTICE #1: Ethnography Delivers the Details

To address this disconnect and surface deeper insights, Storyline led a series of ethnographic engagements—on-site interviews with key personnel at five B2B customers.

Participants ranged from department directors to operations leads and tech-savvy professionals. Interviews lasted up to three hours, combining open dialogue, observation, and laddering techniques to uncover latent needs across areas like:

  • Vendor relationships

  • Training and installation

  • Purchase and service experience

  • The core of their business

The result? Rich, customer-voiced insight that gave texture and meaning to previously abstract market data.

“Rather than simply knowing quality is important, we got more examples, more tangible stuff,” said the Vice President of Marketing. “We now know what they mean when they say reliability and quality is important to them because we have the stories from the effort.”

Even more powerful: project stakeholders participated in the interviews themselves—building firsthand empathy and credibility in cross-functional conversations later on.

STORYLINE BEST PRACTICE #2: Insights Are Shared Through Narrative

Where most companies would default to slide decks, Storyline brought the findings to life using its proprietary narrative framework, designed to engage, align, and activate internal teams.

The Approach Included:

  • 1,500+ Verbatim Quotes, organized as facts vs. feelings

  • Individual Quote Cards with photos, demographics, and context

  • Affinity Clustering, revealing key themes and the customer journey

  • Oversized Storyboards, visually rich and emotionally resonant

The boards, spanning 18 panels, each nearly 8 feet tall, transformed conference rooms into immersive insight experiences. “This is a different way of thinking. This is a different way of doing business,” said the Senior Product Marketing Manager. “This is how we need to think going forward.”

The Director of Global Integrated Communications agreed: “You know what it says to me? We don’t believe in PowerPoints anymore.”

STORYLINE BEST PRACTICE #3: Customer Stories Connect Emotionally

Insights were presented not through data dumps—but through guided walkthroughs, rich with real customer stories. Stakeholders across Marketing, R&D, Finance, Sales, and HR participated in global workshops that built cross-functional understanding and seeded new product and service ideas. These ideas were later validated in customer testing.

The format didn’t just inform - it moved people. “People have been emotionally touched,” said the VP of Marketing. “People were enthusiastic about it, and that leaves an emotional impression.”

For MarCom, the impact was transformative. “People feel very connected to this market study,” said the Director of Global Integrated Communications. “I think the storytelling played a critical role… the presenters really engaged people.”

STORYLINE BEST PRACTICE #4: Insights Rolled Out Through Global Education

Given the success of the initial workshops, leadership invested in a full global rollout—replicating the experience in multiple regions. Each location received a full set of the storyboards, allowing teams worldwide to experience the research with the same level of intimacy and insight. “These workshops were very, very valuable,” said the VP of Marketing. “That is really a best practice… you need to address the bigger picture.”

CONCLUSION

This initiative did more than generate insight - it activated it. Through Storyline’s narrative framework, teams not only understood the customer - they felt them. And that feeling translated into momentum: emotionally engaged employees, new solutions in the pipeline, and a global organization aligned around what truly matters to its most important customer segment.