How to make friends and influence people with digital storytelling? In the collaboration project between Saxion University of Applied Sciences and TUI Care Foundation – the Flavours of Málaga – we set out to explore how digital storytelling can be a way to unite people and build communities. As our key outputs, we told stories of women entrepreneurs and showcased them as something unique and attractive within the tourism industry.
The power of visual storytelling and digital media
In January 1896, the Lumière brothers presented to the public their work L’Arrivée d’un train en gare de La Ciotat, considered the first projected film in the history of mankind. This very short film lasted just 50 seconds and showed the arrival of a locomotive at the station in the seaside town of La Ciotat. The unprecedented nature of the images projected on a white canvas made the audience run and scream at what we can probably consider the first effective example of digital storytelling as we know it.
Fortunately, the terror lasted only as long as it took for the locomotive to stop in front of the station and after that, the event was nothing more than an anecdote. But it is this story of visual success that continues to influence us even today. This great instance of effective storytelling exemplifies how visual media, and later digital media, can be used to provoke emotions and even initiate action. If we are lucky, storytelling can also help establish new behaviors and even habits in viewers. Such behavioral changes are among the many reasons why digital storytelling is considered such an effective marketing tool.
Digital storytelling for and by women in tourism
In the world of tourism, provoking emotions, initiating action, and changing people’s thinking and behavior are very important objectives. A tourist destination is a three-dimensional representation of a story to tell, a culture to share and a place to discover. Digital storytelling can breathe new life into destinations and their cultures and communities – and change the ways in which people experience them.
The Flavours of Málaga project, co-funded by TUI Care Foundation and Saxion University of Applied Sciences, aimed to give a voice within the tourism industry to a group of women entrepreneurs from the neighborhoods of La Trinidad and El Perchel in Málaga. This initial group was later extended to include even more women entrepreneurs and selected businesswomen in tourism. These women were approached as bearers of a unique oral history and guardians of a gastronomic and cultural heritage of incalculable value.
Digital storytelling has the power to reach out, unite, and build communities
The fundamental goal of the Flavours of Málaga project was to give prominence to a sector of society that, for cultural and social reasons, is traditionally linked to menial jobs rather than managerial and responsible positions. From the very beginning, the project set its focus on digital storytelling as a way to reach out and unite.
We used digital storytelling to unite this very special group of women entrepreneurs. We also felt that storytelling would be a way to attract potential tourists of various nationalities, sensitive to the stories of the women entrepreneurs, to Málaga. To our surprise, we also found that it was an effective tool to reach out to our students.
From a marketing point of view, the use of digital storytelling proved to be as effective as expected. The project also demonstrated that digital storytelling can function as a ‘glue’ to create long-term collaboration between diverse stakeholders: the women beneficiaries, the project team members, students, locals, tourists, and other partners.
However, the venture was not an easy one, nor was it easy to sustain. The fundamental objective was to express a shared storyline and a common feeling of being a woman entrepreneur in tourism in Malaga, with its lights and shadows, its successes and frustrations. We also wanted to make that storyline representative of everyone and attractive to the outside eye, luring in other women who might want to join the project. While there were disparities in the women’s experiences, we also found similarities in their daily struggles.
Giving voice and authorship to women entrepreneurs
With our storytelling tools, articles, videos, interviews, and online collaborations, we experienced many logistical challenges (thank you COVID-19!), but we also encountered amazing opportunities to give a voice to women who, despite their talent and professionalism, are often silenced by an eminently ‘macho’ business culture. The use of digital storytelling contributed conclusively to giving voice to the women and to linking their paths in an inexorable way.
Visual media can carry power that is hard to resist. The lived stories upon which we built our narratives had such universal characteristics that they managed to create emotions in our diverse audiences. Approaching our digital stories as art, we must give their authorship to the legitimate owners. The women in the project not only proved to be the authors of their own stories but also guardians of a struggle for dignity in the world of tourism. Their story was worth telling. The project felt as if there was a locomotive arriving in a seaside village. We hope that the women protagonists of this story felt the same pride that the Lumière brothers felt back in 1896.
Text: Almudena González Gutiérrez de León, Saxion UAS, Hospitality Business School, the Netherlands
Image: The Flavours of Málaga project by TUI Care Foundation and Saxion UAS