Story is the emotion that makes your company come to life in the eyes of your audience.
The terminology of storytelling has recently tipped into a marketing cliché. We’re all admonished to be storytellers, or to have a great story. The art of crafting a core narrative has fallen victim to the buzzword, and it has obscured the importance of the “why” in storytelling.
Storytelling is more than just a sleek veneer on stale marketing and sales strategies. It’s an approach proven over millennia of human history that, thanks to modern technology, has become more relevant than ever.
Most people on the planet grew up during the broadcast era: a time when television, newspapers, mail and radio offered relatively few channels for communicating with mass audiences. This was the dominant method of communication during the 20th century, but the truth is it’s an aberration for most of human history. Stretch the timeline out long enough, and modern communication methods are dwarfed by the time periods when humans relied primarily on in-person communications.
For most of human history, we communicated through the oral tradition. A person shared something with another person, and if it was interesting enough, they passed it on to a third person. And if it wasn’t, the message died then and there. It was survival of the fittest for messages.
In this environment, there’s one type of information that passed along most effectively: stories. Stories are memorable because they are emotionally resonant, and easy to take ownership of. The storyteller adopts the story in their own image, modifying it slightly, and passing it on. Storytelling arose not as a form of entertainment, but rather as a mechanism for communicating deeply held truths across societies. We don’t tell stories because we want to – we tell stories because they are essential.
The reason online social sharing, linking, and direct messaging so quickly became a core part of society is because it taps into an ancient need for humans to tell stories to each other, without an intermediary. After a brief period of time where the broadcast era subjected captive audiences to drivel like Cop Rock, the Internet has brought a rebirth of the oral tradition. People are once again passing on the information they see as most valuable, and discarding that which is not.
Brands who are looking to attract capital, customers, employees or evangelists need only look to the ancient form of the story to understand how best to engage audiences today. Due to the resurgence of the oral tradition, companies have more opportunities than ever to reach audiences with their core narratives, and fuel incredible growth. Capital, once needed for access to the broadcast markets, has been supplanted by narrative as the essential ingredient to connecting organizations with people, and fueling incredible growth.