5 Reasons Why Storytelling is Crucial to the Success of Businesses
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Storytelling is Central to Human Existence.
Ever since human beings sat around the fire in caves, stories have served human expression in several narrative outlets: literature, poetry, theatre, music, and cinema, among others, with the mission of informing, entertaining, instilling moral values and, more broadly, for elevating humans’ souls. Our identities are constructed through stories: our family background, our workplace, our culture, sexual orientation, and personal experiences define who we are and create a sense of belonging in our communities. Through stories, we engage with others: the act of telling a story, a person sharing a narrative with a listener, is a fundamental human connection, and it reminds us of how we are part of something enduring, something bigger than ourselves. We need stories to make sense of our chaotic modern world and to share that understanding with others.
So, What Is Storytelling?
A story tells us how and why life changes. It portrays a situation in which life is ordinary, but then something changes, an event occurs and throws life out of balance. To restore balance, the main character, with his own ideals and beliefs, and his subjective expectations needs to make decisions against opposing forces; he takes risks and finally finds the truth. The inner conflict between subjective expectations and reality taps into a dichotomy that belongs to the very nature of human beings that goes back to the dawn of time.
What Makes a Good Story?
A good story moves people and resonates at an emotional level. If the character’s desire, a focal point to the story, his contradictions, needs, fears, vulnerability, and other features so well-outlined in The Art of Character by David Corbett (a must-read for aspiring writers) is represented through his actions, the character becomes credible and relatable to the audience. Once the audience empathises with a character on his struggles and the brain dives into the narrative, the experience becomes immersive. The audience is drawn to the character’s psychology, his system of beliefs and choices, and follows the hero unconditionally in his journey.
Storytelling in Business
In contemporary times, the craft of storytelling has been embraced by businesses worldwide, integrated into branding strategies, and living in internal and external corporate communications. When authentic and trustworthy, stories can be a powerful way to convince customers to buy products or services, influence angel investors to fund a start-up company, or raise awareness of causes driven by non-profit organisations. Even more relevant in leadership roles, storytelling persuades the audience; too often, executives fail to communicate efficiently with their employees and colleagues, getting lost in the accouterments of company jargon: PowerPoint slides, dry memos, and hyperbolic missives from the corporate communications department. Even the most carefully researched and considered efforts are routinely greeted with cynicism, apathy, or outright dismissal.
As opposed to rhetoric, the choice of persuasion may find a solution through the elements that make a good story to serve the purpose of businesses and non-profit organizations to deliver impactful narratives that create awareness, engage, and influence the target audience.
Here Are 5 Reasons Why Storytelling is Crucial to the Success of Businesses:
1. Stories Create Awareness
Until recent times, the amount of budget and creativity for marketing campaigns used to define the success of a brand. The adoption of content marketing at scale, however, has disrupted established ways of promoting products and services to the extent that small companies, entrepreneurs, start-ups, and ordinary people have surpassed multimillion-dollar marketing initiatives and have succeeded to generate powerful brand awareness. While this type of success requires a deep understanding of customers beyond their demographics, the solution to achieve that experience is through a coherent narrative that humanises the company and its purpose in an authentic, trustworthy, and relatable way. Providing depth of character, using a specific voice and tone, sharing ethics and values, communicating mission and vision, creating a deeper emotional connection that enhances brand awareness, and strengthens the bond between the company and the audience.
2. Stories Communicate Values
At the heart of storytelling are the values that we live and share. Through a story, a protagonist faces a challenge and makes a choice that reflects a core belief or value. When storytelling brings the audience into the moments and emotions that reflect this core belief, the storyteller and the listener come to a shared experience. Inspirational, motivational, or utilitarian, the storyteller places the listener into the sharing in which empathy, understanding, and consciousness are created. We encounter a sense of belonging; we identify and become prone to advocate for the brand because those values and beliefs find resonance with ours.
3. Stories Engage an Audience Beyond the Data
When we listen to music or watch a visual or a play, our brains detect patterns. Will Storr, the author of The Science of Storytelling, explains how neuroscience and cognitive psychology studies demonstrate that recognising patterns hold true for words. However, unlike other inputs, the brain’s response to words is faster and more immersive. In fact, the brain is drawn into the change and the events told; it reproduces a form of hallucination, it experiences the narrative, and whenever information is not fed to us, it fills in gaps to make sense of what we read or listen to. When reading straight data, only the language parts of our brains work on decoding the meaning. Yet, when we read a story, any other part can become activated, delivering a memorable experience, hence why it’s easier to remember stories than hard facts.
4. Stories Inspire Actions
Stories can forge deeper connections between people; they inspire us to focus attention and take action. When a strong idea unites with a conveyed emotion, the transmission of important information from one individual or community to the next becomes a persuasive tool: we remember what we feel, and our feelings inspire us to take action. By using storytelling as a communicating technique, one can shift the audience’s mood into empathy, cooperation, and support of a message to affect the change we want to see in an organisation or community.
An excellent example of using a story that promotes a social message is one of the most-watched Ted Talks by Susan Cain, author of Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking. Cain is also the co-founder of Quiet Revolution, a mission-based company with initiatives in children’s lifestyle and the workplace to instill acceptance, inclusion, and advocacy across the broad spectrum of introversion vs extroversion.
5. Stories Provide a Competitive Advantage
In the strenuous and continuous development of our fast-paced society, the relevance of a human-centric product, service, or idea acquires new nuances in meaning. Businesses and communities can’t neglect the shift of attention to human needs and traits. To survive, companies need to connect with audiences and engage with them much deeper, reaching out to what makes us unique: our emotions, feelings, values, ethics, and life experiences.
Not just desired, storytelling has become an element of differentiation, an essential tool to maximise the visibility of an initiative or the business’s profit and impact. When companies integrate storytelling as a regular practice in their day-to-day business, they reframe their marketing approach, combining the goal of profit and its value system while regarding human needs. The result is a captivating and highly persuasive narrative that conquers the hearts of humans and wins over competitors who have failed to understand its relevance.
Storytelling requires intelligence, self-awareness, and an understanding of human nature. The more we understand our humanity, the more we see the humanity in others and treat them in a compassionate yet realistic way.
Other non-cited sources: “The Anatomy of the Story” by John Truby, Story by Robert McKee, HBR articles, and Forbes publications.