Considering the value storytelling has in building powerful, profitable and enduring brands it’s surprising how many businesses lack a clearly communicated story. It may be a result of a feeling that storytelling is a soft, squishy skill that doesn’t have a place in the world of business. Nothing could be further from the truth:

Storytelling simplifies and distils the purpose of a business and helps project it to the outside world.

Developing a clear, captivating story and vision creates a framework that helps organise marketing activity and content. Any activity must support, underpin or reinforce the company’s story. This brings a clarity and consistency that ‘keeps things on track’, presenting a clear value proposition to customers.

This adds extraordinary value. The business has a clear understanding of what it’s about and where it’s going which, in turn, gives it a focus and a point of difference. Customers ‘get’ the business and have a reason to choose its products or services over and above others.

The advent, and continued rise, of digital marketing has brought with it a greater focus on data. In a sense, this has distanced businesses away from the ‘human element’ that influences purchase decisions. It’s easy to forget that ‘the numbers’ being looked at relate to people.

Consumers generally buy things because they make them feel good. They tend to buy them from people or businesses that they feel good about.

People (we’re humans not ‘numbers’!) love stories. Creating a true story, helps brands build an emotional connection with their audiences. Stories evoke emotions that can win the loyalty and affection of customers and create a sense of purpose and vision that they identify with, that they feel good about. They create a connection and an enduring point of difference.

The most successful companies recognise this and use their story to good effect – think of successful brands like Google, Apple and Tesla.

Studies have shown that people want to invest their money in businesses that have emotional relevance to them.

Neuroscientists have established that decisions are largely emotional, not logical. Even when we make what we believe to be logical decisions, at the very point of choosing, the decision we make is arguably always based on emotion. Imagine if the positive emotions created by your business’s story came into play at that point!

In his book ‘Start with why’ Simon Sinek’s premise was that “In business, it doesn’t matter what you do, it matters WHY you do it.” Why a business exists, how the business came about – the story behind a business – is what makes some organisations more inventive, pioneering and successful than others.

Stories connect people. They communicate values and beliefs. They speak to us in ways that numbers, data and charts can’t. They affect the way we think and feel.

The ability to tell a good story can make or break how successful a business is.

With a good captivating story, an organisation can tap into people’s emotions and make a genuine connection with customers that makes their business the preferred choice. 

• In a literary and anthropological experiment devised by researchers Rob Walker and Joshua Glenn heartfelt, short purposeful stories were created for insignificant objects listed for sale on eBay. The objects, purchased for $1.25 each on average, subsequently sold for nearly $8,000.00 in total.
• In their book Corporate Culture and Performance, Kotter and Heskett demonstrated that businesses that convey purpose and value can outperform competitors by up to 12 times on company valuation and can have a profit performance ratio 750 times higher than those companies that don’t.
• A survey by Braze and Forrester Consulting showed that consumers heavily favour brands who successfully demonstrate their humanity. As much as 57% of consumers said they would be more loyal to a human brand.