Let me tell you a bit about storytelling.
It has become very popular, but we seemed to manage without it just 10 years ago, and everything was fine — sales were going, ads worked.
So, what happened?
From my point of view, active internet marketing happened. It’s like an avalanche of products and services that looked amazing and popped up from every social media post and banner. Gradually, our brains stopped distinguishing the call “buy me” from the huge noise of advertisements. Because we process information by adding what we already know or creating a narrative that fits into our previous experiences so it makes sense to us. In other words, we think in stories. And our brains are constantly creating these stories. Anything that doesn’t fit into the story gets filtered out as white noise. So, anyone who tells a clear story about their brand catches our attention because our brains latch onto coherence.
The same happens when you consistently send the same message to consumers. For example, “We are an innovative company, here’s our new product, and here’s our product again, and you’ve never seen anything like it before.” Or “We care about health: here are our chemical-free products, here are our farmers, here are the healthy drinks, etc.”
The consumer reads the story that the company has been tirelessly looking for and finding extraordinary solutions, and they are great for overcoming the routine challenge. Or these people feel familiar to me, they work on the ground, choose quality and reputation over easy money at my expense, at the expense of my health. In other words, you’re hinting at the storyline with your actions.
If you change your positioning, you’re offering the consumer to see your story from another angle (if the positioning is gradually refined), or you mess up the whole plot in their minds and they stop understanding who you are. And sales start to drop.
It’s because in chaos, we prefer to deal with people (and brands) that are understandable.
By the way, storytelling works great with presentations. I want to do a workshop sometime on how to tell a story in a presentation to any business audience.
