“Over 500,000 LinkedIn members have storytelling listed on their profiles.”
Once upon a time, I worked with LinkedIn emptiness Cultural Design Studio explores the art and science of storytelling and inspires marketers to reimagine how they connect with audiences. This partnership led to an interview, an ebook shared below,”The digital age, and a video conversation, “Can Storytelling Save Marketing? (video at end of post).
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Marketing has long embraced the idea of ​​storytelling. By now, some might say that marketing has picked it up, using storytellers as a form of marketing of its own, trying to make marketers and storytellers one and the same. But storytelling is not synonymous with content marketing, social media, digital marketing, growth marketing, web3, or any form of traditional marketing. Storytelling is not marketing, but that doesn’t mean marketers can’t tell stories either. You wouldn’t call someone who grills or cooks a chef, no matter how delicious the food is. For those looking for an uplifting, more meaningful, spiritual, and memorable way to connect with people, learning and practicing authentic storytelling is life-changing.
Storytelling is a sacred discipline, a delicate balance of art, science and humanity. It connects people to each other and to future generations.
In 1985, Christopher Vogler was a Disney story analyst and student of Joseph Campbell. For 15 pages, then 40, Vogler continued to refine his ideas, eventually becoming a book,”The Writer’s Journey: The Mythic Structure of Storytellers and Screenwriters.“
Christopher Vogler’s “Memo to Start It All”
“There are only two or three human stories, and they keep repeating themselves as if they never happened.” – Willa Cather
How Storytelling Can Save Marketing
Brian Solis, Author LifeSCALE: How to Live a More Creative, Productive, Happier Lifeand X: Experience when business meets designin partnership with LinkedIn, emptiness Cultural Design Studio created a special e-book, The Digital Age, one day earlier.LinkedIn Megan King Spending time with Brian to discover how telling better stories can help future-proof marketing and branding.
Megan King
There are over 500,000 LinkedIn members who have storytelling listed on their profiles. Why do modern marketers classify themselves as storytellers?
Illustration from “The Digital Age” by Gapingvoid and Brian Solis
Brian Solis
I keep remembering a very interesting quote from a well-known advertiser who liked to say to agencies and other marketers, “You’re not a storyteller!” In an interview with one of the teachers, the roller coaster designer classifies his work as storytelling.
For advertisers, this shows how easy it is to believe that we are storytellers simply because we produce content or produce experiences. His point is that being a storyteller is more than just saying you are a storyteller. We keep saying this, not because it’s true, but because saying you’re telling a story rather than admitting you feel good about marketing.
Personally, I think storytelling is an aspirational title. I’m an optimist, so I want to believe that marketers do believe they are storytellers. What they need to consider, though, is that this is a very sacred word. We’ve embraced the ambitions and ideals of storytelling-based marketing, but we haven’t experienced the actual requirements of being a storyteller.
I realized this a few years ago when I was writing a book, X: The experience of business meets design. I’m guilty of being a storyteller because I control the narrative. I’m not. My response was to find a storyboard artist to teach me the art and science of storytelling. It makes a big difference, but I can tell you that even after going through this, I would never put a storyteller in my title. This word is so sacred that we must respect it.
You say in our book that marketers end up getting distracted by social media follower counts and losing their sense of purpose. How do you know when you’ve lost your purpose? How can you recycle it by telling a story?
Illustration from “The Digital Age” by Gapingvoid and Brian Solis
Megan
You say in our book that marketers end up getting distracted by social media follower counts and losing their sense of purpose. How do you know when you’ve lost your purpose? How can you recycle it by telling a story?
Brian
The challenge for marketing is that it’s adapting to storytelling, it’s adapting to social media, it’s adapting to mobile devices, it’s adapting to all these new channels on the classic basis of marketing tactics. It has a traditional matrix that has to adapt to new times, technologies and trends. The matrix ends up focusing on the wrong things.
It’s not that marketers don’t understand this. More importantly, they pack technology into structures they know. It is self-reinforcing. Executives there would therefore look at marketing in those terms, and fund and support it in those terms. They support what marketing is, not what it might be.
This is an era of reinvention and innovation. In this book, we talk about using storytelling not only as a guiding light for future engagement and experiences, but also as a catalyst for driving innovation. What does it take to tell a great story? What does it take to really understand your audience? What does it take to really stand out? How can we move, guide and motivate them?
The answers to these questions will lead some marketers to break away from old structures and start them building something new: a new generation of marketing, less about “marketing” and more about experience and engagement.
This raises the question: what do we do once I get your attention and you get mine? When you start thinking in these terms, you move in a new direction, and you continue to move in that direction as you pursue these ideas. I call it “progressive transparency”; moving beyond previous marketing priorities and getting interested in “hugs”; or what happens when you engage.
The challenge for marketers today is that their budgets, resources and expertise all reflect the way we thought about marketing yesterday, not the way marketing needs to be tomorrow. We’re stuck in a cycle of allowing marketing to be driven and directed by executives who want to see certain things communicated a certain way. I mean, the law has such a strong voice on what we can and can’t say, or what the narrative has to be according to the “optics of organization.” These are designed based on how marketing was seen yesterday, which makes marketing impossible.
Illustration from “The Digital Age” by Gapingvoid and Brian Solis
Megan
How did you initially connect with Hugh MacLeod, and what do you think is Hugh’s illustrations that made you really understand your words?
Brian
I’m part of a startup community that eventually became Web 2.0 and then evolved into social media. Hugh is also a member of that group. He was from Savile Row and left the advertising world. He uses cartoons to express some of the truly amazing things technology is starting to empower us, and all the paradoxes it brings to our lives. He also took a swipe at the way the marketing department only focuses on the next ad. We revolved around the same circles in the Web 2.0 world, and in its earliest stages, the community wasn’t just for work. It’s also about verification, self-help, and support. We’ll get together for drinks, bring all the entrepreneurs together to talk about what we’re doing and help us take everything to the next level. I just connected with Hugh immediately. He was an amazing man, so witty and smart.
Illustration from “The Digital Age” by Gapingvoid and Brian Solis
Megan
You wrote a book a few years ago, X: Experience when business meets design. There you talked about the need for an Enterprise Investment Experience Architect. Can you explain how storytelling affects the design of these experiences?
Brian
Once I got to the core of the experience, I realized that you can’t design the experience unless you focus on the experience. When someone touches your brand, product, service, packaging, or representation, you don’t want them to feel the value of those parts alone; you want them to feel more than the sum of the parts. You have to design the experience as a story where everything comes together in an arc that people feel, walk away and talk about. So, it’s a very purposeful way of looking at experience. I thought it was a bit early as an idea and now it’s starting to be appreciated more.
So the idea of ​​being an experience architect is essentially no different than being a storyteller. It’s about being able to build experiences by transforming every aspect of your company around the experience you want to deliver.
Illustration from “The Digital Age” by Gapingvoid and Brian Solis
The real challenge is for us to deal with all of these issues like marketers. We speak like marketers. We measure like marketers. We talk to people based on what other people approve of what we say, but no one finds it human. That has to change. The first step is to realize that we are in denial. Then we can accept the need for change and start moving in a new direction.
“I like to receive regular emails and text messages;” says no one ever. We have to understand that marketing is just that. The reason it doesn’t have a place at the negotiating table in most executive discussions is that it doesn’t align with business growth and it doesn’t align with customer experience.
But it could be! Marketing doesn’t have to be a discipline or a function. It could become what the customer experience team is doing, through the use of communications, touchpoints, technology and channels to deliver the overall experience. I think the future of marketing is bigger than we think because we’re still stuck focusing on what marketing is rather than what it could be. Storytelling in marketing matters because it starts to force us beyond that. It absolutely needs transformation when we accept it as its true divine term. It’s not just another marketing tactic.
life scale
Explore Brian’s vision for storytelling in marketing Gapingvoid Cultural Design Group by downloading”The digital age” exist lnkd.in/storyteller
So, can storytelling save marketing?let’s discuss
Did you know that over 500,000 marketers have storytelling listed on their LinkedIn profiles? Marketers have become obsessed with storytelling.As a result, does storytelling fall into the bucket of marketing buzzwords—a bucket full of things like truly and transparency? Words we use in marketing jargon but don’t actually take seriously and act on?
Tune in to our latest episode of Live with Marketers to hear from storyteller and LinkedIn influencer Brian Solis, and learn about:
- What storytelling really means for marketers
- How our discipline needs to evolve for storytelling to flourish
- How storytelling can have an honest impact on the way you interact with your audience
The original association
