Storytelling
Storytelling is important to Marketing because a core component of the practice is the presentation of information – particularly to prove to people that your offer is of sufficient value to them and to convince them to take a desired action.
Information can be presented in many different ways relatively easily, but the real challenge is getting people to act on it, whether that action be remembering your info, taking a flyer, calling a phone number, visiting a website, or buying a product online, for example.
Modern living is very resource-intensive though, and most people don’t seem to have much time or attention to spare. If something is going to effectively catch their attention and induce a desired reaction, it needs to have a very good reason to do so.
This ‘good reason’ isn’t some hypothetical, abstract concept though. As we have seen throughout earlier sections, everybody is always consciously and subconsciously working towards one thing – the satisfaction of their needs. Whether that be actively making the decision to avoid something you know is bad for you or your brain subconsciously telling your body that it’s time to eat, everything revolves around our real and perceived needs (desires/wants).
*Marketing is the process of identifying, predicting, and meeting customer needs*
The ‘good reason’ that will make someone take notice of information and react to it is the belief of a desirable offer to satisfy a need. The “belief” is key, because even if no satisfaction of a need exists, a person can pay attention and react to what they think satisfies a need (sexual optical illusions, for example)
Everybody has a vast array of needs that have varying degrees of importance and urgency. Somebody might have the need to be positively viewed by their peers along with their needs to eat and breathe, all of which vary greatly in importance and urgency based on the given situation.
No matter how urgent or important a need is though, it is not magically identified, predicted, and satisfied on its own. Rather, this occurs as a result of the brain interpreting inputs from internal events (e.g. memories) and external events (e.g. sensory input) and calculating what actions your brain and body should take to optimize your chances of survival and reproduction.
And how does the brain induce itself and the body to take such actions? With emotions!
At a very basic level, the process of emotional response consists of neurochemicals (molecules like dopamine) being produced or blocked to induce a desired effect by your brain and body. For example, in very stressful situations, the brain produces the chemical epinephrine, also known as adrenaline. Among other things, this chemical tells your brain to tell your heart to beat faster so that more blood carries more oxygen to your muscles, allowing them to more readily act, increasing your chances of survival and reproduction.
Now, if somebody’s brain believes that it recognizes a solution to a need it has, it will dedicate resources to the perceived solution to investigate if it valuable. This is done via numerous different possible emotions/chemical responses. If your brain sense danger, it will evoke fear/chemical responses to get you out of danger. If your brain senses positivity and health, it will evoke happiness and desire, or chemical responses to ingrain you further into it and get more of it.
If the brain is unable to read a situation, it is not able to generate a chemical response one way or the other. Especially in this day and age, the limiting factor is the processing capability of the brain. Ideally, we would take in all information available to our brains at all times, process is at thoroughly as possible, and react perfectly. This is not possible though, due to the brain requiring energy to do so, requiring pauses for sleep, etc.
Therefore, considering the vast number of events and situations we are presented with every day, especially through various forms of media, our brains are forced to save energy and only analyze and consider the things that it absolutely must. Familiar things, for example, are given very little resources, while new and urgent things take priority, for the sake of optimizing survival and reproduction.
So that being said, Storytelling is vital to Marketing. Information can be presented any which way, but it will be fruitlessly fighting countless other inputs for the brain’s scarce resources. Storytelling is the process of offering a solution to a need via information that is shared in a way that triggers the brain to acknowledge and consider the information via neurochemical activation AKA emotions.
While the definition of a ‘story’ takes various forms, the key characteristic is that it explains a series of events and details in a way that evokes emotion and stimulates the imagination of the audience.
Storytelling is fundamental to marketing because it builds trust and credibility, helps people remember information, and builds an emotional connection with the receiving party
A story is an account of a series of related events or experiences.
A story of a series of events told with emotion and details
Exact, all-encompassing data of a situation cannot just be transferred into someone’s brain like a piece of code. The expression and cognition of information must be done through written and spoken codes, which are imperfect and have room for error.
Storytelling deputizes the faculties of the receivers brain to fill in the gaps of the data and understand the whole of a story as accurately as possible. Namely, through presenting stimuli that evoke the proper emotional response to direct the imagination in the right direction.