Why Do Marketers Tell Stories?
A few reasons have been mentioned above, but there are important ones that
haven’t come up in our discussion yet. There is a misconception in the
general public that marketing is simply about telling people “buy our
products.” While this is the goal of marketing, those of us who do marketing
know it is not even remotely close to how complex our approach to
marketing is. There is a lot that goes into marketing, and it doesn’t do just to
hand a possible customer some numbers or copy. There are three core ideas
that storytelling handles best for marketers.
The first is the way that stories help marketers to take abstract or complex
concepts and make them easy to understand. Anyone who has studied a
difficult subject knows that wrapping your head around a new idea isn’t
always easy. Stories are one way that we are able to grasp an idea more
readily. An example of this in action in the classroom would be when a
teacher turns a math problem into a story so that you understand the real-
world application of the problem you are struggling with. Taking the abstract
idea and turning it into a solid that we can grasp makes it easier to understand
the way that everything connects with our experiences as human beings. An
example of this in action is the way that Apple markets its gadgets. Instead of
focusing on telling people how much processing power their computers have,
they instead sell people on the things that they can do with their computers.
The technical talk is still available for anyone interested in looking it up, but
by sharing stories about what users have done on their computers, Apple has
been able to boil a complex concept down to the way that real people have
made use of them.
Stories also bring people together in a big way. We’ll hear more about this in
a moment because this goes back far into our evolutionary past. The stories
we experience in our modern day living express emotions and experiences
which we all share. Being that we are all humans, we can understand what it
is like to fall in love, or to be sad. We can understand the relief that comes
with finally finding a product that provides us with what we were looking for
and makes our lives easier. By connecting to stories, people feel more
connected to each other. When your brand tells stories, this helps people to
feel more connected to both your other customers and to the brand itself. Talk