Since its founding, WordWrite has focused on storytelling. In this blog post, content manager Tara Darazio asks WordWrite chief storyteller Paul Furiga to explain our passion and focus.
Tara: Why is storytelling important and valuable in marketing? What does it add to marketing efforts, and why does it connect with an audience so strongly?
Paul: Decades of research – and the results from our social media era – demonstrate that while people “decide rationally,” they “buy” emotionally. And whether the “buy” decision is a concept, a cause or a product or service, no tool is as powerful as storytelling to tap the emotional conscious that seals the buying decision.
Tara: What are some tips to tell captivating stories?
Paul: A good story provides a few essential elements:
A relatable character or hero,
A common challenge or issue, and
A solution or resolution to the challenge that’s appealing to the intended audience.
Tara: What are some common mistakes to avoid when using storytelling in marketing?
Paul: The most critical elements in successful storytelling are authenticity, fluency, and engagement. Specifically:
The story needs to be rooted in truth; it can’t be saccharine or fantastical.
Second, the storyteller needs to be a believable and fluent narrator – not a professional actor. The narrator needs to be relatable.
And finally, and especially important for the organization that’s doing the marketing, the story must be one that the intended audience wants to see, hear or experience.
This makes it crucial for the organization sharing the story to ensure that engagement is measured and tracked. Otherwise, the effort will be wasted. How will you know whether you are moving hearts and minds and delivering results? Only by having a clear sense of what success looks like before you begin, and by tracking that.
Tara: If a marketing team or individual hasn’t worked with storytelling previously, where would you recommend they start?
Paul: Storytelling is both strategic and tactical.
It’s best to begin at ground level, with personal stories and build storytelling skills from there.
Pay attention to how storytelling masters like Disney and Pixar handle their storytelling, which definitely moves hearts and minds. What can you learn from them?
Start by viewing the many great TED talks and other tools in which their storytelling experts share their secrets.
Tara: What is WordWrite’s expertise in the storytelling arena?
Over more than two decades and 300 clients, our focus has been on what we call the Capital S Story of our clients. This is the most important story an organization shares, because it answers four fundamental questions: Why someone would buy from you, work for you, invest in you or partner with you.
This story gets that capital S because it stands above all the other stories that leaders and organizations share. This is the story that defines the very character and nature of an organization.
Our work is rooted in science, from the work of psychoanalyst Carl Jung to mythologist Joseph Campbell and many others and seasoned with the real-world business insights of experts including Simon Sinek, who famously said, “People don’t buy what you do, they buy why you do it.”
One way of looking at what we do is that we uncover the why of what our clients do and align that with classic archetypal stories like those Jung and Campbell identified. Our goal is to help organizations share their Capital S Story in ways that are unique, compelling and memorable. In our experience, this process delivers the best possible results.
Tara: What’s the one takeaway you’d like us to know about the power of storytelling in business?
Paul: Storytelling is both the oldest form of human communication and also the best form for today’s busy, cluttered, social media world. Our brains are wired for storytelling. Though none of us today were present when the first person who started a fire on purpose taught the second person how to do it, I am fairly confident they told a story to show them how to do it.
