- Beyond the Business Case
- Storytelling and Business
- Why Stories?
- The Myth of Business and the Business of Myth
- Dont Blame Us; Blame Plato
This chapter is from the book
This chapter is from the book
This chapter is from the book
Storytelling and Business
We’re willing to bet that your business already engages in a good deal of storytelling.
Creating stories and telling stories are the most universal human activities. An anthropologist might try to tell you that tool making is what separates man from animal, but any decent marketer or brander will tell you it’s myth making. Chimpanzees, we’ve discovered, use tools, but only human beings use stories to explain themselves (and sell things) to each other.
If you had happened to turn on your television set as this book was being written, you might have seen a commercial for the Nissan Pathfinder. Our ears perked up when we heard the ad’s tagline—“Discover Pathfinder—tell better stories.” A quick look at Pathfinder’s website (www.nissanmotors.com/pathfinder) yielded a classic example of conscious corporate storytelling. At the bottom of the screen, a shaded box invited us to explore “Nissan Insider Stories.” One click brought us to two other boxes. The first contained a simple phrase: “Everything we touch, we shift. And everything we shift, we make better.” The second box invited us to share a deeper storytelling experience. “You will find this mantra at the core of every person who touches a Nissan vehicle,” it read. “These are their stories. The memorable, compelling accounts worth sharing. Click and explore each story to experience the shift yourself.”
Research in Motion’s BlackBerry is another of the many brands jumping on the storytelling bandwagon. The company invites Internet users to visit its “Owners [sic] Lounge” on its website and share their favorite personal story. Tell the right story, and you, too, can become one of BlackBerry’s “Success Stories” and have your picture and story broadcast throughout cyberspace.