Every day institutions and individuals use storytelling to sell brands and products.
Through storytelling, this communication occurs in a much more effective way than with the mere listing of attributes. Storytelling uses three functions to reach an audience:
- Identification: The story makes the audience identify with characters and events.
- Emotions: The story awakens particular emotions – joy, sadness, compassion, anger – that become channels of connection.
- Bonding: The brand, institution or person becomes the repository of these values and emotions, and creates a special bond with the audience.
Here’s how one company used storytelling to their advantage.
Rimac Insurance: A Christmas with #ZeroPyrotechnics
Perhaps many realised how noise levels had dropped over Christmas. Usually, at the stroke of midnight there is a roar of rockets and firecrackers that lasts for hours.
When the “almost firecracker-free Christmas” was mentioned, almost everyone responded unanimously with “Have you seen how pets and autistic persons suffer from such noise?” as well as “Haven’t you seen the #ZeroPyrotechnics campaign?”
Rimac, an insurance company in Peru, uploaded this video some ten days before Christmas. With different hashtags, it went viral throughout Latin America, with hundreds of thousands of views – and millions of tears – in just six days.
It was the trigger for a debate on social networks, news, health and pet programmes across the continent.
The number of visits to Rimac’s site grew by 4,000%, accumulating 25,000 backlinks. But above all, the brand demonstrated that it not only promises wellbeing but achieves it. Many people, moved by the stories in the video, changed their habits.
Why storytelling captivates
Storytelling appeals to universal values. And among them, empathy stands out, leading people to identify themselves with the characters of a story, to feel what they feel and to dive into their minds.
This eminently human capacity is the basis of marketing strategies, making it effective, while subtle.
Storytelling challenges and progressively leads the audience to communicate the following:
- Information, under the guise of a story
- Values that a brand or product stands for
- Emotions and commitments concerning the values conveyed
- A scene which serves for solving a problem: a beginning, a conflict and a solution
- A call to action
It is important to note that the best stories are those in which the audience receives the message as a kind of revelation: suddenly, something previously overlooked, becomes a discovery that ends in learning.
Some infallible storytelling tactics to inspire your audience
In the following TED Talk, “Why Stories Captivate”, Tomás Pueyo describes what storytelling is and delves into some issues to take into account when building a story.
- Be authentic
Every brand with a compelling history has some reason which led to its creation. Therefore, the first step to start building stories is to be authentic and go to the root of your brand, product or venture.
- What were your intentions, convictions and reasons to launch it?
- What life experiences, emotions and values do they awaken in you?
- How do they translate to the lives of your consumers or customers?
- Say ‘I’
To summon your audience’s “you”, there is nothing better than speaking in the first person. Nowadays, people live overwhelmed by an immense amount of data and messages that they must process.
Therefore, more than ever, the most effective way to address someone is to relate to the entire spectrum of emotions and experiences that human beings share.
- Have structure
Usually, every story begins with some conflict. Through the unfolding of a series of acts, after a climax, the battle is resolved in the end.
In the case of storytelling, the circular structure can be much more effective: the characters close the story becoming aware of an issue that changes their view of the initial problem.
By using this scheme, which represents the human learning process, your audience is moved to take action spontaneously, by the discovery of something meaningful.
Look out for Part 2 on this same subject as Workana shows you three original ways to tell a powerful story.
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