Stop Focusing on Marketing ‘Trends’ and Start Focusing on Storytelling

TikTok. Clubhouse. Instagram Reels. Houseparty. If you’re a marketer in 2021, you’re probably diving into these trendy new social media platforms and trying to figure out how your brand can harness it to reach your audience. You’re probably also juggling countless other existing channels to try and check every possible marketing box.

I’m going to tell you the secret to effective marketing campaigns, and it’s not jumping on every fancy new tool or trend that comes along.

What you need as a marketer is better storytelling. Yes, storytelling. That thing you thought was just for children and the entertainment field. 

Like many of you, I once thought storytelling was reserved for movies, books, and theater. While I’ve always appreciated good storytelling, my career was built through science and technology, and I didn’t think stories had much to do with those fields at all. However, I came to learn that storytelling played a significant role in every single piece of internal and external communication, for every business, in every industry.

Soaked in story: How storytelling shaped my life and career

My mother was a scientist — a biologist focused on virology and zoology. She taught my sister and me to ask questions, develop hypotheses, and test our ideas. We were taught to seek facts. Data. Truth. 

My father reinforced this, an electrical engineer who enjoyed a career spanning five decades in high-tech. He inadvertently indoctrinated me into the world of tech. I grew up surrounded by tales of Silicon Valley (I highly recommend “Accidental Empires,” which a prior manager, Sara Munro, gifted me in 2004), and I cut my fingers on daughterboards before I could ride a bike. My father was also a big fan of Einstein (there is even an Einstein quote on his grave: “Not everything that counts can be counted. And not everything that can be counted counts”).

Amidst this scientific and technological upbringing was a foundation of great storytelling. We were soaked in story from a young age. Both my parents read to us voraciously. I still have fond memories of being curled up with dad and my sister as he read us “Lord of the Rings.” 

My mother, the scientist, was also a poet and even wrote a novel. She instilled in me a love of creating things (two science fiction novels, daily hand-journaling, and photography, to name a few).

And so, I followed my mother’s footsteps into creative writing and my father’s footsteps into technology when I started my career in Intel's marketing department.  

The merging of storytelling and business

In the early days of my career, storytelling mostly seemed relegated to presentations and ad campaign ideas. I didn’t explicitly see it as being something to use in internal business communications. I was more worried about remembering my Computer Science and Business Administration degrees’ teaching of the 4 Ps of marketing (product, place, price, promotion) and cash cows. 

But my storytelling roots run deep: Without realizing it, I started applying storytelling to my everyday work. 

In one early instance, I created a superhero theme for a partner account manager training event at Intel. In another, I created a James Bond-style internal alignment campaign to get Microsoft account executives to care about the Cisco threat to Microsoft’s Unified Communications business. 

Eventually, efforts such as these led to me being internally recruited as Chief Storyteller for Microsoft Dynamics, just as I was planning on leaving the company. 

Oh wow! I thought. It was all official. I was actually going to get paid to be a storyteller. Finishing my novels can wait!  

Little did I realize that the journey I was about to go on would result in me being able to help others unlock a big business secret.  

The fruitless hunt for existing storytelling ‘wheels’

A mentor of mine at Intel, Nick Drew, once said, “Always find if someone has done it before. It’ll save you time and energy.” In other words, don’t reinvent the wheel if you can avoid doing so.  

I’ve always kept that in mind and, as such, kept an eye out for existing approaches that I could leverage in my work. As a newly minted Chief Storyteller, I sought to do the same in my new role and went on the hunt for existing wheels.  

I found tons of fascinating information and frameworks for storytelling, born out of hundreds of years of story crafting in literature and the movie industries (Joseph Campbell’s “Hero’s Journey,” to name but one famous framework). Even Pixar had an approach.  

In my exploration, I also found approaches to help with improving presentations. I loved Nancy Duarte’s “Resonate” and techniques like Bo Eason’s for telling your personal story for impact.  

As I dug into these various methods and classic storytelling models, I couldn’t find the “wheel” I was looking for. Remember, these models can be pretty detailed. The Hero’s Journey is a whopping 17 steps. Phrases like “rising and falling action” and “character arc” were just too much of a heavy lift for busy professionals. No matter how many rabbit holes I went down, I just couldn’t find a storytelling wheel that worked for the repeatable application of storytelling in business. 

As frustrated as I was, I knew I had to make it work. I had turned down external job offers to take this role. Besides, the more I learned about storytelling, the more I realized my natural passions could be applied to business. I just had to figure it out. 

Understanding and unlocking the true power of storytelling in business

As Chip and Dan Heath explain in their book, “Made to Stick,” we are all subject to the curse of knowledge. This curse makes it hard for people outside our own areas of expertise to understand what we simply “get.” What is effortless for us requires much energy for a non-expert.  

Storytelling was no different. The years I spent analyzing and encoding story frameworks resulted in its own set of complexities that your average businessperson would struggle to apply to business repeatedly.  

I would try and apply these approaches, and my colleagues’ eyes would glaze over. The wheels just were not rolling. 

So, I became a story-interpreter.  

I decided to focus on the essence of storytelling. A focus on outside-in customer-centricity. A focus on the customer as the hero on their journey to (hopefully) purchase from us. 

This led to the development of a customer decision-making journey and the specific audience personas traveling that road. My team and I created terrific customer showcase films that focused on the customer and their experience. 

This only reinforced for me how powerful storytelling was. I was discovering more than ever that the power of story wasn’t limited to movies and books. This was how we as humans connected. And since business is still human to human, I realized storytelling played an essential role in internal and external business connections.

I was experiencing this power of having an impact on business. I felt like I was only just scratching the surface. I wanted to go further than injecting elements of story into traditional marketing models. I started to wonder what actual “business storytelling” wheels might look like. 

From tragedy to triumph: The birth of Go Narrative

I was inspired to take my experience outside of my corporate role and start my own company to put all my energy into helping businesses with storytelling. But I had a young family at home, and my wife was on sabbatical from her career after the birth of our second child. Quitting wasn’t an option. 

Everything changed on July 19, 2015. Tragedy struck. I received the phone call no one ever wants:

“There has been a car crash. Your father is dead, and your mother is in critical condition.”

It was about 16 hours later, when the plane touched down on the tarmac at Heathrow, that I learned of my mother’s passing. Their loss tore the heart out of our family and sent my sisters and me into a flat spin that took us years to come to terms with.

I won’t go any further into this sad tale, but if you have ever experienced something like this, know that you are not alone, and if you ever want to talk about it, I’m here for you. 

The fact that life is short was never more apparent to me. My wife had just gone back to work but ended up quitting. She didn’t just have two young boys to take care of. She also had a fully grown man who was hanging on to reality by a thread. 

Against the backdrop of this profound grief, I left Microsoft. 

What on earth was I thinking?! 

This was my moment to triumph over the profound personal tragedy I had just experienced.

In his book, “How to Stop Worrying and Start Living,” Dale Carnegie wrote:

“We can all endure disaster and tragedy and triumph over them — if we have to. We may not think we can, but we have surprisingly strong inner resources that will see us through if we will only make use of them.”

And that’s precisely what I did. I tapped into the inner resources I had been gifted by my mother and father — my creativity, my aptitude for technology, my deep, abiding love of storytelling — and I honored them in the best way I knew how: by making business storytelling the focal point of my career.

I spent a year helping a friend get his second agency off the ground. It was a great off-ramp from corporate America and granted me the set of experiences I needed to take the next step out on my own.  

In January of 2017, I formed Go Narrative. I started working on those business storytelling wheels, so you don’t have to. Today, I am proud to help technology businesses (including my alma mater, Microsoft) build and harness their storytelling skills.

Through frameworks like Go Narrative’s TRIPS StorytellingTM model, we work with brands to build strategic narratives that inform every external marketing story and internal communication for maximum engagement and effectiveness. And it’s all thanks to the power of storytelling.

If you’re ready to start focusing on your storytelling skills for better marketing campaigns, book a complimentary consultation with Go Narrative, and let's chat.

Go Narrative is a Seattle Based firm that helps business leaders challenge the status quo to find a better way to clarity through storytelling. Get attention. Be heard. Sell more.

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