Storytelling is like Swiss Art of Watchmaking

In sales and marketing, it’s never about shouting louder than the others, it is increasingly about getting heard by those you care for. Storytelling is becoming the new buzz word. But what is hiding underneath this trendy term? The required skills, qualities and methodology compare very much to those for high-end watchmaking. What distinguishes corporate storytelling, and how can it drive business development effectively? How can you best engage and with which audience?

"Leadership Through Storytelling: Unlocking Your Potential to Inspire Change" is what ChatGPT returned when asked to write a tagline about leadership and storytelling. It quite remarkably illustrates how smart sounding words, well put together in some sort of communication jigsaw, will nevertheless sound very cool. But are they meaningful and connecting with any audience? This also further highlights the risks of taking counterproductive shortcuts when trying to fix a story that “sells” but does not trigger a sense of belonging. Everybody can tell a story, but not everybody is a storyteller. It is not about pitching, convincing and selling to an audience, but about understanding, engaging, sharing. A solution that solves a problem for a familiar targeted community, with a strong emphasis on the community and their concerns, not the vendor’s features list and achievements.

We have entered a post-advertising, and possibly soon a post-SEO world, leaving some CMOs struggling with old ways, and others blinded by new technologies. Audiences have progressively disconnected from all what marketing and PR people were relentlessly repeating to them, guided by three human nature principles. First, people hate to be lied to, and they can somehow sense it (even subconsciously) when that happens. While it may seem an acceptable practice, consequences are looming in the long term. Second, people despise feeling manipulated, and the immediate result is that they shut off. The persistent result is a lack of trust, which is unfortunate, considering that trust is the basis of communication. Third, people don’t like being told things, even less lectured. They prefer to discover by themselves, even more so when it happens through emotional stories.

So it is time to move from rhetoric-centric to story-centric marketing and sales!

And storytelling is powerful when applied with the right tools, but storytelling is not copywriting. Corporate storytelling is a very specific field, with its eight well defined steps, built around a number of techniques and elements, such as transformational arc, inciting incident, creative method, meta model, etc. It is collaborating with so-called dreamers, realists and critics, all part of a “writers room”. Storytelling is not just about an inspiration and feeling in a creative mood. It actually requires a precise methodology, training, hard work, patience and team spirit. Storytelling is not about loudly broadcasting some catchy phrases. It is a craft that aims at powerfully delivering meaningful journeys that resonate with an audience. It is hence crucial for storytellers to know their audience well, seeking what drives them. This will allow them to effectively engage, and in empathetic ways, with such communities they target or even may create.

One of the key words for a thriving post-advertising business development just fell, one that will only gain in importance as people need even more to “belong”: communities! And to reach those communities, no software, no bots (yet) can provide the human empathetic touch needed to connect genuinely, with creativity and authenticity.

Not taking into account all these elements and continuing to brag about a product, service, company or person, with repeated, probably unverifiable promises, will impede to achieve what should always remain the golden ticket of marketing: building trust. And to do so, we need to not only know our audiences, but to profoundly understand them. Data sets can no longer just be some ammunition to target, relentlessly “pitch”, and get a designated audience to want what we have to offer. But it can become valuable context information, used to incite and allow a community to love it, because they feel a connection between the values our story irradiates, and their own lives and preoccupations.

Episode 4 and workshop 2 of the MBA Business Communication Essentials course about strategic communication, presented by HEC Liège Luxembourg will be exploring these topics. Interested? Be my guest and join by registering here: https://www.hecexecutiveschool.be/mba-luxembourg?

Stay tuned for a sneak peak of final episode 5: Leadership Talk … and Walk: Inspiring, not Telling. Or how great leaders can inspire and move entire teams when they understand the foundation and mechanics of storytelling and public speaking.