The Weekly Spark #2: “There’s always room for a story that can transport people to another place” J.K. Rowling

Do you ever have those moments in life when some random story from the past invades your mind consistently for some time? Just like this, without any rational reason. Since I began writing this blog I had one in particular, and though today I wanted to develop a different topic, I want to give space to this story and see where it takes me. Sometimes I tend to believe there is a sense to why these things happen – just it isn’t probably clear yet.?

The story goes like this

Around 9 years ago, after I came back from my experience in Los Angeles, I wanted to approach a more “creative” career. For different reasons I was attracted to marketing, and one of my mentors advised me to try one of the classical FMCG multinational companies as they were (and probably still are) great schools of marketing for entry level jobs. Luckily enough, I managed to lock 4 interviews. Out of these, there is one I still remember: the marketing manager asked me “what is marketing?”. Now, I’m not really a textbook marketeer, but even Seth Godin wrote a 258-page book called “This is Marketing”; let alone that I hadn’t even had an internship in marketing, so I was quite under pressure. However, I was expected to answer, so after a moment of thought I replied “the ability to tell a story that spreads”. Probably I was still thinking about my time in Los Angeles working in the movie industry or thinking about that storytelling course I had taken a few years before, nevertheless the interviewer got quite irritated and replied “no it’s so much more than that”. Without giving me an answer, he told me the interview was over. If you’re still wondering, I didn’t get the job.

Where did it go wrong?

After all these years I still don’t know what answer he expected, but it hasn’t really changed my view on the importance of telling a story. Actually, most often storytelling is associated with marketing, but in my view it is a key component in the majority (if not all) of the jobs in the world. For instance, when we see a CEO presenting the yearly targets and the strategy for the next year, isn’t that a story? When a PR department ships out a press release, isn’t that a story? Or when a salesperson wants to sell you a house or a car, don’t they tell you a story?

In fact, our brain is wired for stories – it is something we carry from our ancestors. We tell them to ourselves and to other people because stories make it easier to understand a complex world. And once something is easy to understand, then it can be remembered and shared. In fact, to put it in Seth Godin’s words “stories are the only way we know to spread an idea”.

Ideas that spread win

In a world in which ideas that spread win, it comes out quite obviously that we need to value storytelling. Great stories succeed because they are able to capture the imagination of large audiences, and most often evoke emotions. And as much as we like to see ourselves as rational beings, we are all quite irrational, leaving space for our emotions to guide our behavior. This is why you will never sell that Coldplay concert ticket despite someone is offering you 3x what you paid for it. Marketing works in this direction: no marketeer has ever invented storytelling, just leveraged it.

So, my take-out here is whatever job you have or whichever task you have, always remember that you are telling a story to someone. Don’t forget to find a relevant story that resonates with your audience, and you will likely succeed.

I leave you with a great example: