Impact of Awesome Storytelling on Businesses [Updated]
“Storytelling is the most powerful way to put ideas into the world” — Robert McKee
From bedtime stories to age-old love stories and fairytales we have always loved stories.
But stories are more than just entertainment. Stories have a unique ability to build connections and it also helps transform ourselves, learn more about our history, and tell our experiences and transcend them. Stories allow people to share knowledge and emotions and make sense of the world they live in.
Storied helps you influence, teach, and inspire. Listening to stories that are being told or read to you activate the auditory cortex of your brain. Engaging with a story also fires up your right temporal cortex region that is receptive to language.
Scientists have discovered that chemicals like cortisol, dopamine, and oxytocin are released in the brain when they are told a story and as a result, they tend to remember facts better when they are told through a story rather than via simple fact-telling.
So people are conditioned to look for answers in stories to make decisions as it broadens the perspective to see further than normal.
Creating a story around data might seem unnecessary and time-consuming and data and analytics might alone seem sufficient and may influence the right decisions and audience.
This is based on the flawed assumption that business decisions are entirely based on logic and reason.
Storytelling in business is a strong business skill. Having your audience connect with your brand is imperative to your success. It helps you boost the business, that is; to create a successful marketing campaign or branding you need a cohesive story of the brand with all the company vision that spans all channels and campaigns.
Storytelling helps you create a strong marketing strategy and increases profit as it conveys purpose in a way which the people understand and can relate to and makes you stand out from the rest. Analytics, data, and numbers are fun but messages and ideas delivered as stories can be up to 22 times more memorable than just facts. It helps the audience grasp and retains your key points or message.
Therefore it improves customer loyalty as you are fabricating a connection among people and people and ideas.
Storytelling is a great way to keep your brand memorable, through storytelling, you can share your business’s backgrounds, values, prospects, services, or culture using words, sound, video, or any other mediums.
And creating a great story creates an emotional reaction from your audience and adds character and depth to your company’s brand image and the customers will recall the brand and it will make them feel more relatable and connected. Most of the companies use digital storytelling to endorse their brand’s qualities and here are a few of them which has caught our attention and stayed in our hearts.
Samsung India’s ad from 2017 is a heartwarming story of a Samsung service engineer who goes to a remote village in India to provide service. The ad shows all the struggles he is facing throughout his journey and it calls attention to Samsungs’s dedication to creating lasting relationships with customers with timely delivery anywhere in the world.
Kalyan Jewellers ad from 2013 is a beautiful and meaningful story which shows trust between a father and daughter. In that, the girl goes away with a person she loves against her father’s wishes, but when she is in need of help her father is always there for her, this depicts the trust that the customers have towards the brand.
Fevicol’s ad from 2011 is a funny yet interesting story that shows the struggle a person is having to break an egg. Then he realizes that the hen is having its food from fevicol’s case and through this, they are showing how strong the glue is. Fevicol has always endorsed its brand in the funniest way possible, and it has always caught our attention.
The impact of digital storytelling on Walmart is commendable. When Walmart had a reputation management challenge and all the hard work went unnoticed, that is when they started telling the right stories. They started a company blog in the year 2014 and made visually enthralling stories about their suppliers.
Through this, they portrayed the company’s domestic endeavor and showed hows it’s like to be a supplier for them. They used the concept of digital storytelling to make short animated videos and shared them to capture their audience’s attention.
Through digital storytelling, Walmart has reached its audience of customers, associates, and opinion holders in the market. They have authentically connected with their audience and also they started working with a creative agency and have taken a collaborative approach to content creation.
Stories always engage your audience before facts. Even though good businesses are developed through the use of numbers, they are typically approved on the basis of a story.
The brain processes image 60,000 times faster in comparison to word, that is 90% of the information transmitted to our brain is visual. When you are reading plain and simple data only the language part of your brain works whereas when you are reading a story not only the language part but also any part of the brain that we would use if we are actually experiencing what we are reading about becomes activated as well.
Digital storytelling has gotten a lot of attention and has been given a lot of importance and is used for getting user-generated content. Digital marketing is now being used by innovative startups to pitch their ideas to their potential investors and it is used as a form to communicate with their potential customers and get feedback about the market potential of their product or service.
Digital storytelling can be effectively applied to nearly any subject, as constructing a narrative and communicating it effectively just requires the storyteller to think carefully about the topic and consider the audience’s perspective. With all these media devices like computers, digital cameras, recorders, and end numbers of software and digital tools, digital storytelling is just a piece of cake.
