It’s National Story Telling Week and I am so excited!! In addition to being a fabulous freelance writer I am also a fiction author, so I spend an awful lot of time writing stories. Stories like my urban fantasy novel, Chasing Azrael, my dark fantasy novella, Bleizgeist, even short stories like ‘Grave’, a modern fairytale, and load of others; all of which you can find on Amazon (you’ll forgive me for that little shameless plug!). But today I’m not talking about my fiction. I’m talking about stories and how corporate storytelling can supercharge your business, and be used to create a super powerful brand and an astonishingly compelling message.
I don’t just use stories for fiction; I use them in everything. In my own blogging, in the blogs that I write for my clients, in sales copy, and pretty much any kind of writing I do.
Stories really are phenomenally powerful. If you are familiar with the term corporate storytelling, you may already be aware that stories are often used in business narratives to help sell things. If you’re interested in that, be sure to check out my next blog on how to use corporate storytelling to empower your business and skyrocket your blog.
For today I’m going to focus on stories, and why they are so amazing…
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The Power of Myth…
You may or may not know that I have a background in archaeology and research. One of my main areas of interest is mythology. Myths are really just stories. And mythology actually explains why stories have such astonishing power over us.
We take the written word for granted; we take our stories for granted. They are on every page of every newspaper, in every book, in our phones, on our computers, in our Kindles. We literally have twenty-four hour access to as many stories as we could possibly want or need, via the internet; it doesn’t end.
But the world wasn’t always like that.
Long before the technological advances that gave us e-readers, and even printed books, people were telling stories. Before we even figured out how to put pen to paper and create the written word, we were telling stories. Stories were the core of our culture and heritage in a time before we had science to explain everything for us, technology to record everything for us, and ways of passing information back and forth ridiculously quickly.
As far back as written records go, we have stories. Many of the first stories ever written down, all around the world, were written accounts of oral stories that had been passed down, generation to generation for hundreds, if not thousands of years.
As far as we are aware, humankind have been telling each other stories for as long as they have been able to talk. They have been scratching them in cave walls in the most rudimentary styles. They have been doing everything possible to use stories to convey one simple thing: a message.
Stories are a universal language.
The really fascinating thing about mythology is not that every culture in the world has its own version of myth, but that every culture has such similar mythology.
When these myths originated there were no airplanes, trains, cars, or even boats that were capable of traversing great distances. So, how then did these stories get passed all around the globe? The simple answer is, they didn’t.
Different cultures evolved their own stories. This is so interesting is because different cultures have versions of the same stories over and over again, all round the world. Almost every culture we know about has some version of a creation myth; the story of where we came from. Everyone has myths about heroes, villains, how the weather works, how certain major landmarks, features, and other things in their world, came into being.
Stories were the way that people explained the world before the advent of science.
Stories speak to us on a really basic level; a primal level. They tap into areas of our psyche and subconscious that we don’t pay attention to but are really powerful.
Think about all those fairytales you are so intimately familiar with. How many of them are, at their core, a tale of rags to riches, like Cinderella? Or a tale of a quest, like The Search for the Holy Grail? How many of them are, in essence, nothing more than a hero’s journey?
How many of them, when you actually break them down are really the same story with different characters?
These types of stories are incredibly powerful. They don’t need to have the same details for us to be able to understand them. If you told the same story to two different people, from two different cultures, in two different languages, and use their own cultural context as the details of the story, the story would be the same, it would be told differently, but the meaning would still be understood.
Stories have universal meanings, which speak to us on such a deep level that we can’t help but respond to them.
If you know how to use stories, and tell stories, and weave stories into your brand and into your marketing, you can literally make people do whatever you want them to do; it’s actually quite terrifying.
How Corporate Storytelling Can Supercharge Your Business…
Say you want your brand to represent something specific, a particular ideal. What better way to epitomise your brand than to use stories to reinforce your message?
By constantly telling narratives that trigger a deep understanding in people, reminding them of other, familiar stories that are really memorable, your can help them to understand quite complex information you need to get across. Why on earth wouldn’t you use that?
Stories are just epic. Stories have been teaching us things for hundreds and thousands of years. They are the easiest way to get across information, they are the most powerful, emotional, and viscerally felt messages, if you use them correctly. Stories are the key to skyrocketing your business, I promise you. You just have to know how to use them, why they are powerful, and understand how to harness that power for yourself so you can tell your own stories, in your own way, and reap all the rewards of thousands of y ears worth of storytelling.
You can infuse your brand with stories.
You can infuse your brand with the most powerful stories there are: archetypes.
What Are Archetypes?
Archetypes are the types of stories I have been referring to, tales that are the same story told over and over again with the slightly different details.Archetypes are the key to understanding how corporate storytelling can supercharge your business. You just have to know what they are and what each is for. All you need to do is change the details in the stories to fit you, your message, and your brand.
If you can do this you suddenly have the most powerful brand imaginable, because it is talking to people on a level so deep, so primal, and so impossible to ignore that they won’t have any choice but to get behind what you are saying, to react to it.
Now, not all of them are going to love it. I’m not saying this is the way of making people universally love you. You will still have to contend with the fact that not everybody likes you (d0n’t worry, that’s actually awesome!). But by using stories in your brand, the people that do like you, are going to connect to you so well, so deeply, that you will going to have clients for life. You will have a super powerful brand.
Now, if you sat there thinking, “What the hell is she talking about? I don’t get it!”, don’t worry. It’s not a difficult concept to grasp, but it does take a little explaining to understand what the exact archetypes are and how they work, learn the exact messages that are carried in these stories, and the exact way you can use corporate storytelling in your business, to build an absolutely rock solid irresistible brand.
It takes a bit of time, a bit of explaining, but this what I do. If you’ve been following the blog for a while you will have heard me mention The Divine Blogging Design; this is my signature method, and corporate storytelling is the core of it.
This is it. This is what it is all about – stories.
My whole business is based on stories. I’m going to be telling you all about them, all the time, I promise.
So if you sat there thinking, “Well, it’s all very well saying that, but I don’t really get it yet”; that’s fine. If you sat there thinking, “God, you’re right, this is so interesting. I want to know how to use this in my business”, don’t worry about it; I’m going to tell you.
Next week on the vlog I’m going to show you exactly how you can use corporate storytelling to empower your business and make your blog your most powerful marketing tool ever. And it’s not going to end there! There’s a lot more to come.
If you haven’t already, make sure you subscribe to my YouTube channel so you never miss a video!
I will be back very soon with more details on exactly why stories are the best thing that has ever happened to your business…
