Marketing via Stories: The Selling Power of Narrative in a Conceptual Age

As A Whole New Mind author Daniel Pink puts it, we have entered a new era: a less linear and more whole-mind/holistic "conceptual age." As we live our personal lives with a better understanding of how interconnected everything is, our work as marketers should also be addressing that fact in the way consumers take in our messages.

In this more full-service, conceptual age, storytelling—in its many forms—is one of the most powerful tools for presenting the truths of your product, service, or brand. Whether a story is about the internal/corporate experience or the customer's experience, it has the incredible ability to give context to the facts of daily life.

These much richer narratives, in turn, help brands more empathically interconnect with the buying minds of their customers. There is simply more for them to hold onto.

Let's say your brand's laptop has amazing amounts of memory and incredible processing speed, and it's Wi-Fi ready and weighs less than a feather. That is all well and good, and makes for a nice bulleted list of features.

However, what if you've got a customer (let's call her Nancy) who recently bought that laptop, and it has changed her life? What if she shares a bit about why she was looking for a new computer, how her life goes from home to work and back, the way the laptop has to fit into the bulk of other items she carries around with her, and so on?

In the television or print ad campaign, we'd see a woman who might look a lot like someone in our car pool and hear her use a few key words that we know she got from her kids, just like us. We'd be more engaged with the product because we'd feel a little like we actually knew her.

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