COMPELLING STORYTELLING IN BUSINESS MARKETING
June 2023
Novel writing has been a long-held dream. No really. I mean long. The same year Luke Skywalker destroyed the Death Star and John Travolta strutted the dance floor in his oh-so-cool white three-piece suit, I won a creative writing prize at school. The seed was sown, but never fertilised.
As I stumbled around trying to learn my new craft, reading books on writing, attending online courses, writing, rewriting, working on draft after draft, I came to realise there are some notable similarities between the twin worlds of business marketing and novel writing.
The golden thread weaving them together is “story.” Specifically, the elements of a well told, compelling, authentic story. Unfortunately, much marketing is the opposite. Blatantly self-serving, self-centred, uninteresting and superficial content plagues marketing. In this article, I show marketers how to use the interesting compelling stories of your customers to inform and engage your buyers instead of boring and befuddling them with corporate mumbo jumbo.