Now, more than ever, businesses are using storytelling to raise awareness about their brand and create a relationship with their prospects and customers. Through carefully constructed content messaging and visual images, the world’s most loved and recognizable brands use the power of storytelling to enhance feelings of affinity within their target market and loyalty among their customer base.

Stories are one of the most fundamental ways humans have always communicated. Throughout our lifetimes — beginning on our parent’s knee — stories have been central to how we learn about the world, convey our own thoughts, and connect with others. Good stories are memorable because they create relatedness and conjure emotion. We pick up early-on that stories can be used effectively to explain, engage, entertain, and persuade.

And so it comes as no surprise that storytelling is used heavily in marketing — in the approaches we take to promote and sell products and services for our businesses. Companies have always told stories, and with the rise of industrialization and modern commodities, it became even more important for advertisers to differentiate one mass manufactured product from the next. But if brand storytelling has been around for so long, why has it become a marketing buzzword more than a century later? Continue reading →