Storytelling: The Ancient Memory Mechanism that Helps Brands Thrive
It turns out, it’s all about having a good story these days. Whether it’s a hookup or a job interview, your personal narrative is essential to the way people will perceive you. The same goes for brands, and as we already spoke about it, the brand story is quite darn important for your business’s success in a world sick of advertising.
But let’s get deeper into the mechanism of storytelling. Why precisely this way of digesting and presenting information has worked for humans through the ages? Why memories and emotional associations are so easily communicated with a story? And how it all ties together and makes storytelling such an awesome tool for brands…
The story, deconstructed
To understand the importance of storytelling, we need to first take a look at the essence of a story. What is it made of? Well, you need characters. They have to be doing something at some place at a certain time. There needs to be a plot — a storyline of events.
Then we go in the details: sensory elements such as smells, flavors and colors, characters’ gestures and attitudes and emotions. Zooming out, there needs to be somebody telling the story from their point of view and in their style and tone of voice. Finally, the overall narrative usually is permeated by a theme that conveys an idea or a message.
Besides these elements of a story, it needs to have a sequence of events. What the story actually does is to create a logical and engaging relation between these series of occurrences, often binding them together with causality.
Yet on top of all these technical details, an interesting story has much more. It usually involves unexpected situations, which are relayed through dramatic tensions. It also has some kind of conflict, be it external or internal, that revolves around human values and people’s relations with nature, society and the self. But most of all — the best stories tell us how existence changes and what are the reasons for that.
Storytelling: behind the mind scene
The way our brains organize memories is actually story-based, which puts storytelling in the spotlight of human history-keeping. That’s because we store information in an episodic way and we take pleasure in remembering, retelling and reliving stories.
Our mind narratives have another important feature too — they have multiple indices, or simply put, contact points, through which we have an understanding of being human and make emotional associations. That’s how the stories we tell and are told can touch us and evoke heartfelt responses in others.
It all started with, yeah, stories around the fire, myths and folklore, then novels, theater, movies. Through the ages, we’ve been using storytelling to digest the events in our lives and in the world, to define and teach values and culture, and to connect to our history and to other social groups.
Besides holding together the fabric of society, stories have helped us as humans to make sense of our self, experiences and lives and to, well, find the meaning(s) of life.
Digital storytelling
So how does this memory and psychological survival mechanism make its way into today’s digital world? Well, one of its great uses is brand storytelling. Because brands want to connect with people, and people experience the world in stories, a brand identity is communicated beautifully through a story, just as a human or social identity is best told through one.
Brand storytelling builds on the understanding how our mind functions and what it enjoys to do. We work great with stories — and we like repeating and reliving them. So brands that focus on the human factor easily find their way to tell their authentic story and to satisfy our need to recreate previous experiences through narratives.
Applying the understanding of what a story is and why people enjoy storytelling so much can help all kinds of brands, including small crafters and makers. This allows them to tap into the awesome potential of their own company history. Then the engaging and unique story of each brand can reach out and win hearts.
And then…
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