How to Use Storytelling to Launch Your Business
Storytelling is the secret weapon for entrepreneurs, small businesses and non-profits. Learn how telling the right brand story can help you launch your company, connect with your audience and stand out from the crowd.
Illustration done by Jason Mathis of Midtown Mystery Story Studio.
A new business or non-profit often starts with a story.
It’s the story the founder tells themself about the way the world could be – if only. And the company they start is designed to bring that story to life, to make it real for themselves and the audience they think is out there waiting for it.
It’s important to understand how crucial the initial story is. We romanticize entrepreneurs but the truth is it’s often a lonely, perilous pursuit filled with rejection and failure and stress. It would be a lot easier for entrepreneurs and small business owners to just get normal jobs and forget about that story lingering in the backs of their minds. But for many, that story just won’t go away. It’s personal and emotional and it sticks. They need to see it through.
This is the company’s Genesis Story. The Genesis Story is usually the story entrepreneurs tell about their business when they first go to market, when they’re closing their first deals, when they make an initial pitch for investment capital. It’s a way to say, ‘here’s this thing I believe in; I hope you love it too’. They’re not sure. But they have a suspicion usually based as much on intuition as research.
A Genesis Story often gets replaced with a Growth Story a few years into a company’s existence. A Growth Story is more refined and based on what’s been learned in the early years of a business. At Midtown Mystery, we work with companies on both of these story types.
But without getting that first Genesis Story right, there’s no foundation to grow from.
So, how do you create it?
The best brand stories are not just focused on the value of a company’s products or services or the problem they solve. Those things are (obviously) important but history is littered with could-have-been companies with good products that failed because they didn’t tell the right story to their audience.
The most successful organizations combine what they do with a story that connects with their audiences on a human level – rather than a purely rational or analytical level.
Why is this so effective? Because humans are wired for story. Stories are how we make sense of the world, our own lives and relate to each other. We humans have an inexhaustible appetite for story, whether it’s talking to each other at the end of the day or transporting ourselves into fictional worlds that, however magical or strange, manage to tell us something about our own lives.
The numbers don’t lie when it comes to story’s potency. By some estimations, delivering information through storytelling is 22 times more memorable than facts alone. That’s partially because, storytelling, at its best, produces emotion in its audience. And we know that ‘emotion is what really drives purchasing behaviors, and also, decision making in general’.
If you’re focused on creating your company’s Genesis Story, you should be thinking about developing story elements like:
A hero. This can be your company, but it should almost always be your customer too. Sometimes there are a group of heroes. Creating your hero properly is the first step to creating empathy in your audience. And that opens the door to everything else.
A problem. What is the problem facing your hero? What kind of pain does it cause? What happens if the problem doesn’t go away? Think of the practical here, but also the emotional. We talk about our problems as much in terms of how they make us feel as anything else.
A goal. What is the hero (your customer or your company or both) trying to achieve? The more specific the goal, the better.
A villain. Who or what is getting in the way of your hero achieving their goal? In a business context, this can be anything from a bad legacy product to inertia to a dozen other things. In a non-profit, the villain might be immoral industry practices or societal problems tied to multiple factors.
Audience. Who is your product, service or company for? The answer is almost certainly not everyone. It’s probably someone very specific. What expectations do they have of a story created for them? Remember the more specific you are in identifying your audience, the better you can tell your story, execute your marketing and deliver your services for them. It’s the difference between buying a present for a stranger you barely know and someone you’ve known for decades.
Entertainment. This is one of the areas where story-based marketing shines, but most non-story-based marketing ignores. Make your story fun, thrilling, funny, scary, etc. Forget about the message you want to send to your audience for a second. Focus on being worthy of their time by being entertaining instead.
Change. Almost every story’s core idea is revealed in the change it produces. If there’s no change, there’s probably not a story. Unless your story is about the consequences of failure to change. Think of it all this way – your hero achieves their goal, by overcoming a problem, to create change, which produces….
Emotion. This is probably the most important part. Audiences want to feel something. Even in business. If you make your audience feel joy, hope, excitement, anger, peaceful, or any other emotion, you’ve tapped into something primal that opens the door for them to connect with your company on a much deeper level. We are all exhausted by information. But we still want to feel something. There’s always room for that.
Does all this seem like a lot to consider?
Don’t worry! This stuff takes forever to master and, even then, it’s tricky stuff even for the best storytellers. It’s got science in it, but storytelling is a subjective art form. And, in the end, you’re better off being authentic than overly polished.
You can create a rough blueprint for your brand story simply by working through the list above. Don’t worry about being perfect. But try and get some of your core story elements in place as you think about that first conversation with a sales prospect, or an investor, or just the person next to you on the train who says, “So tell me about your company. What’s the story there?”
