Marketing Solutions for Highly Skilled Professionals

Storytelling is an activity that likely goes back as far as the dawn of human consciousness. At a minimum, we’ve been depicting stories in caves since 30,000 years ago. Our survival as a species could well have been in part due to humans’ ability and desire to tell their loved ones about events that happened. Stories about that harrowing lion encounter and that trophy ungulate kill might have been really effective tools for survival of a larger number of hominids. 

The neuroscience we have about how humans experience stories tells us that something different is happening in our brains when we hear a story than when we hear a list of facts. When someone tells me a story about Frederick and Nora Urquhart’s work to map monarch migration, a few really interesting things happen in my brain. If a live person is telling me the story, my brainwaves will change to match the frequency of the storyteller. The parts of my brain involved in deriving emotions from sound, the areas related to movement, and social cognition all light up. 

Listening to or reading stories also creates a lot of activity in the parts of the brain that make predictions and that try to decipher the motives of other people. As I’m listening to a story, I’m feeling the emotions of the characters as if they were my own and my brain is telling me how to move and what to do to participate in the action. 

Meanwhile, if I listen to a series of facts about monarch migration, the primary activity will be in the language comprehension areas of my brain, with little to know involvement in other areas. 

Knowing what we know about the different ways that we absorb and respond to information in different formats is really important for marketing. The story can be a double-edged sword. It elicits strong emotions and those aren’t always predictable drivers of actions. Sometimes building empathy for characters in a story can turn the audience against the author. 

We often see the messy side of using highly emotive stories to drive behavior in the political arena. The Republican Party has tapped into a bubbling well of anxiety and anger in a large segment of the US population and the party appears to be struggling to control it. 

For my entire lifetime the GOP has been riding the emotive freight train of a protecting-babies story. This story and the fervid devotion it has garnered have had massive impacts on the nation’s perception of privacy, fairness, and autonomy. 

The narrative system worked pretty well for most of my lifetime. The prolife movement emphasized the experience of the embryo or fetus, who they portrayed as a perfectly proportioned chubby baby miniaturized to fit the dimensions of the week of gestation. Mothers seeking abortion care were painted as irresponsible or misguided and the complexity of their situations was airbrushed away. Most of conservative America came to believe that the most pressing political issue in the nation was protecting babies from abortion-seeking women.

Now that the barking dog of single issue voting has finally caught the car, we’re watching a new story unfold. Listening to powerful men at the Supreme Court and on the Supreme Court callously discuss whether the state can force a woman to endure pain, loss of bodily functions, and organ loss in order to prevent her from accessing abortion care. Those cute plastic figurines of babies were the face of the prolife movement. Now the image we associate with the prolife movement is an immigrant woman giving birth in an ER waiting room bathroom lot to a stillborn infant.

On a smaller scale, business marketing can work the exact same way. A story that pushes your audience to make choices can be a dangerous thing, particularly if your product or service involves something difficult or unpleasant for the customer to face. Don’t be sloppy with your messaging. Don’t expect heavy emotions to be easy to manage after you stir them up. Offer escape and solutions not anger and fear.