Storytelling isn’t selling: Stop shoehorning your brand and use science instead
Paper + Spark’s Zeina Khodr explains how neuroscience can help improve our storytelling and outlines why great stories are a critical tool for impact and connection.
It goes without saying that storytelling is generally considered to be best practice for modern content creators. Unfortunately, far too many of today’s content creators confuse storytelling with selling and attempt to shoehorn their brand – or the brands they’re working with – into a story that doesn’t fit.
It might sound counterintuitive, but in order to understand how to tell good stories, creators and brands need to understand the science behind them. Creating immersive, memorable content, creators and marketers alike should invest the time in understanding the human brain and what makes us tick.
Humans have told stories for as long as we’ve been on this planet. While cave drawings and hieroglyphic depictions play an important part in the early human history of communication, for the most part, our stories, traditions and historical records have been transmitted orally. In fact, the transition from oral to written culture didn’t come into full force until Ancient Greece, where the earliest transcriptions date from 770 to 750 B.C.
