“Tell me a story!”

As children we were all fascinated by stories. Growing up, maybe there is no more time for fairy tales, but the same desire to storytelling remains, and so we read articles, reports, interviews.

Even in the advertising and business fields today the narration is widely used.

The corporate storytelling

Storytelling refers to the act of narrating. Specifically, the corporate storytelling is now involved in the daily practices of marketing, communications, retail and human resource management.

In Italy there is also the Storytelling Centre, a cultural association which aims to compare and integrate knowledge in the narration field and which also organizes a number of events on this topic.

Why storytelling?

Today we need to tell stories to be known, to be appreciated and to be followed.

The narrative is very powerful: it creates bonds between people, motivates them to pursue common goals, creates trust in something or someone. And trust needs stories to be transmitted in a credible way.

Some of the objectives of corporate storytelling are:

• to give meaning to everyday actions
• to create identity, in order to be recognizable
• to maintain the memory (collective or individual)
• to shape public opinion with emotional stories
• to communicate projects / activities more effectively
• to expose problems in order to find a solution
• to communicate the corporate vision

An important point

It should be underlined that doing storytelling is not just about telling stories to anyone, but it’s about a strategy in order to create stories and design them according to their effectiveness.
The storytelling is in fact a strategy, which should be then applied to all communication’s channels.

Finally, for more inputs on corporate storytelling take a look at this interesting free ebook.