Why is storytelling so popular?

Hi! I'm your hamburger! And I think you are fat cool! The commercial sector has also discovered the power of stories. Then it is called 'storytelling'. Companies tell us their 'corporate story' - to win our customer souls. Good food, and even the Hema's scarf, now has a story.

Source and image: De Groene Amsterdammer, September 2014

Storytelling Animal

Suppose I say three words. Child. Rope. Rain. What happens when you read these words? Do you see a playing child jumping in the rain rope? Or do you see a child afraid of being beaten? The exact interpretation probably depends on your childhood, personal nature and temporary mood. Whichever way it goes, there is a good chance that a (beginning of a) story will unfold in your head. In fact, it has become clear that you should do your utmost to ensure that no story is formed. Our brains are set on stories. We are constantly looking for coherence between units of information. And we find them. Nothing is just the way it is. Nothing is just the way it is: child, rope, rain. Everything is a story with meaning. Even when we are asleep, our brains continue to spin together the most fantastic movie plots.

Why? Jonathan Gottschall researched this question from a biological perspective in his book 'The Storytelling Animal' (2012) Is inventing and telling stories an evolutionary adaptation or a side effect of something else? Nobody has a definitive answer to this question. Yet Gottschall makes an attempt.

He finds a first clue in the 'as if' games of children. This is often sweetly remembered. Ah, the uncomplicated games of that childhood... But on closer inspection, it cannot be maintained that these storylines are milder than the raw reality. On the contrary. Mothers die, babies are lost, knights cut through their opponents with swords, fire-spitting dragons chase screaming princesses. These are not the least dilemmas children face in their play. The game almost always revolves around dramatic problems. This line can easily be traced to fiction, which also almost always has wrestling as its main theme. It is almost a cliché that literature cannot exist without struggle and Gottschall discovers a kind of universal grammar of stories. It's about a character in a predicament and then the attempt to free oneself from it. A kind of test situation for the real problems in life. This would also apply to dreams. All practice material. Everywhere we make stories the problems are more numerous, more intense and above all more concentrated than in real life. Just look at any film, book or dream.

Narrative mind

The left half of our brain is responsible for spinning all these stories. This is where the continuous flow of information is ordered and organised. Gottschall calls this left half a 'classic know-it-all'. He writes: 'The narrative mind is a crucial evolutionary adaptation that enables us to experience our lives as coherent, orderly and meaningful. This is what makes life more than a blossoming, humming chaos'. But Gottschall makes an important observation: 'The narrative mind is imperfect. It is allergic to uncertainty, randomness and coincidence. It is addicted to meaning. If the narrative mind doesn't discover meaningful patterns in the world, it will try to impose those patterns...The narrative mind is a factory that produces true stories when it is possible, but will produce lies when it isn't possible'.

This unreliability of our narrative mind makes that there is more and more the idea that we cannot rely on our own interpretations and meanings in science. Thus we see in our brain culture that more and more people have come to believe that a brain scan can tell more about us than we can ourselves. Trudy Dehue, Professor of Philosophy of Science at the University of Groningen, discusses this in detail in her new book 'Better People', which was published last 11 June. In an email she writes to me: 'Most research is based on the premise that your own stories do not yield good knowledge. Questionnaires are preferred. Certainly since the neurobiological turn it is no longer about own stories and interpretations. This science searches for the truth behind the story. As if the researcher and the scanning device are a kind of lie detector together'.

Storytelling marketing

Christien Brinkgreve, professor of sociology at Utrecht University, spoke about stories during her farewell lecture on 23 June. She made a plea to give stories a place again in social science. Brinkgreve: 'Not only do you hear and tell stories, you also live in stories, often without knowing it yourself: it is the water in which you swim, the words and thoughts that form your mental world, of course, tacitly. And that have consequences for your thoughts and actions, for what is noticed and what is neglected'.

At the same time, the 'hard', commercial sector does know what to do with stories. Storytelling' is at the top of all commercial trend lists this year. Marketers are increasingly working with journalists to use their narrative spirit to sell a product or brand. Journalists thus become 'content providers' in various manifestations of 'branded journalism', while their audience shifts from citizen to consumer. Marketing agencies hire cultural anthropologists to do ethnographic research and search the internet for stories, for what really concerns people. CEOs are urged at expensive courses to deliver their message in the form of a personal story; to communicate their leadership through storytelling. Companies set up 'corporate museums' to record a strategically constructed history. Good food has a story, even the HEMA scarf has a story.

Trudy Dehue: 'It's an irony of history that the commercial sector is now rehabilitating qualitative research, while most science has renounced this precisely because it would be too subjective. Perhaps ironic, but also understandable. If the story makes money, it will be embraced by the market. But isn't the story more meaningful than that of an effective revenue generator? Why does the market get so much room to appropriate the story?

Storytelling People

Mathieu Jacobs, originally a historian, is the founder of the company Storytelling People. Storytelling is such a hype in business at the moment that he sometimes gets a little tired of it himself. Jacobs: 'People haven't even tried it yet, but mainly want to participate. It then becomes such a buzzword. Sometimes even sectarian. Like: who is the 'real' storyteller? In 2001 he read the first article about the corporate story in a communication magazine. Of course the concept came from America. Laughing: 'within 10 minutes I was on my bike at home to register the domain name immediately'.

Since that day, he has done a lot of pioneering work. People didn't understand. It's a form of neo-romanticism, because the personal story comes to the fore. The emotion is reflected in the story and many companies find that scary. Behind that glass and marble is a kind of detachment'. However, he now sees a turning point. Companies are so big, so perfectionist. And there's not much new to discover on the old marketing route. Organisations are becoming looser and more flexible, so the question is becoming more pressing: how do I bind and captivate people?

That's how he wrote a lot for Heineken, an important customer. He uses a lot of historical data for this. At one point a photo was found from 1933, when the reclamation in the United States had just been lifted. The first ship carrying beer that arrived in New York after the reclamation turned out to belong to Heineken. And there was a photograph of it. Jacobs: 'In that photo you see a crane with a net. Boxes with kegs of beer. All very small, but with an iconic value. What time does with a story! That picture feels like a kind of moon landing. It expresses so much entrepreneurship. That says so much more than a number of managers who say that entrepreneurship is the value of Heineken. You don't feel anything about it.

Another icon: recently the only colour photo was found of the Beatles' visit to the Netherlands, sponsored by Heineken. Jacobs: 'It's funny to see that glass of lager on that photo. People like that. And you can also see that a brand can function as a time link, as a generation link. Heineken is a familiar image and fulfils a certain anchor function'.

Corporate soul

After completing his studies in commissioned history, Jacobs wrote company histories, but in these stories he missed the personal element. Even the reader finds scientific texts boring. The consumer just wants to hear stories. For example, Jacobs recently held an interview with the widow of a former employee of Sligro, a catering wholesaler and an important client of Corporate Story. She sat there in her room, surrounded by pictures of her husband in front of or next to a Sligro truck. The tenderness with which she held those photographs of her husband. I just don't have any tears in my eyes yet, but that's the beginning of a Sligro community'.

According to Jacobs, it is about companies forming a community. 'When I say that, customers sometimes look at me with those big eyes. Then they ask me if I mean that they have a Twitter account. No, with a Twitter account you don't have a community yet. According to Jacobs, it's about the 'soul of the company', about the 'core identity'. People want to be part of a group. Recognize themselves. At the moment, for example, you usually see a model of a clothing brand wearing a beautiful dress. That image should tempt you to buy that dress as well. That's very one-dimensional. What if, on the brand's website, I can see videos of the people who make the clothes. This will deepen and broaden the story of the brand. Simply labelling a brand as sustainable is not enough. You really have to show it. And if you're not authentic, the consumer will sting through it too'.

Jacobs believes in storytelling. ‘I think it's really going to make the world a little better. The concept of participation in our society should actually be the concept of storytelling. The danger, of course, is that you only go down the marketing route. Then it becomes a trick. But I think that the consumer will judge companies on that. The power is shifting.’

It is clear that companies play an important role in storytelling. By the way, storytelling has also become popular with public organisations. In Amsterdam-West, for example, countless stories are being recorded by residents in order to construct a collective memory of the neighbourhood. All these stories are collected on www.geheugenvanwest.nl. It contributes to the neighbourhood's sense of community. Education Minister Jet Bussemaker also wants to use storytelling to increase women's participation in the labour market. As guest editor of Lof magazine, she stressed the importance of role models for women. To be appealing as a role model requires a story.

Getting Started

Do you want to start storytelling right now? You can start by taking a look at our websites storytellingpeople.nl, storytellingpeople.com or corporatehistory.com.

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