Stories That Stick: How Storytelling Can Captivate Customers, Influence Audiences, and Transform Your Business

Where, When, and How to Tell Your Stories
Storytelling is as old as the campfire, and as young as a tweet.
What moves people is someone who is credible.
—RICHARD BRANSON, FOUNDER OF THE VIRGIN GROUP
I
f a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?
It’s an age-old question, and when it comes to your stories, a relevant one.
If you find your story and put the effort into crafting it, but you never tell it,
does it even matter? While the forest-tree conundrum is up for debate, the
answer to the storytelling question is pretty straightforward.
No.
When it comes to storytelling, simply knowing all the things you’ve learned
thus far does you no good. Knowledge is not power; it’s just wasted brain space
if you never actually tell your story.
The good news is that your opportunities for storytelling are endless and
ever-growing. Case in point: A recent 
Wall Street Journal
article announced that
some companies are now printing inserts and paying to have them included in
packages from retailers such as Saks Fifth Avenue and Zulily.
1
If you’re going
to spend that much money on an ad, you might as well tell a story and make it

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worth it.
And much like Windex, duct tape, or in my opinion, a nice glass of
champagne, a well-told story can solve a whole variety of challenges in business
and beyond. Essentially, when in doubt, tell a story. This has basically been my
mantra for the past two decades.
For example, I used to be a spin instructor, which, I should start by saying, is
a lot more intense than you might expect. There is so much going on in that
single hour of teaching: you have to remember the movements, change the
lighting, call out instructions, adjust the music volume, keep the riders motivated
when all they really want to do is die, and, oh yeah, be a cardio machine.
And that’s just during the class. Perhaps the most stressful part of teaching a
spin class is putting together the playlist ahead of time. I don’t know if you’ve
ever been to a workout class where the music was insufferable, but it is a unique
form of cruel and unusual punishment that should be reserved for the likes of
evil dictators.
I’ll never forget the terror of putting my first few playlists together. Would
the riders like it? What if they hated Britney Spears and Daft Punk? Every week
when I got on the instructor bike, I had a pit in my stomach about this. To ease
it, out of instinct, I started telling stories. Before each set, while the riders were
hydrating, I would tell a story about the song that was about to play next. They
were short, funny, and added context to every ride. So, yeah, maybe they hated
Kylie Minogue, but they loved the story I told about picking Michael up from
the airport before we were dating and blasting “Can’t Get You Out of My Head”
from my car in an effort to be subtle.
Slowly but surely, what started out as just a few riders at 9:30 a.m. on
Sunday mornings and 6:45 p.m. on Wednesday nights turned into sold-out
classes and people being turned away at the door. And when I taught my final
class two years later, my riders said they’d miss the workout, yes, but the thing
they’d miss most was my stories.
When in doubt, tell a story. Tell them in emails and email campaigns. Leave
a story in a voice mail. Tell a story in your autoresponder. Tell them in meetings.
Tell stories in webinars. Tell them online. A 2014 study conducted jointly by
social ad tech firm Adaptly and Facebook and Refinery29, a fashion and style
website, concluded that telling a brand story—bringing customers through a
sequential series of messages—was more effective than simply using traditional
calls to action. Not just more effective, but