Why stories? 

The short answer: Because it’s the only way.

“Humans are essentially storytellers,” wrote Walter R. Fisher, the scholar who taught for years at USC’s famous Annenberg School for Communications. Fisher created the “narrative paradigm” of communication, elaborated in his influential 1987 book, Human Communication as Narration. Quite simply, Fisher lays out the compelling, virtually undeniable argument that all human communication takes the form of narrative.

Fisher’s book documents how people in all times and cultures have made their decisions, taken action, and lived their lives based on an inherent human ability to judge the “coherence” of the stories they are told—the internal consistency of a story and how well one story hangs together with others that we believe. Fisher shows that people’s beliefs and behavior are determined by “the constant habit of testing...whether or not the stories they experience ring true with the stories they know to be true in their lives.”

I think that’s exactly right. It’s been validated now by psychology, sociology, anthropology, neuroscience, and narrative theory. The sciences of the mind tell us that people are conscious of only a small portion of this constant evaluation of internal stories; the vast majority of decision making is unconscious. (Take a look at The Science of Winning with Stories.)

I came across Fisher’s work late, around 2016 or so. It resonated because it confirmed all the recent audience research I’ve been involved with and everything I’d experienced while telling stories in journalism, then advertising, and, for the past few years, in politics and social activism. If you want to influence or persuade people, you have to tell them a true, coherent, emotionally appealing story that engages them and intersects with the internal stories — conscious and unconscious — that construct their reality. These are the stories in their heads — the ones they tell themselves; the ones parents pass on to their children and friends repeat to friends.

Along the way—while creating stories for clients like Unilever, Lexus, and others—I invented the term "post advertising" to describe a world where the people, not brands or media companies, would be in charge of what content they'd consume. It was 2007. Facebook had been open to the public for just a year. The internet was a glossy, anti-corporate, utopian dream of infinite content choices controlled by the audience.

Things changed. The internet became more of a corporate nightmare than a dream of democracy. But the defining rule of what I called the post-ad age still holds pretty much true: The only messages people see or hear are the ones they choose to see and hear. If product claims and message points had ever wielded persuasive power, that power ended abruptly. Emotionally appealing storytelling took over in commerce and civics.