Why Stories Matter: Storytelling & Marketing
By Kelly Walsh, CEO, MSL London
To understand why storytelling is important to you, your company, your brands or your corporate reputation today, we need to go back a bit. The origin of the importance of stories lies in their power to make sense of the world for ancient man. The most engaging storytellers attracted the biggest and most attentive audiences. These “prophets” began to assume positions of authority, giving rise to priests, judges and rulers, and – eventually – the popularity of the BBC, Google and the world’s largest repository of personal stories, Facebook.
Stories Make Sense Of Information
Neurological research shows that our brains, despite evolution, still look for the story to make sense of information today. In fact, in the landmark Heider & Simmel study (An Experimental Study of Apparent Behavior), people interpreted a simple animation involving 2 triangles, a circle and a square as a torrid tale of love, promiscuity and domestic violence.
Ideas conveyed in story form especially visual stories, versus concepts explained with logic and analysis, naturally imprint themselves into the brain faster. Stories are also universal, crossing boundaries of culture, language, gender and age. They’re told and retold, building and preserving a group’s sense of community, establishing emotional connections and creating a shared sense of purpose.
Why We Need Storytellers Today
In an age of ever increasing noise, in which we send a billion tweets a week, read around 10 megabytes of material a day, hear 400 meg, and see 1 MB of information every second, attention is worth more than ever before.
And nothing holds attention like a great story.
MSLGROUP – Creative Storytellers
Storytelling has been a part of MSLGROUP’s DNA since we launched our global brand back in 2010. But a lot has happened in the intervening years. Our increasingly sophisticated approach to corporate and brand storytelling has taken us in new and exciting directions.
So back in March this year, we saw an opportunity to take everything that we’d learned and experienced and use it to create an overarching approach to Storytelling that is designed to make our clients expert storytellers and make our client teams expert story strategists, developers and editors.
Developing this approach has also given us a renewed sense of purpose – to make our clients the most successful storytellers in the world. Storytelling 2012 gives us the intelligence, practice and processes to do that. We are proud to share this work with you and welcome your thoughts.
Kelly is the CEO of MSL London. Having successfully grown the consumer practice in London, she now also works across the agency on multi-disciplinary client work and driving Digital, Planning and Measurement capabilities and thought-leadership.
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