Storytelling Marketing Quotes

People don't think in terms of information. They think in terms of narratives. But while people focus on the story itself, information comes along for the ride.

5 Ways To Build Your Brand on Social Media: 1 Post content that add value 2 Spread positivity 3 Create steady stream of info 4 Make an impact 5 Be yourself

All marketers are storytellers. Only the losers are liars.

Master communicators listen to understand what people are saying, know how to use storytelling as a means of persuasion, and generate a gravitational pull towards their brands and offerings.

Storytelling sells a vision of the future.

The ultimate gift, in our digital age, is a CEO who has the storytelling talent to capture the imagination of the markets while surrounding themselves with people who can show incremental progress against that vision each day.

If we all work together there is no telling how we can change the world through the impact of promoting positivity online.

Good content isn’t about good storytelling. It’s about telling a true story well.

Effective content marketing is about mastering the art of storytelling. Facts tell, but stories sell.

Stories connect us at a human level that factual statements and logical arguments can't possibly match.

Your audience is waiting for your stories. They have memory slots tailor-made to light up and remember you.

The incredible brand awareness and bottom-line profits achievable through social media marketing require hustle, heart, sincerity, constant engagement, long-term commitment, and most of all, artful and strategic storytelling.

In our modern world, this elemental quality of storytelling is denied. We live today in a world in which everything has its place and function and nothing is left out of place. Storytelling is thus at a discount and like everything else in a world ruled by the laws of exchange value, literature is required to submit itself to the requirements of the market and must learn, like any other commodity, to adapt and serve needs that lie outside of itself and its concrete value. It is forced to stand not for itself but for an ideological cause of one sort or another, whether it be political, social or literary. It cannot exist for itself: like everything else it has to be justified. And for this very reason the power of storytelling is automatically devalued. Literature is reduced to the status of complimentary utilitarian functions: as a pastime to provide distraction and entertainment, or as a heightened activity that would claim to explore 'great truths' about the human condition.

We’d like to believe that efficient, useful, cost-effective products and services are the way to succeed. That hard work is its own reward. Most marketers carry around a worldview that describes themselves as innovators, not storytellers.

When a hot trend turns into a sub-category, new strictures arise along with it. Tropes turn into shortcuts, character paradigms become cardboard cutouts. Publishing pulls the bandwagon, true enough, but when feel-alike fiction floods the market its impact declines because it is starved of what makes fiction rich, surprising, moving, and masterful.

People do not buy goods and services. They buy relations, stories, and magic.” – Seth Godin

Visuals are processed 60,000 times faster than text by the human brain and 90% of information transmitted to the brain is visual.17 Humans evolved over millennia to respond to visual information long before they developed the ability to read text. Images act like shortcuts to the brain: we are visual creatures, and we are programmed to react to visuals more than to words.

Decrease dependence on any one specific prompt by generating a multiplicity of prompts. Using a variety of types or styles of prompts, especially if they can be delivered via unexpected channels,

The American Society for Training and Development says that by the time you go back to your job, you've lost 90% of what you've learned in training. You only retain 10%. If you don't use the skills very quickly, you will have big decay very quickly.

The incredible brand awareness and bottom-line profits achievable through social media marketing require hustle, heart, sincerity, constant engagement, long-term commitment, and most of all, artful and strategic storytelling. Don’t ever forget it, no matter what you learn here.*

The relationship between humanity and work involves money, but in something of a negative correlation. The jobs and roles that are the most human and would naturally be most attractive tend to pay nothing or close to nothing. Mother, father, artist, writer, musician, coach, teacher, storyteller, nurturer, counselor, dancer, poet, philosopher, journalist—these roles often are either unpaid or pay so little that it is difficult to survive or thrive in many environments. Many of these roles have high positive social impacts that are ignored by the market. On the other hand, the most lucrative jobs tend to be the most inorganic. Corporate lawyers, technologists, financiers, traders, management consultants, and the like assume a high degree of efficiency. The more that a person can submerge one’s humanity to the logic of the marketplace, the higher the reward.

Our understanding of the world of business is all mixed up with storytelling and mythology. Which is funny because we’re missing the real story by focusing on individuals. In fact, half the companies in the Fortune 500 were started during a bear market or recession. Half. The point is that most people start from disadvantage (often with no idea they are doing so) and do just fine. It’s not unfair, it’s universal. Those who survive it, survive because they took things day by day—that’s the real secret. Focus on the moment, not the monsters that may or may not be up ahead.

Wild animals enjoying one another and taking pleasure in their world is so immediate and so real, yet this reality is utterly absent from textbooks and academic papers about animals and ecology. There is a truth revealed here, absurd in its simplicity. This insight is not that science is wrong or bad. On the contrary: science, done well, deepens our intimacy with the world. But there is a danger in an exclusively scientific way of thinking. The forest is turned into a diagram; animals become mere mechanisms; nature's workings become clever graphs. Today's conviviality of squirrels seems a refutation of such narrowness. Nature is not a machine. These animals feel. They are alive; they are our cousins, with the shared experience kinship implies. And they appear to enjoy the sun, a phenomenon that occurs nowhere in the curriculum of modern biology. Sadly, modern science is too often unable or unwilling to visualize or feel what others experience. Certainly science's "objective" gambit can be helpful in understanding parts of nature and in freeing us from some cultural preconceptions. Our modern scientific taste for dispassion when analyzing animal behaviour formed in reaction to the Victorian naturalists and their predecessors who saw all nature as an allegory confirming their cultural values. But a gambit is just an opening move, not a coherent vision of the whole game. Science's objectivity sheds some assumptions but takes on others that, dressed up in academic rigor, can produce hubris and callousness about the world. The danger comes when we confuse the limited scope of our scientific methods with the true scope of the world. It may be useful or expedient to describe nature as a flow diagram or an animal as a machine, but such utility should not be confused with a confirmation that our limited assumptions reflect the shape of the world. Not coincidentally, the hubris of narrowly applied science serves the needs of the industrial economy. Machines are bought, sold, and discarded; joyful cousins are not. Two days ago, on Christmas Eve, the U.S. Forest Service opened to commercial logging three hundred thousand acres of old growth in the Tongass National Forest, more than a billion square-meter mandalas. Arrows moved on a flowchart, graphs of quantified timber shifted. Modern forest science integrated seamlessly with global commodity markets—language and values needed no translation. Scientific models and metaphors of machines are helpful but limited. They cannot tell us all that we need to know. What lies beyond the theories we impose on nature? This year I have tried to put down scientific tools and to listen: to come to nature without a hypothesis, without a scheme for data extraction, without a lesson plan to convey answers to students, without machines or probes. I have glimpsed how rich science is but simultaneously how limited in scope and in spirit. It is unfortunate that the practice of listening generally has no place in the formal training of scientists. In this absence science needlessly fails. We are poorer for this, and possibly more hurtful. What Christmas Eve gifts might a listening culture give its forests? What was the insight that brushed past me as the squirrels basked? It was not to turn away from science. My experience of animals is richer for knowing their stories, and science is a powerful way to deepen this understanding. Rather, I realized that all stories are partly wrapped in fiction—the fiction of simplifying assumptions, of cultural myopia and of storytellers' pride. I learned to revel in the stories but not to mistake them for the bright, ineffable nature of the world.

The storyteller gave me a sideways look. “Miss Lea, it doesn’t do to get attached to these secondary characters. It’s not their story. They come, they go, and when they go they’re gone for good. That’s all there is to it.” I slid my pencil into the spiral binding of my notebook and walked to the door, but when I got there, I turned back. “Where did she come from, then?” “For goodness’ sake! She was only a governess! She is irrelevant, I tell you.” “She must have had references. A previous job. Or else a letter of application with a home address. Perhaps she came from an agency?” Miss Winter closed her eyes and a long-suffering expression appeared on her face. “Mr. Lomax, the Angelfield family solicitor, will have all the details I’m sure. Not that they’ll do you any good. It’s my story. I should know. His office is in Market Street, Banbury. I will instruct him to answer any inquiries you choose to make.” I wrote to Mr. Lomax that night.

Niflheim: the world of primordial darkness, cold, mist, and ice Norns: the three sisters who control the fate of men and women Ormstunga: means serpent’s tongue, from orm (serpent) and stunga (tongue) Prow: the front end of a ship or boat Ragnarök: the final battle between the gods and giants which will bring an end to the gods of Asgard. Sax-knife: a large single-edged knife Skald: a poet, a storyteller Skjaldborg: a shield wall Sleipnir: Odin’s eight-legged horse Snekkja: a viking longship used for battle Stern: the back end of a ship or boat Suðrikaupstefna: Southern Market, from the words suðr (south) and kaupstefna (market) Surtr: a fire giant who leads his kin into battle against the gods of Asgard during Ragnarök Svartalfheim: the world inhabited by the dwarves Tafl: a strategy board game Thrall: a slave Valhalla: Odin’s hall where those who died in battle reside Valknut: a symbol made of three interlocked triangles, also known as Odin’s Knot. It is thought to represent the transition from life to death, Odin, and the power to bind and unbind

Declan had been told a long time ago that he had to know what he wanted, or he'd never get it. Not by his father, because his father would never have delivered such pragmatic advice in such a pragmatic way. No, even if Niall Lynch believed in the sentiment, he would have wrapped it up in a long story filled with metaphor and magic and nonsense riddles. Only years after the storytelling would Declan be sitting somewhere and realize that all along Niall had been trying to teach him to balance his checkbook, or whatever the tale had really been about. Niall could never just say the thing. No, this piece of advice--You have to know what you want, or you'll never get it--was given to Declan by a senator from Nevada he'd met during a DC field trip back in eighth grade. The other children had been bored by the pale stone restraint of the city and the sameness of the law and government offices they toured. Declan, however, had been fascinated. He'd asked the senator what advice he had for those looking to get into politics. "Come from money," the senator had said first, and then when all the eighth graders and their teachers had stared without laughing, he added, "You have to know what you want, or you'll never get it. Make goals." Declan made goals. The goal was DC. The goal was politics. The goal was structure, and more structure, and yet more structure. He took AP classes on political science and policy. When he traveled with his father to black markets, he wrote papers. When he took calls from gangsters and shady antique auction houses, he arranged drop-offs near DC and wrangled meetings with HR people. Aglionby Academy made calls and pulled strings; he got names, numbers, internships. All was going according to plan. His father's will conveniently left him a townhouse adjacent to DC. Declan pressed on. He kept his brothers alive; he graduated; he moved to DC. He made the goal, he went towards the goal. When he took his first lunch meeting with his new boss, he found himself filled with the same anticipation he'd had as an eighth grader. This was the place, he thought, where things happened. Just across the road was the Mexican embassy. Behind him was the IMF. GW Law School was a block away. The White House, the USPS, the Red Cross, all within a stone's throw. This was before he understood there was no making it for him. He came from money, yeah, but the wrong kind of money. Niall Lynch's clout was not relevant in this daylight world; he only had status in the night. And one could not rise above that while remaining invisible to protect one's dangerous brother. On that first day of work, Declan walked into the Renwick Gallery and stood inside an installation that had taken over the second floor around the grand staircase. Tens of thousands of black threads had been installed at points all along the ceiling, tangling around the Villareal LED sculpture that normally lit the room, snarling the railing over the stairs, blocking out the light from the tall arches that bordered the walls, turning the walkways into dark, confusing rabbit tunnels. Museumgoers had to pick their way through with caution lest they be snared and bring the entire world down with them. He had, bizarrely, felt tears burning the corners of his eyes. Before that, he hadn't understood that his goals and what he wanted might not be the same thing. This was where he'd found art.

We come from different worlds,” I said, “but each has so much to teach the other. There will be moments of dissonance, when people struggle to understand each other’s ways, but once we get past our misconceptions, imagine the reward. “The dancers will perform in the market of Wyvern’s Court; they will be beside avian poets, singers, philosophers and storytellers or we cannot hope to succeed. Merchants will haggle prices and barter goods as they have in both our markets throughout history. Scholars will work to impart their valuable knowledge to their students. Artists will create beauty. And our children will grow up together, playing the same games, taught by the same teachers, living side by side until as adults, I pray, they laugh at the petty arguments we had in this nest while we designed their world.” “And ravens will dance, and serpents will fight for the lives of falcons.

But when it comes to telling stories in a marketing context, you generally want to inspire your audience.

Truth is the greatest marketing campaign.

Design is your silent storyteller. The visual aesthetic you share with the world tells a story about the values you uphold. When your audience is not ready or willing to listen, a strong visual can capture even the most evasive of minds. Design is not ornamental or secondary: it can propel your stories far beyond the spaces you initially planned for.

. . .You are preparing to make it possible to live in the writer’s dream, by learning to market your writing skills, your wonderful books. All it takes is believing in yourself for an instant, believing your power as a storyteller full, completely, absolutely without question. AND, letting go just long enough to create, to break the dam that’s holding you back. Just a little rupture so your energy starts leaking out, and you start learning to quit dwelling on any the thoughts related to your mental roadblocks. . . .

But sometimes storytellers want to inhabit certainty. They assume more than mortals ought. A tale-spinner by a hearth fire or gathering a crowd in a market square or putting brush to paper in a quiet room, deep into his story, the lives he’s chronicling, will deceive himself into believing he has the otherworldly knowledge of a fox spirit, a river spirit, a ghost, a god. He will say or write such things as, “The boy killed in the Altai attack on the Jeni encampment was likely to have become a great leader of his people, one who could have changed the north.

The idea that this technology is a new business model for animation is bullshit. Good luck with that! The artists and storytellers will want to continue to grow the technology, so this year’s technology will be obsolete in ten years.” Katzenberg was right, of course. No matter how much technology you throw at the art of making an animated movie, a good one will always be expensive. Pixar made Toy Story for around $20 million (a number that doesn’t include what Disney spent on it for promotion and distribution). Pixar’s 2013 movie, Monsters University, is rumored to have cost around $200 million, marketing included.

Storytelling delivers facts or information through a narrative that is relatable and has an impact.

you are not your job or your material possessions, or your most significant accomplishments. Storytelling calls for that underlayer, that private part of your life to come to the surface.

The Why am I here? story serves a particular purpose in explaining the connection between the storyteller and the audience.

These stories can be short or long, but they need to depict the information while remaining engaging clearly.

I know what you’re thinking approach allows for the acceptance of the skeptics.

I know it’s hard right now, but it gets easier later.

When clients want to add a bunch of confusion to their marketing message, I ask them to consider the ramifications of doing so if they were writing a screenplay. I mean, what if The Bourne Identity were a movie about a spy named Jason Bourne searching for his true identity but it also included scenes of Bourne trying to lose weight, marry a girl, pass the bar exam, win on Jeopardy, and adopt a cat? The audience would lose interest. When storytellers bombard people with too much information, the audience is forced to burn too many calories organizing the data. As a result, they daydream, walk out of the theater, or in the case of digital marketing, click to another site without placing an order. Why do so many brands create noise rather than music? It’s because they don’t realize they are creating noise. They actually think people are interested in the random information they’re doling out. This is why we need a filter. The essence of branding is to create simple, relevant messages we can repeat over and over so that we “brand” ourselves into the public consciousness.

The whole point of storytelling is to connect with an audience and share an experience. Through storytelling, you can accomplish emotional connection and behavioral change that raw facts simply cannot achieve.

human response to emotional engagement

The response of your brain when listening to a story is almost the same as if you were experiencing the events yourself.

Give an issue an identity

Emotional response

Connect a greater audience to a specific challenge –

Make the audience feel humanized –

Raise the stakes

A story alone may accomplish those results, but for impact and efficacy, combine the two with an emphasis on culture, minor parts in facts, and acknowledging the public opinion.

dopamine results in increased focus, better memory building, and a boost in motivation.

create endorphins, make your audience laugh.

ensuring your story is meaningful, useful, and achieves specific goals.

Average brands share the pitch. Smart brands share the passion.

Start by identifying the possible key moments in your life.

Often the beginning of a story is one moment that impacted how you thought about the world around you and changed your behaviors. Activity Make a short list of the moments in your life that you remember most vividly.

seemingly insignificant moments lead to life-changing events.

people and relationships.

What moments and meetings in your life have drastically changed who you are as a person?

look for these tiny moments, and question their degree of impact.

What will this story accomplish, and why should you share it?

Your story must be unique, offer insight, and give perspective into your experiences and help others learn more about themselves.

basic structure of beginning-middle-end. Thus, you should have rising action, the climax, and the falling action.

Establish Your Point “A story is already over before we hear it. That is how the teller knows what it means.” – Joan Silber

3. After sharing this story, I can _______________. 4. After hearing this story, the listeners should __________________. 5. This story shared human experiences, such as __________ and _______________. Through these five questions, you should have a pretty clear understanding of what you want to see come out of this story

Stuck in your story? – Evoke the senses.

Stop judging yourself – That inner critic is the death of many great storytellers.

Get involved in a workshop – Finding a workshop or writing partner can help you

Prove value first; Prove value always.

Don't tell them what you want to tell them; tell them what they want to hear.

In the end, value is all that matters to every participant in any speaker-audience interaction. Either a story delivers value or it doesn’t; everything else stems from that simple equation.

● Knows your story ● Likes your brand ● Connects with your target audience ● Aligns with your brand’s values and mission statement ● Understands your needs in an influencer campaign

Host Events When you want some control over an influencer’s interaction with your brand, you can sponsor an influencer event. Invite a small handful of influencers to come and experience your brand’s products or services. By doing this, you allow them to become part of your story

There is something about a meet and greets with influencers. They are a very special experience for their followers. Plus, if you are the brand that can deliver that experience, then you’re the hero in the room.

shared elements between storytelling and digital storytelling: ● Point of view ● Dramatic question or addressing specific issue or challenge ● Conflict and tension ● Emotional connection ● Unique voice or narrative tone ● Controlled pacing

Structure of beginning, middle, and an end

elements that only appear in digital storytelling, but not storytelling: ● Soundtrack ● Possible visual elements such as video, background images, or PowerPoint presentations ● Economy – purposeful withholding of specific information given in another format,

supplemental elements, such as a soundtrack, videos, or images to make that emotional connection that they weren’t able to make through wordsmithing alone.

Ensure That Your Narrative Has a “Feel

Remember the saying, “It’s not what you say; it’s how you say it”? That is the foundation of giving your narrative a feel.

As a digital storyteller, the tools to help you build your narrative tone will continue to change and evolve. You have to change and evolve with the times as well.

Get Outside Your Comfort Zone

Tools to Use in Digital Storytelling

Immersive storytelling is a technique used to explore storytelling through new technologies to immerse the reader or audience fully.

Through compelling storytelling and targeted messaging, marketing initiatives capture the essence of a school's brand, evoking emotion and inspiring support from its audience.

Branding is the storybook, narrating the school's history, values, and culture, while marketing is the storyteller, crafting messages and impressions to attract and keep their audience.

1. The conglomerate movement, “with all its fancy rhetoric about synergism and leverage.” 2. Accountants who played footsie with stock-promoting managements by certifying earnings that weren’t earnings at all. 3. “Modern” corporate treasurers who looked upon their company pension funds as new-found profit centers and pressured their investment advisers into speculating with them. 4. Investment advisers who massacred clients’ portfolios because they were trying to make good on the over-promises that they had made to attract the business. 5. The new breed of investment managers who bought and churned the worst collection of new issues and other junk in history, and the underwriters who made fortunes bringing them out. 6. Elements of the financial press which promoted into new investment geniuses a group of neophytes who didn’t even have the first requisite for managing other people’s money—namely, a sense of responsibility. 7. The securities salesmen who peddle the items with the best stories—or the biggest markups—even though such issues were totally unsuited to the customers’ needs. 8. The sanctimonious partners of major investment houses who wrung their hands over all these shameless happenings while they deployed an army of untrained salesmen to forage among even less trained investors. 9. Mutual fund managers who tried to become millionaires overnight by using every gimmick imaginable to manufacture their own paper performance. 10. Portfolio managers who collected bonanza incentives of the “heads I win, tails you lose” kind, which made them fortunes in the bull market but turned the portfolios they managed into disasters in the bear market. 11. Security analysts who forgot about their professional ethics to become storytellers and let their institutions be taken in by a whole parade of confidence men. This was the “list of horrors that people in our field did to set the stage for the greatest blood bath in forty years,

Restrictions are a powerful thing. Although we often chafe at the limitations imposed by our marketing platforms, those limitations often bring out our storytelling creativity. That’s why we should all be paying close attention to Vine, the six-second looping-video platform

Buyer Legends is a business process that uses storytelling techniques to map the critical paths a prospective buyer might follow on his journey to becoming a buyer. This process aligns strategy to brand story to the buyer’s actual experience on their customer journey. These easy-to-tell stories reveal the opportunities and gaps in the customer’s experience versus the current marketing & sales process. These legends communicate the brand’s story intent and critical touch point responsibilities within every level of an organization, from the boardroom to the stockroom. Buyer Legends reconcile the creative process to data analysis; aligning metrics with previously hard-to-measure marketing, sales, and customer service processes. The first result is improved execution, communications, and testing. The second result is a big boost to the bottom line.

Marketing shouldn't feel like marketing. It should feel like a story.

Kellogg’s Pop-Tarts frequently uses cartoons as part of its visual content mix to tell a fun and irreverent story around people’s cravings for Pop-Tarts.

Often, the cartoons feature people using sneaky and creative ways to coax their Pop-Tart into a toaster. One such example occurred over the July Fourth holiday, where a cartoon depicted a person luring a Pop-Tart into a toaster made to look like a parade float. While inside the toaster, the Pop-Tart inquires about when to pop out, and the hungry person declares, “Yep, just one more minute …

When she’s in a courtroom, Wendy Patrick, a deputy district attorney for San Diego, uses some of the roughest words in the English language. She has to, given that she prosecutes sex crimes. Yet just repeating the words is a challenge for a woman who not only holds a law degree but also degrees in theology and is an ordained Baptist minister. “I have to say (a particularly vulgar expletive) in court when I’m quoting other people, usually the defendants,” she admitted. There’s an important reason Patrick has to repeat vile language in court. “My job is to prove a case, to prove that a crime occurred,” she explained. “There’s often an element of coercion, of threat, (and) of fear. Colorful language and context is very relevant to proving the kind of emotional persuasion, the menacing, a flavor of how scary these guys are. The jury has to be made aware of how bad the situation was. Those words are disgusting.” It’s so bad, Patrick said, that on occasion a judge will ask her to tone things down, fearing a jury’s emotions will be improperly swayed. And yet Patrick continues to be surprised when she heads over to San Diego State University for her part-time work of teaching business ethics. “My students have no qualms about dropping the ‘F-bomb’ in class,” she said. “The culture in college campuses is that unless they’re disruptive or violating the rules, that’s (just) the way kids talk.” Experts say people swear for impact, but the widespread use of strong language may in fact lessen that impact, as well as lessen society’s ability to set apart certain ideas and words as sacred. . . . [C]onsider the now-conversational use of the texting abbreviation “OMG,” for “Oh, My God,” and how the full phrase often shows up in settings as benign as home-design shows without any recognition of its meaning by the speakers. . . . Diane Gottsman, an etiquette expert in San Antonio, in a blog about workers cleaning up their language, cited a 2012 Career Builder survey in which 57 percent of employers say they wouldn’t hire a candidate who used profanity. . . . She added, “It all comes down to respect: if you wouldn’t say it to your grandmother, you shouldn’t say it to your client, your boss, your girlfriend or your wife.” And what about Hollywood, which is often blamed for coarsening the language? According to Barbara Nicolosi, a Hollywood script consultant and film professor at Azusa Pacific University, an evangelical Christian school, lazy script writing is part of the explanation for the blue tide on television and in the movies. . . . By contrast, she said, “Bad writers go for the emotional punch of crass language,” hence the fire-hose spray of obscenities [in] some modern films, almost regardless of whether or not the subject demands it. . . . Nicolosi, who noted that “nobody misses the bad language” when it’s omitted from a script, said any change in the industry has to come from among its ranks: “Writers need to have a conversation among themselves and in the industry where we popularize much more responsible methods in storytelling,” she said. . . . That change can’t come quickly enough for Melissa Henson, director of grass-roots education and advocacy for the Parents Television Council, a pro-decency group. While conceding there is a market for “adult-themed” films and language, Henson said it may be smaller than some in the industry want to admit. “The volume of R-rated stuff that we’re seeing probably far outpaces what the market would support,” she said. By contrast, she added, “the rate of G-rated stuff is hardly sufficient to meet market demands.” . . . Henson believes arguments about an “artistic need” for profanity are disingenuous. “You often hear people try to make the argument that art reflects life,” Henson said. “I don’t hold to that. More often than not, ‘art’ shapes the way we live our lives, and it skews our perceptions of the kind of life we're supposed to live." [DN, Apr. 13, 2014]

the secret sauce remains the same: The incredible brand awareness and bottom-line profits achievable through social media marketing require hustle, heart, sincerity, constant engagement, long-term commitment, and most of all, artful and strategic storytelling.

Over the years, I’ve launched dozens and dozens of projects and sold goods and services to businesses and individuals. I’ve worked with Jay Levinson, the father of Guerrilla Marketing, with Lester Wunderman, the godfather of direct mail, and Bernadette Jiwa, the doyenne of storytelling. My ideas have built billion-dollar companies and raised nearly that much for important charities

Deri was well and truly caught, a fly in the web of words and wonder spun by the actors on the stage.

Clear and persuasive copywriting. Classic, heartfelt storytelling that speaks to people’s everyday problems. A strong and well-communicated differentiator, so I stand out from the competition. An email list I control and regularly provide value to. Informative, insightful content that delivers value upfront while also moving people toward a sale. Long-term relationships that will continue to bear fruit for years. Authentic testimonials that help people see themselves in what I’m offering.

Marketing and selling are simply storytelling. If you cannot story tell, you cannot market or sell. If you cannot market or sell, you cannot win.

That is the essence of a value story—to illustrate value in a way nothing else can. No matter how big or small your business, if you want more sales and better marketing, start with your value stories. And if you’re suddenly planning a Mother’s Day photo session with your mom or grandmother, you’ll have to get in line behind me.

This is the first gap in business: the value gap. The gap between the problem and the value of the solution. The gap between the product and the value to the customer. The most important gap any business needs to bridge is the gap between what they offer and the people who, whether they know it or not, need it. To capture the attention of buyers, to convince them that, yes, this is the solution, and eventually to transform them into repeat users, customers, buyers, believers. When it comes to sales and marketing, the value story is king. And the value of a value story starts in psychology and spans the full spectrum of why we say yes.

Having an identifiable character is a critical point of distinction between a strong story and a weak one. The greatest mistake of marketing is to put what you offer at the center of everything instead of the person you offer it to.