Story Is Not a Communication Tool. It's a Drug.

The marketing world has a storytelling problem, and it is not what you think.

We are not bad at telling stories. We are bad at understanding what story actually does. We treat it as a communication format, a way to make information more palatable, a vehicle for delivering messages that would otherwise be ignored. We put a human face on a product announcement and call it storytelling. We add an opening anecdote to a white paper and call it narrative. We are aping the form without understanding the mechanism.

When a story works, your audience's brain chemistry changes.

Neuroscientist Paul Zak spent years running one of the more unusual research programs in modern science. He drew blood from people before and after exposing them to video narratives, then measured what happened to their neurochemistry. What he found is difficult to overstate. A compelling, character-driven story causes the brain to produce oxytocin, the same neurochemical associated with trust, empathy, and social bonding. It is released when a mother holds her child. It is released when someone shows us genuine kindness. And it is released, Zak's research showed, when we are transported into a well-constructed narrative.

"We have identified oxytocin as the neurochemical responsible for empathy and narrative transportation," Zak wrote in Greater Good. "When the brain synthesizes oxytocin, people are more trustworthy, generous, charitable, and compassionate."

In one version of his experiments, participants who received synthetic oxytocin donated to 57 percent more charities and gave 56 percent more money than those in the control group. The story had, in effect, given them a chemical argument for generosity that no amount of statistics or logic could replicate.

This is the thing we are missing in most marketing conversations. We are not competing for attention. We are competing for chemistry.

Rory Sutherland, vice chairman of Ogilvy and author of Alchemy: The Dark Art and Curious Science of Creating Magic in Brands, Business, and Life, makes the broader argument that human decision-making is fundamentally irrational, and that our obsession with rational persuasion is why most marketing fails. "The fatal issue is that logic always gets you to exactly the same place as your competitors." Everyone making a rational argument arrives at the same rational argument. Differentiation requires something else.

That something else is what story provides. Not information. Not rational justification. A biological state that makes your audience more open, more trusting, more generous toward what you are asking of them.

Neuroscientist Antonio Damasio spent decades studying patients with damage to the ventromedial prefrontal cortex, a region of the brain involved in emotional processing. These patients were intelligent. Their reasoning faculties were intact. But they had lost the ability to feel emotions, and as a result, they became functionally incapable of making decisions. They could analyze options endlessly but could not choose between them. Damasio's conclusion, documented in his book Descartes' Error, was radical. Emotions are not the enemy of rational decision-making. They are the substrate of it. Without emotional input, the decision-making mechanism simply does not function. "Feelings are not just the shady side of reason," he told Scientific American, "but they help us to reach decisions as well."

The marketing implication is one that most organizations have not fully absorbed. When you strip the emotion out of your communications in the name of professionalism or precision, you are not making your message cleaner. You are making it neurologically inert. A press release that contains only facts gives the reader's brain nothing to act on. A story that creates emotional engagement gives the brain exactly what it needs to move toward a decision.

The companies that understand this at an operational level do not think of storytelling as a creative exercise. They think of it as a mechanism. They understand that before you can convince anyone of anything, you need to change the state they are in. And the most reliable tool for changing that state is a well-constructed narrative.

Most companies start with what they want to say. The question that should come first is what do we want our audience to feel? And then what story will make them feel it?

Those are very different questions. The first produces messaging. The second produces magic.

This is the first article in a five-part series on the alchemy of story in marketing.