Story Telling v. Product Selling

My intuitive friend Dave Taylor had an interesting recent post post called "Don't sell me a product. Tell me a story. Of course this also plays into Seth Godin's excellent, "All Marketers are Liars." I violently agree with the concept that the best way to market is to tell a story, rather than sell, sell, sell.

But as I commented over at Dave's blog, I don't think the concept goes far enough in expressing the essential impact of story-telling.  As Yossi Vardi told Robert and me back in Naked Conversations Chapter 3 (Word of Mouth on Steroids), our culture is conversational.  We have been telling each other stories ever since we were huddle together in caves, using berries and blood to paint pictures before we had languages to tell stories. Religion, history--nearly every aspect of every human culture is built on story-telling. 

Story-telling is very powerful stuff.  We retain the essence of simple stories, well-told much longer than we recall the three key point in a PowerPoint stack.  When I cover conferences for Conferenza, the most popular speakers were not the pontificators, but the story narrators.  Malcolm Gladwell was our favorite last year.  He was selling his book, but he didn't talk much about his book.  Instead he told audiences the story of designing the Aeron Chair and zesty Prego Spaghetti.  I loved the stories so much, I just couldn't wait to read the book.

When I look back at the making of Naked Conversations, I still wonder how people will receive the list, tips and guidelines crammed into its pages.  But I have very high confidence that The stories we tell, of over 100 business bloggers are powerful stuff.  And the stories we tell is what will convince new people to start blogging.