If American Idol wasn’t enough to prove that we all love a great story, check out The Voice coming to NBC this week. It is the latest music-reality starmaker program. And come September, North America will see Simon Cowell’s X Factor for the first time. Music is a great foundation to tell a dramatic story.
Since human beings came to exist, we’ve loved stories. We carved them on cave walls. Then we sang them and told them as fables and legends. We turned them into songs. As technology advanced we created books, magazines, TV shows, and movies. Stories, all of them.
Great brands have compelling stories with engaging lead characters and dramatic twists and turns. Mark Zuckerberg’s first twenty years became dramatized in The Social Network last year. In that case, reality was equally as enticing as the fiction it inspired.
Great stories exist in business, and smart brands tell them. Chrysler’s recent “Imported From Detroit” commercials wonderfully tell the story of hard times and a rise from the ashes. Dos Equis brilliantly tells the ongoing story of “The Most Interesting Man In The World”.
Are you telling a story, or just selling your stuff? The secret is that if we buy into your story, there’s a good chance we’ll buy whatever you are selling as well.
By the way, you can follow my story on Twitter at http://www.twitter.com/rockstarbrands. I never tweet about what I had for breakfast, but I do zealously tweet about branding, marketing, advertising, and building better businesses.
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