Why Storytelling Is a Marketable Skill
Storytelling is not just for people who want to write novels.
When I’m not writing, I’m teaching college students how to write. I teach basic English Composition and I also teach business writing for the Department of Management, but I get all kinds of business students in my class. Some are marketing students, some are accounting majors, some are studying cybersecurity.
So, I read books, articles, and internet blogs about business to learn interesting things and to find topics for them to write about and to understand more about what they are learning.
What I’ve noticed in the last few years is that the business world has become aware of how important story is and they are using storytelling more and more.
Stories in Commercials
One of my favorite classes is when we talk about sales letters and I make students watch commercials. Not just any commercial, we watch a few and my favorite are the Budweiser commercials. Beginning, I think, in 2013, the marketing experts for Budweiser started a story about a little dog, a yellow Lab who loves horses. And year after year until about 2016, during the Super Bowl, the story continued. People tuned in to see what would happen next with the dog. Why did people care? This was a commercial!
