Why great stories build relationships and make people care

- When you look at the history of mankind, you see storytelling woven into the very beginning all the way through today, how we survived together, and how we built relationships and made people care. In fact, all the way back to when we were first building civilization, when we lived in tribes, stories were key to how we survived because the human had this big brain, which was great and novel, but this sort of fragile body, especially when you compared it to the saber-toothed tiger and the poison berries and everything that were out there that threatened our survival. And so we worked together in tribes to try and survive, to learn together, to hunt together, to find food together and stories, it turns out, became key to how we did that, how he formed tribes and how he kept them together. So when we sat around the campfire as tribes, at the end of the day, we took this wide world of stimuli all of the things that we learned, that we experienced, we had to package them in ways that our tribe's members could understand and could remember and stories became this key way for us to remember. That's part of the power of storytelling. If you think about in your own families or your own country or any sports team that you maybe love or that you're loyal to, often this loyalty that we have is somewhat irrational. Why do, if you live in America, you love America so much? Perhaps it's because of the stories you grew up hearing about the Founding Fathers and how they fought against the revolutionary armies with no shoes in the winter and how they went through all of these great sacrifices to build this country. Maybe learning about the stories of your grandparents makes you love your grandparents when you sit down at the dinner table with your family, or even when you're trying to form a new relationship, a new friend, perhaps a romantic relationship, what do you do? You sit down over dinner, over coffee, maybe just somewhere in a park and you talk about the stories of your life. This is how religions impart messages. It's how through stories you remember the parables, the life lessons, the things that you need to do to be a better person or to connect to this organization. The stories are the mechanism that do that. When you look at the history of business, it should be no surprise then, that the businesses that have the most loyalty, the best relationships, that have subscribers, are the ones that are in the business of storytelling, they're the newspapers, the magazines, the movie companies, television studios. Their business is storytelling and that builds relationships and makes people care to the point that most of us have to pay them to get our message out to the people who are paying attention to them. But if you look throughout the history of business, stories have been used to make people care about products as well. If you look at Ford Motor Company in the late 2000s, they were in trouble when their cars were seen, starting to be seen as not as high quality as they used to be. People were disappointed and sales were falling, so what Ford did is they used storytelling as a way to get people to care about them again. They took documentary film crews into the Ford factories where they interviewed the employees who were working on cars, on the assembly lines, who were designing things and they said to the cameras, they said, "Look, we know that we have screwed up. We know that Ford isn't what it used to be but we are all working hard to make it back what it did use to be and to make it even better. So we're going to show you the stories of the people who are your neighbors, who are working on these cars, who are working to make this product, the product that you know and love." And this helped Ford turn things around and become again, this great brand that people love and helped them with their sales. And they had to be congruent with those stories, they had to tell the truth and they had to do that, but it worked. If you look at the history of SPAM, so I used to live in Hawaii and if you go to Hawaii, you'll notice that people love SPAM. People love it there because it's part of their history. Because during the war, when they couldn't import meat, they couldn't import a lot of food, SPAM was this military sort of canned food that was all of the meat that they could get on the island and so people have this deep nostalgia and this history for it, where when they eat this food, they like it and they love it because it's part of their culture, it's part of how they came together during this really hard time, but it's the story that has made it this powerful part of their culture and helps them to, the company, to sell a lot of SPAM. So as you can see, stories have been used throughout history for good, to make people connect to businesses, to products, to each other, but I should note that stories have also been used in history for evil. The good news is that at the end of the day, if you're using stories for evil, people tend to find, the truth tends to come out and people tend to eventually turn around and discover the truth and the true story, but we need to recognize that we, when we're using stories to connect with people, to build our businesses, to build our relationships, that we need to use them for good and that if we become incongruent with our stories, that people will smell a rat, that humans are built to discern. For stories to really work to be powerful in the long run, they have to be honest and authentic.