Stories provide the cognitive and neural means of organizing the chaos of information into units of meaning that allow us to understand. They reinforce existing knowledge, give context, and attend to our emotional state. Storytelling stands the test of time because they speak to the most human fundamentals: psychological, biological, and neurological. Throughout history have been telling stories from cave paintings to blockbuster movies.
Stories connect us to each other and give us insight about ourselves. They give us a common language where we can share experience, teach, reflect and create culture. As stories are retold, they reinforce cultural traditions and norms, linking our understanding of the human condition across divides and across generations.
“If you talk to a man in a language he understands, that goes to his head. If you talk to him in his language, that goes to his heart.”
Nelson Mandela
A story can go where quantitative analysis is denied admission: our hearts. Data can persuade people, but it doesn’t inspire them to act; to do that, you need to wrap your vision in a story that fires the imagination and stirs the soul.
Harvard Business School professor Gerald Zaltmansays that 95% of our purchase decision making takes place subconsciously.
“Thanks to new research, we now understand that our emotional decisions are not irrational or bad. In fact, our unconscious decisions have logic of their own. They are based on a deeply empirical mental processing system that is capable of processing effortlessly millions of bits of data without getting overwhelmed. Our conscious mind, on the other hand, has a strict bottleneck, because it can only process 3-4 new pieces of information at a time due to the limitation of our working memory.”
But what makes our unconscious so intelligent is that it has spent a lifetime learning from our successes and failures. It has evolved to make decisions for us according to rules of thumb.
Consumers often act on inner urges and emotions. It’s been reported, that the motivations are so powerful that 95% of purchasing decisions are subconscious. Emotion drives brand choices, purchasing behaviors and decision making.”