A new tale’s perspective: storytelling in business communication strategy

Abstract

The art of storytelling is as old as the act of communicating. Stories teach behaviors, discuss morals and values, dramatize social relationships and life problems, as well as satisfy curiosities and fantasies. Good storytellers are able to pass on information to their interlocutors through attractive narratives, which facilitate understanding and fixation of what has been said, written or reproduced. Rooted in oral tradition, the popular tale is linked to very specific sociocultural and pragmatic circumstances such as circulation and oral transmission, brevity and simplicity of the plot, as well as the abbreviated spatio-temporal dimension and the reduced number of characters. Its technical-formal structure, coupled with the semiotic character of its oral practice and the interaction between the linguistic and kinetic code, the proxemic and the prosodic, has inspired the marketing and advertising industry and communication professionals in the creation and improvement of storytelling, a concept that reinvents the memorable “Once Upon a Time” expression of traditional children’s narratives, and applies it to the business environment for a variety of purposes, including building narratives that create consistent relationships between a brand and its consumer. Despite the specificity of these “organizational” narratives, justified by the strategic communication objectives that guide them, it is intended to establish a parallelism between the traditional story and this new tool of business communication that, through strategic narratives, uses in its construction memories , heroes, tangles, conflicts and dramas that evoke memories of folk tales, fairy tales, of enchantments or wonderful, in order to foment the memorization and sharing strategic messages and to captivate and thrill the target – audience / consumer, being used as an optimization tool for internal organizational performance.