When brands use storytelling in their campaigns, they will not only create impact but will also move people to action. I have studied and practiced storytelling almost all my professional life, and in this presentation, I have selected what I consider the 10 best books on storytelling for brands.
1. Nancy Duarte: Resonate – Present Visual Stories that Transform Audiences
This book is not only about storytelling, but it also reveals the underlying story form of all great presentations that will not only create impact but also move people to action.
Presentations are meant to inform, inspire, and persuade audiences. So why then do so many audiences leave feeling like they’ve wasted their time? All too often, presentations don’t resonate with the audience and move them to transformative action.
Resonate helps you make a strong connection with your audience and lead them to purposeful action. The author’s approach is simple: building a presentation today is a bit like writing a documentary. Using this approach, you’ll convey your content with passion, persuasion, and impact.
The author has a proven track record, including creating the slides for Al Gore’s Oscar-winning An Inconvenient Truth.
This book focuses on content development methodologies that are not only fundamental but will move.
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Related: The Story of Storytelling in Marketing
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2. Donald Miller: Building a StoryBrand – Clarify Your Message So Customers Will Listen
In this book, New York Times best-selling author Donald Miller uses the seven universal elements of powerful stories to teach listeners how to dramatically improve their connection with customers and grow their businesses.
3. Chip and Dan Heath: Made to Stick
”This book is a gift to anyone who needs to get a message across and make it stick,” wrote The New Statesman.
”Smart, lively . . . such fun to read” according to Guardian.
Mark Twain once observed, ”A lie can get halfway around the world before the truth can even get its boots on.” His observation rings true: urban legends, conspiracy theories, and bogus news stories circulate effortlessly. Meanwhile, people with important ideas – entrepreneurs, teachers, politicians, and journalists – struggle to make them ”stick”.
In Made to Stick, Chip and Dan Heath reveal the anatomy of ideas that stick and explain how to make ideas stickier, such as applying the Velcro Theory of Memory, using the human scale principle, and creating curiosity gaps. Along the way, they reveal that sticky messages of all kinds – from the infamous ”kidney theft ring” hoax, to a coach’s lessons on sportsmanship, to a vision for a new product at Sony – draw their power from the same six traits.
Made to Stick reveals the vital principles behind winning ideas – and tells us how we can apply these rules to making our own messages stick. It will transform the way you communicate.
”An entertaining, practical guide to communication,” wrote Financial Times.
”Anyone interested in influencing others… can learn from this book,’ according to the Washington Post
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Related: What Makes a Story Stick?
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4. Jonah Sachs: Winning the Story Wars
The story wars are all around us. They are struggling to be heard amid the noise and clamor of the media. Today, most brand messages and mass appeals for causes are drowned out before they even reach us. But a few consistently break through the din, using the only tool that has ever moved minds and changed behavior: great stories.
With insights from mythology, advertising history, evolutionary biology, and psychology, viral storyteller and advertising expert Jonah Sachs takes readers into a fascinating world of seemingly insurmountable challenges and enormous opportunity.
This book is a call to arms for business communicators to cast aside broken traditions and join a revolution to build the iconic brands of the future. It puts marketers in the role of heroes with a chance to transform not just their craft but the enterprises they represent. After all, success in the story wars doesn’t come just from telling great stories, but from learning to live them.
5. John Truby: The Anatomy of Story
John Truby is one of the most respected and sought-after story consultants in the film industry, and his students have gone on to pen some of Hollywood’s most successful films, including Sleepless in Seattle, Scream, and Shrek. The Anatomy of Story is his long-awaited first book, and it shares all his secrets for writing a compelling script. Based on the lessons in his award-winning class, Great Screenwriting, The Anatomy of Story draws on a broad range of philosophy and mythology, offering fresh techniques and insightful anecdotes alongside Truby’s own unique approach to building an effective, multifaceted narrative.
6. Paul Smith: Lead with a Story: A Guide to Crafting Business Narratives That Captivate, Convince, and Inspire
With clarity around your message, you will energize those you lead and create a vision they can buy into. But first, you must write the story that will get them excited and ready to execute.
Clarity is key for any successful leader, so much so that top corporations, such as Microsoft. Nike, Procter & Gamble, Kimberly-Clark, and many more have incorporated storytelling into their leadership training programs. These companies know that before you can become a strong leader, you must first master the art of storytelling to communicate your vision to your team and inspire them to execute on objectives.
If you want to be a leader others want to follow, you must master storytelling and use it to communicate a vision your team can support.
7. Seth Godin: All Marketers are Liars – The Underground Classic That Explains How Marketing Really Works–and Why Authenticity Is the Best Marketing of All
All marketers tell stories. And if they do it right, we believe them. We believe that wine tastes better in a $20 glass than in a $1 glass. We believe that an $80,000 Porsche is vastly superior to a $36,000 Volkswagen that’s virtually the same car. We believe that $225 sneakers make our feet feel better—and look cooler—than a $25 brand. And believing it makes it true.
Seth Godin’s books are easy to read, written in a funny style and effortless to understand.
As Seth Godin has taught hundreds of thousands of marketers and students around the world, great marketers don’t talk about features or even benefits. Instead, they tell a story—a story we want to believe, whether it’s factual or not. In a world where most people have an infinite number of choices and no time to make them, every organization is a marketer, and all marketing is about telling stories.
Marketers succeed when they tell us a story that fits our worldview, one we intuitively embrace and then share with our friends. Think of the Dyson vacuum cleaner, or Fiji water, or the iPod.
But beware: If your stories are inauthentic, you cross the line from fib to fraud. Marketers fail when they are selfish and scurrilous, when they abuse the tools of their trade, and when they make the world worse. That’s a lesson learned the hard way by telemarketers, cigarette companies, and sleazy politicians.
But for the rest of us, it’s time to embrace the power of the story. As Godin writes, “Stories make it easier to understand the world. Stories are the only way we know to spread an idea. Marketers didn’t invent storytelling. They just perfected it.”
8. Annette Simmons: The Story Factor
A fully revised, updated, and expanded version of this modern classic will teach you to use the art of storytelling to persuade, motivate, and inspire in life and business.
Anyone seeking to influence others must first know their own story and how to tell it properly. Whether you’re proposing a risky new venture, trying to close a deal, or leading a charge against injustice, you have a story to tell. Tell it well, and you will create a shared experience with your listeners that can have profound results.
In this modern classic, Annette Simmons reminds us that the oldest tool of influence is also the most powerful. Fully revised and updated to account for new technology and social media, along with two new chapters on the role of stories in the development of civilization and how to adjust your story to your specific goal, Simmons showcases over a hundred examples of effective storytelling drawn from the front lines of business and government, as well as myths, fables, and parables from around the world. Whether writing a screenplay or announcing a corporate reorganization, Simmons illustrates how story can be used in ways that cold facts, bullet points, and directives can’t. These stories, combined with practical storytelling techniques, show anyone how to become a more effective communicator and achieve their goals.
9. Rob Biesenbach: Unleash the Power of Storytelling: Win Hearts, Change Minds, Get Results
Unleash the Power of Storytelling offers a practical roadmap for crafting and delivering more powerful, persuasive stories to get more of what you want in your career and life.
Study after study confirms that stories have unparalleled power to break down walls, build trust, and influence people to act. More than facts and data alone, stories are fundamental to capturing and expressing our ideas, wishes, and beliefs … and getting the results we want.
The right story can help you: nail a job, interview, earn a raise, close a sale, build trust with an employee or colleague, strengthen relationships with customers, become a more comfortable networker, win over a skeptic, rally a team, align people with a strategy, promote your brand, raise a toast, deliver a eulogy, get out of a speeding ticket, and more.
The market is flooded with a dizzying array of books, experts, and resources on business storytelling. This book, however, cuts through the hype to clarify and demystify the storytelling process.
Unleash the Power of Storytelling offers step-by-step instructions for finding, shaping, and telling powerful stories. You’ll learn about the essential ingredients that go into any good story and how to avoid common storytelling pitfalls.
The book also contains tons of practical examples showing you how to use stories in job interviews, presentations, customer calls, employee meetings — even how to craft the right story for a wedding toast or eulogy!
10. Tor Kjolberg: How I Survived as a STORYTELLER for Over 50 Years. 12 Survival Techniques.
Is my own book on a list of the 10 best books on storytelling for brands? I couldn’t resist placing it on the list because I believe I have an important message for everyone struggling to get their product (or destination) to attract more people.
The book presents a set of “home-truths” to help you harness its power to enhance your storytelling, creativity, collaboration, and profitability. Best of all, you can get a free digital copy. Just send me a message and include your name and email address, and write “ebook” in the subject line.
Reading only three of these books will get you a long way toward becoming a better and truly convincing communicator.
10 Best Books on Storytelling for Brands, compiled by Tor Kjolberg.
Feature image (top): © StoryBistro.com