Story is everywhere

If you know how to use it—do you???

May 28, 2025

Currently challenging myself to write about the push-and-pull of creativity and entrepreneurship; art vs capitalism; artistry vs product for 30 days.

If this is something you’re thinking about, then I want to hear from you!!

In the business world, storytelling usually is most associated with brand, marketing, and advertising. Let’s break down what those terms mean:

Brand: is a combination of words, images, and associations that represent and distinguish a product, service, or company from its competitors. Branding aims to build a lasting connection with consumers, fostering loyalty and shaping their perception of the brand.
Marketing: is the activity, set of institutions, and processes for creating, communicating, delivering, and exchanging offerings that have value for customers, clients, partners, and society at large.
Advertising: is the practice and techniques employed to bring attention to a product or service.

Simply put:

Brand = the story itself
Marketing = the mechanism of storytelling
Advertising = the medium through which the storytelling generally happens

The output of all these things together are what we generally encounter as content or product marketing, campaigns, advertisements, etc and etc.

a man holding a cup of coffee and some snacks — Photo by MK +2 on Unsplash

All this makes me think again of what my dear cousin said waaaaay back in this post, but rephrased for this one:

“People don’t know where [storytelling] is and what it does. For me, I thought it was something that only existed in places like [advertisements and such.]”

Waaaaay back in college

I encountered this conundrum without understanding it. I was an English major, and the question always put to me was: “Are you going to be a teacher?”

“No,” I said.

“Journalist?”

“No,” I said.

“Well,” they wondered. “Then what are you going to do?”

Of course, marketing and advertising were an option, but I always shrunk from that path. Not because I didn’t appreciate the craft of brand, marketing and advertising. As I get older, I am often in awe of those who do it well. A la Don Draper, the best marketers understand that there is a transmutation that occurs between marketer ➡ brand ➡ marketing piece ➡ customer/regular person ➡ business. It is human. It is authentic. It can be strange, sincere, funny, interactive …. The best of the best causes us to stop in our tracks—to pause in the moment and notice it.

pink and white box on gray table — Photo by Jelena Mirkovic on Unsplash

But that doesn’t change the metric; the end goal of these three things is to engender customer loyal in the name of sales. And I did not want to serve that.

Now a career leap!

That now takes us to my career leap into user experience (UX) design and the tech world. For those of you who don’t know:

User experience the exact thing is how a person (you) interacts with and experiences a product, system or service. It includes a person's perceptions of utility, ease of use, and efficiency.

However, user experience is also a more holistic view concerned with the way people experience that product’s entire ecosystem, not just the device or product alone. What is a product’s ecosystem? That’s everything between that happens between you reading this post and me writing it—idea, writing it on a computer, publishing it on Substack, sending it to you, you opening an inbox to read it, reading it on a device, and more!

person writing on white paper — Photo by UX Indonesia on Unsplash

I initially found UX after having tried teaching, journalism and publishing as a career. I immediately was struck by how design was a means to shape communication not just with a customer but with allllllllll the people in the ecosystem. And throughout my career as a UX person, I’ve found story, storytelling, storycraft and more in all kinds of places. Here are some recent examples:

I used storytelling for a calculator system—using storycraft to shape the page layout, create new design elements, and to persuade my team and client on the changes.
In a pitch for a new client project, I used unlocked a startup founder on what he needed through story. He came to the table thinking that he needed to do XYZ, but I presented several versions to him. He had better decisions and paths. Therefore, this pitch wasn’t about me delivering his expectations, but helping him decide on a path that would get him to a better outcome.
I’m currently realigning a large team by helping them understand the story of their process and work better. Once every understands where we are and why we are going forward to a certain point, the bottleneck will evaporate. And we will all use the story to keep everyone in sync.

Heck! I once used a simple metaphor as a mechanism to help a large global brand use as a quick test as to whether they should do this strategy or that strategy!

Story is everywhere! And if you see it, then you are free—a master of story itself, the mechanisms, and mediums. And that is truly powerful.