What the F* Is Storytelling, Actually?

Marketers love buzzwords.

Affinity. Integrated Marketing. Content. Thought Leadership.

USP. ABE.ICP. OMG.

And the buzzword du jour? Storytelling.

In fact, the percentage of U.S. job postings including the term storyteller doubled last year to 50,000, with AI leaders from Anthropic to OpenAI hiring mid-six-figure-salaried Storytellers, and brands from Notion to Nike creating full-fledged Storytelling teams — capital S intended.

And since I dropped the S word when I announced my business last week, I figured I’d address the elephant in the room. As one business owner asked me when I was creating Pi Brand Marketing: "what the f is storytelling?" He later on clarified that it sounded like a 'warm and fuzzy' nice to have, but not something that would make him money.

Defining Storytelling

To define storytelling, I went to the source: the Oxford English Dictionary. And got this mind-blowing and illuminating definition:

Storytelling (n): the act of telling stories

So I turned to Claude to define "story." After commending me for asking the hard-hitting questions of a journalist (he's very sycophantic right now), Claude reported that Nancy Duarte defines a story as "a visualization" which allows ideas to become tangible and "more readily manifest as reality in people's minds." When one remembers that Duarte is the mastermind behind the slideshow Al Gore presented in An Inconvenient Truth, the importance of turning the abstract into something tangible and visceral takes on new meaning.

Closer, but still storytelling felt both too big (there are stories everywhere) and too small (a single story is, after all, a single tactic) all at once. There is your founding story. The story told by your tagline. The story that makes your CEO's presentation the most talked about at the conference,  and the story that your top-selling salesperson tells to win over any room.

Each of these tactics are valuable, but a single story will not move the needle any more than a single LinkedIn post, regardless of how well written it is.

And then the lightbulb went off. It's not about any one story.  It's in the act of creating a narrative system that underlies each one. So I beg to submit a new definition to the Oxford English Dictionary:

 Corporate Storytelling (n): creating a narrative system and applying it to all touchpoints of communication— the underlying argument about who you are, why you exist, and why anyone should care, applied as a through-line for everything from your tagline to your product literature.

 Here's an example of the difference, IRL B2B style.

I recently watched a TED talk by a former colleague of mine, Lindsey Hermes, who's taken over as CEO of her family's company, BioSpan Technologies. Their products do real, measurable things: extend infrastructure life, cut emissions, save municipal budgets. But that's not the story Lindsey told.

 Lindsey told the story of her dad — a career scientist working out of his garage on a biodegradable detergent. In 1994, eating lunch, he accidentally knocked over a test tube of soybean oil. He looked down and watched the asphalt beneath it dissolve. The accident was the breakthrough: a humble soybean could break down petroleum-based grime better than petroleum itself. "Let me repeat that," Lindsey said, "because it's kind of a big deal — the same plant-based chemistry can extend the life of concrete and asphalt."

 The single story of Lindsey's dad's discovery made an amazing TED talk, and probably could and should be made into a blog post. But the magic happens when Lindsey takes the story and turns it into a narrative about her company: small solutions, big impact.

 Lindsey created a framework. The lens, the worldview, the operating system of BioSpan Technologies becomes small solutions, big impact. Applied across communications, the same narrative scales: a case study reframes one municipal leader's small decision into their lasting impact on the community. Employees don't just go to work for a plant-based chemical company— they go to work for a company where small steps lead to massive change. A sales deck, a hiring page, an investor update — every touchpoint could pull in the same direction.

How Does Narrative Strategy Impact Your Profits?

Every great consumer brand has made this move. Nike: greatness lives within everyone Apple: technology empowers individuals against conformity. Patagonia: business should be in service of the planet. Every story they tell ladders back.

 Yet very few B2B companies invest in narrative strategy. A handful of corporate giants have built genuinely systemic narratives — Salesforce, Notion, Stripe, Anthropic. but the vast majority default to clear-cut benefit statements and rational messaging. Why?

Most B2B leaders learn this equation quite literally in Business 101:

 Value = Benefits − Cost

 There are two types of benefits. On the one hand, there is the tangible: utility value, the literal work the product does. On the other hand, there is the intangible: the brand, the IP, the customer relationships, the meaning that lives in the buyer's mind. So the equation works a little closer to this:

Value = (Utility Benefits + Emotional Benefits) − Cost

In their seismic work Capitalism Without Capital, economists Jonathan Haskel and Stian Westlake make the case that the rise of the intangible is the central economic fact of modern business. In the U.S., it's a foundational shift: in 1975, 83% of S&P 500 market value was tangible. Today, roughly 90% is intangible. 

We see this every day. It's why I buy Tylenol over the chemically identical generic acetaminophen. It's why Stripe is the developer default. It's why Slack held customer loyalty after competitors copied its functionality. 

If intangible benefits are the meaning a company carries in its buyers’ minds, and stories make that meaning perceptible, then storytelling isn’t just a buzzword. It’s the key to unlocking value-based growth. When applied systematically through narrative strategy, every marketing touchpoint reinforces another. That growth compounds.  

That's not warm and fuzzy. That's like finding a million dollars in a couch cushion — value that  was already yours, and was waiting to be found.  In industries where features can be replicated overnight, and every one of your competitors can make the same claims as you, your narrative is the one thing that can't be replicated.

So back to my friend: the business owner who asked if storytelling makes money. Here's the answer: no, a blog post won't move your topline. But narrative —the system that makes your intangible value perceptible — determines whether you're a commodity or a category-leader. In a sea of synthetic content, where humans seek connection and truth above all, companies that master storytelling will close deals faster, attract better talent, and command greater pricing power. 

The money’s already in the cushion. The question is whether you’ll bother to look.