Storytelling = Subliminal Selling

Receptivity to stories is an ancient evolutionary "hack" to the mind's emotional centre.

If you're in the persuasion business that's exactly where you want to be. The reason it became hardwired into the brain was; In the days before the written word it was the best way bar none to transmit information into another's mind.

In the ancestral environment danger was an everyday possibility, telling a story to another member of your tribe was a way of getting them to run a virtual simulation of a potential opportunity or a possible dangerous situation and give them a tried and tested solution to it.

Basically the story was saying: If this happens, this is what you do.

Because the listeners critical factor could get in the way and interfere, your brain disabled it to some extent. The wisdom within the story was usually so tried and tested across the generations that accepting the story without interference was nearly always better for your genes as an action heuristic was more likely to save your life than trying to analyse a novel situation on the fly.

As civilization progressed the stories became more and more complex and condensed even more information into themselves you ended up with the first great stories such as the Greek myths filled with tales of heroes overcoming adversity and ending up with both the girl and the kingdom through heroic acts, self-sacrifice and outwitting wily opponents.

If you're living in a tribal structure then these acts were just the ticket for protecting your tribe and your extended family (people you share your genes with).

Receptivity to stories became dominant in the population. It's still there ready to be utilised by any copywriter with smarts. Nature even built in a pleasure response when you correctly anticipate what happens next and the dopamine rush you experience is your reward for toeing the line.

The actual science of how it works is unusually simple for a cognitive trait. It's to do with what's called "theory of mind". TOM as it's known can extend even beyond knowing what someone else is thinking [2nd Order] to even higher levels such as a 4th Order level.

"He knows that I know that he knows I know"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_mind

It evolved in the higher mammals along with mirror neurons to allow them to run a virtual reconstruction of what another mammal was thinking and predict what it was going to do next (sort of like a sandbox) and act accordingly.

Very handy for your genes if the other mammal intends on killing you!

The problem is though there has to be a highway between your own mind and the simulated mind or to be technical the two "global workspaces"...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_Workspace_Theory

...and this highway allows emotions another person is experiencing to leak into your own mind, it's a small price to pay for such a useful mechanism though.

You experience it every time you watch a movie and feel the emotional triggers in the story. You know the hero isn't really trapped by zombies or handcuffed to a pipe in a rapidly flooding room, but you STILL feel the emotions of panic and unease the actor is portraying.

As a copywriter you can sneak these emotions into your copy by using stories as the transmission vehicle. Emotions are the levers that create decisions.

Whether they're someone else's you're experiencing in a story or your own pertinent ones it doesn't make any difference to how they influence you.

Narrative bunnies been movin' hearts and minds since Tarot, horoscopes, an' kathlick bejesus.

All is imagry and arc in the dark.

Also, dialog.

Absolutely Ray... Gary had some of the best. Heck, whether it was in his copy, or an issue of The Gary Halbert Letter... you could almost always count on a story to come up.

And it's funny how a lot of his students like Doberman Dan and Scott Haines, they use a lot of stories in their copy as well.. .especially when they bring up working with Gary.

When you think about most people... there isn't a day that goes by where SOME kind of story isn't involved in their lives, somewhere, somehow.

Like watching movies? It's the story.

Like reading books? It's the story.

Like some of the HBO or Showtime shows? Stories.

Plays and theater? Stories.

Love listening to music? Most songs are stories.

So yeah, I'd have to say there's a little something to this story-thingy when writing
copy :-)

Last time I hit on a movie for a synopsis was never.

Not really. Many people are terrible at story telling and don't even try.

And most of those who do tell stories are just running their mouths... doing it to be the center of attention.

For the most part, it's only persuaders and educators who use a story to make a point.

Alex

All stories are a series of emotive hooks arranged in a narrative arc.

Fiction, movies, comics, copy, oral tales, myth: all follow this broad format.

Storytelling is kinda instinctive, 'cos showin' what we know is key to survival.

So most people can tell stories about what they did that day, or the funniest thing that ever happened in their lives, or mebbe summarise the plot of a movie for a friend who missed it.

But what kinda stories would these be?

Mebbe kinda humdrum, or kinda boringly told -- so most people ain't gonna want to know.

For stories to be effective, they gotta be good stories. And they gotta be brilliantly told.

This is where anything instinctive gotta subject itself to the rigor of craft.

Anyone can write a dumb story about a stoopid girl who discovers a secret door, but to make the bestseller fiction and movie list, you gotta have talent honed by years of painstaking fiction craft, kinda like Gaiman did with Coraline.

Ditto movies. The narrative plays the same, but the means of delivering it, the expertise, differs from literature. Any goober can make a home movie on a vid camera these days -- but who's buyin'?

Same with alla the other stuff I mentioned, includin' copy.

Anyone can have a raw stab, and the result will prolly be a crock of crapola.

Anyone 'naturally' half decent gonna be tempted to refine their craft, learn the stuff that mebbe ain't so instinctive, ain't so obvoius, and relates specifically to copy narrative rather than movie narrative or fiction narrative.

Ultimately, every story, however it's framed, whatever its purpose or 'genre', is a series of emotive hooks arranged in sequence from beginning to end that clearly outlines/describes/shows a change, a transformation.

In fiction, typically the protagonist triumphs over some kinda adversity, in movies, some guy in a cape saves the world from Godzilla, and in copy, the reader is moved to pick up the phone or buy the product or whatever you persuade 'em is

THE END.