Your Best Influencer Could Be Your CEO

Researchers have demonstrated that stories centered on  the CEO &/or founder’s story (e.g., why I started this, how the product helps people) drove higher engagement and elicited more favorable emotional responses than testimonials from a customer  or informative advertising (e.g., how the product works, its benefits).

Tell the Perfect Story:

Develop a narrative around the CEO &/or founder’s story; the messaging should focus on who they are, where they’ve come from, why they decided to start the company, and the problems they’re looking to solve.

An important caveat; if your story doesn’t create an emotional reaction in a viewer, regardless of who is speaking, consumers are less likely to engage with and share your content.

The Role of Storytelling in Advertising

People are persuaded by their emotions versus pure information. 

Storytelling is one of the most effective ways to persuade people because it contains emotional elements. When someone tells their own story it can have, what academics call, a transportive effect on a viewer. In other words, the audience is so captivated and moved, they temporarily leave their own reality behind. Academics have proven narrative transportation to be effective in both reducing negative cognitive responses (the desire to argue or find the counterpoint) as well as eliciting strong emotional responses and the desire to take action.

An effective story or narrative can more likely lead people to be persuaded by emotions rather than information; this is true in both commercial & non-commercial messages.

You made it to the end! Thinking about whether this might work for you? Perceptly empowers you to understand what messaging and creative styles are driving campaign performance — down to the last pixel. If you’d like to learn more, set-up a time to speak with us!

Source: Kang, Jin-Ae & Hong, Sookyeong & Hubbard, Glenn. (2020). The role of storytelling in advertising: Consumer emotion, narrative engagement level, and word-of-mouth intention, Journal of Consumer Behaviour. 19. 47-56