Got a Good Story Ad?

Last week my post at Copyblogger, How to Write Weapons Grade Copy, focused on the power of stories to hold the attention of a customer. Here’s a heartwarming ad from the UK department store John Lewis that shows how even a rather long (1.5 minutes) ad can keep a viewer engaged:

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Vivid Stories Change Donor Behavior

A vivid story can put us in a more altruistic mode, a study shows. UK researchers looked at the two ways people think about death – abstractly or specifically. They used a detailed story which placed the reader in a burning apartment to activate specific death thoughts. A second group of subjects answered more general [...]

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Story Power in Presentations

Our brains like stories. That’s not a new theme here at Neuromarketing, but now there’s biometric evidence that supports what the best speakers already know: telling a story keeps the audience engaged.

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Bit Pickles & Fuzzy Olives

In The Million Dollar Pickle (retitled after a reader suggested the original title When Stories Don’t Sell wasn’t that good), I retold a story about how a single bad customer service experience turned a business author and speaker into a negative PR machine for a local supermarket. What sparked that post was my OWN version [...]

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The Dark Side of Anecdotes

The power of anecdotes to persuade (see Why Stories Sell and Your Brain on Stories) is established, but there’s a dark side to that power. Quite simply, an effective story can take over our brains to the point where we disregard more valid information: reliable statistics, the opinions of true experts, and so on.

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Why Stories Sell

We know that anecdotes can be a convincing way to sell a product, particularly if the story is told by someone we trust. (See Your Brain on Stories.) Evolutionary psychology may offer a reason. Human brains evolved when we had just two ways to learn about dangers and rewards in their environment: personal experience, and [...]

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Your Brain on Stories

“They laughed when I sat down at the piano…” “On a beautiful late spring afternoon, twenty-five years ago, two young men graduated from the same college. They were very much alike, these two young men. Both had been better than average students…”

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