No Tale, No Sale : A Novel Approach to Marketing Communication

Humankind is a storytelling animal. Everyone loves good stories, well told. Telling tales is central to communicating successfully with customers, yet marketing academics seem to have forgotten this fact. The stories we tell, in our papers, books and learned journals, are often less than compelling. This article contends that our principal constituents – practising managers and would-be managers – deserve better. It argues that marketing academia can improve its storytelling skills by studying bestselling novels. Two marketing-saturated bestsellers, Bridget Jones's Diary and Fight Club, are examined in detail and their salient storytelling lessons are extracted