Stories of Love

Love engages us and makes us whole. As individuals, groups or corporations, we connect with the outside world when we give and receive expressions of love. Through these expressions of love we are nurtured, we find meaning and purpose...we find the essence of life itself! Our expressions are our stories; the stories we tell ourselves, the stories we tell others, the stories we tell the world. In the corporate arena, we call this advertising.

The book “Crucial Conversations” reveals that there are four steps involved in expressing ourselves. First, we learn the facts. Second, we tell ourselves a story about those facts. Third, we develop feelings based on the story that we told ourselves, and lastly, our expressions are based on our feelings about our story and not on the facts by themselves. Herein lays profound personal implications in that we can change the way we feel, by changing the story we tell ourselves!

We have the power to create our own story. The much larger global implication is we can change the way others feel by the story that we tell them, thereby influencing them to act. What story are you telling?

Stories of love are an art form. Stories of love have transformative power. They intrude into the secret life of both the teller and the hearer and reflect and touch the human soul. Stories of love change lives.

The implications are enormous and sobering. Do we take enough time and energy to tell the right story? In our self-centered world that rewards the warrior with the spoils of victory do we minimize the power of story on the human heart? Often, we are too busy ascending steps to worship at the temple of “things that can be measured and justified.” But the prudent among us take the time to create a story; explaining facts in the language of the human heart...the language of love.

My friend Randy Curtis, from Wal-Mart fame, taught me the central theme of advertising before he passed away. Randy taught me that “everything we are drawn to is a matter of the heart.” He also taught me that “Relational Marketing is not rocket science but it is science, the science of human needs and relationships.”

A wise man, who lived 2,000 years ago, convinced over a billion customers to buy what he was selling simply by telling amazing stories of love. Randy Curtis was a customer of this wise man. Through him, Randy resolved questions of the human heart and found his own wisdom through the wise man’s stories. We would also do well to learn that if we were to just once, hold up a mirror to our customers and reveal to them their own wisdom, we would tap into the most powerful language in the world and change their lives.

We should be telling stories of love.

Kevin Roberts taught us this universal principle in his book “Lovemarks” by showing that Love is central to our customer’s brand-loyalty and their perception of value in our products. If we want sustained growth in our frenzied and hyper-material future, we must be able to, as George Steiner writes, “break into the small house of our [customer’s] cautionary being” so that “it is no longer habitable in quite the same way as it was before.” We must show our customers how our products and services can change their lives through story.

This is the challenge. How shall we answer it? We must answer it by the way we create our advertising messages. We must answer it every day in the way we market ourselves, our products, our groups and our corporations. We must create ingressive stories that penetrate to that powerful place in the human soul that makes it sing, and dance, and whistle, and live…truly. Furthermore, we must do it every day as if it were a familiar refrain. The battleground is the heart of our prospects, which governs their feelings, which in turn dictate their actions. We are not only Warriors but we are Shamans too, and our primary and most effective weapon for victory is our skillfully crafted and executed expressions of love through story.

We must create stories of love. Let’s get about doing it. Nothing happens until it happens and if we don’t do it, who will? Let us honor those brave souls who went before us, who showed us the path to advertising greatness. Let us also be driven by a thirst for the knowledge of the key drivers of humanity and be sharp enough to apply those principles with great skill and wisdom. We will find that our most effective expressions will be when we tell our story. And who knows, we may even teach the world how to love along our way!