Here's a tighter, reformatted version:
You know the conversation.
You're at a social gathering making small talk with someone new. It's going well—your jokes are landing, you're building rapport. Then comes the question: "So what do you do for a living?"
My answer almost always kills the conversation: "I work in marketing."
Most people don't know what that means. Marketing? That's advertising, right? And nobody wants to talk about advertising.
A better answer would be: "I'm a professional storyteller." That leads somewhere interesting. It also happens to be true.
At Brodeur, we tell stories that make our clients' products and services relevant to specific audiences. Our stories aren't judged just on entertainment value—they're measured by whether they drive action. Did the audience click, like, share, or buy? If not, we've got more work to do.
Every product or service solves a problem or improves someone's life. There's inherent drama in that dynamic, which means there's a story waiting to be told. Our job is to structure it, frame it, and deliver it effectively.
Why not just share facts and specs? Because humans think in stories. We're constantly constructing and revising the narratives of our lives—it's how we're built. Science proves that facts activate two parts of the brain while stories stimulate seven. Higher brain engagement means higher memorability, which is essential to selling.
Best-selling author Alex Haley said the best way to begin a speech is "Let me tell you a story." Nobody wants a lecture, but everyone loves a good story. Those words make you lean in, like huddling around a campfire waiting to hear what comes next.
Here's a story that proves the point.
On a cool, damp day at Stanford, Professor Chip Heath divided his class in half and had students craft one-minute presentations on a controversial topic. After all the presentations concluded, he played an unrelated 10-minute video. Then he asked students to write down everything they remembered from the presentations.
The results were striking:
This experiment, featured in Heath's bestselling book Made to Stick, perfectly illustrates why storytelling is central to everything we do at Brodeur—from media pitches to commercials to PowerPoint decks.
There's no simple formula, but we know what matters:
Despite relying on research and data, building powerful stories is more art than science. But it's our trade. We believe in stories, and we work tirelessly to craft and optimize them for our clients.
We're not just marketers. We're storytellers.