Persuasion: Convincing Others When Facts Don't Seem to Matter

Stories make facts “sticky,” meaning memorable. And memorability is one of the keys to persuasion. Because when your position, brand, or product is memorable, you turn your audience into your PR machine and they start to do the work for you. That’s when you catch fire.

should tap into a core emotion. They do this by following certain rules developed over thousands of years that work with what our brains find satisfying. From Aristotle’s Poetics to Joseph Campbell’s The Hero with a Thousand Faces, much has been written about what we require of a narrative as an audience to find it resonant. Stories must have an ar

This is where the rubber meets the road. While we have prepared as best as we can, it’s not until we see our messages come to life in the real world that we can truly understand how they’ll land.

First, you must be specific.

It’s not what you say, it’s what they hear. —MASLANSKY + PARTNERS TAGLINE Now you have your draft Persuasion Plan. This is your foundation, your starting point. But until you know how people are going to react to it and how you will react using it, you can’t go any further. I have seen this happen time and time again. You have the message. You have

What storytelling is meant to do is demonstrate something that we couldn’t otherwise say about ourselves without sounding disingenuous or boastful, like “I have your best intentions at heart” or “I’m a great mom.”

To summarize, for a story to be effective, it must be four things: Interesting to your audience. Connected to the core emotions we discussed in chapter 3. Relatable. Scalable, meaning it must be reflective of a bigger point you are trying to make.

Paul Smith, author of Lead with a Story, and he shared with me why it is so important. He said, “Storytelling makes the things that you’re telling people much easier to remember. It helps build strong relationships because it gives your buyer or your audience time to just relax and listen to you, instead of being caught up in critical evaluation of

The point of that story is this: A Persuasion Plan on paper is just a plan. You don’t yet know how it will feel coming off your tongue. You don’t yet know how your target audience will react. You don’t yet know what questions you will get. That’s why this phase is all about practice. Role-play. Simulation. Testing. Refining. Call it what you will,