Anchored in the story: The core of human understanding, branding, education, socialisation and the shaping of values

Storytelling or the narrative approach is increasingly becoming a core element in influence processes such as education, teaching, leadership, culture, history, marketing and its facets and a whole range of other functionalities across the multitudes of human activities. By nature human processes are a story told for a purpose; be it, as fun, socialisation, education, business, and so forth. Storytelling, be it narrated consciously or otherwise, tends to have a huge impact on society. It is the contention of this paper that the story is the ultimate in shaping minds and behaviour, and creating perceptions for the clientele or the stakeholders in any human engagement. While some writers might question the authenticity of using the storytelling approach on the pretext that it is not scientific they cannot take away the influence that the story has in shaping the thought process. In any case the human heritage is a story that transcends through generations: evolution, creation, discoveries of places, scientific discoveries or inventions, obituaries, product profiles, organisational profiles, advertisements, etc. Anything that is current, past or future that is narrated encapsulates a story be it past, present or future and each has its own purpose. Marketing has taken on board this notion in most of its facets in communications and brand development though this element does not come out strongly in the marketing literature. A quick check on the marketing literature would not present the notion of storytelling or the narrative as a topic in marketing books other than in the form of case studies. Ultimately the paper emphasises the notion that every influence process involving people is down to a story and no one can deny that socialisation is a story of perpetuating humanity and its facets. Denning (2007a) suggests that there are eight types of stories that serve a range of business related purposes and other facets of life or man's desire to understand or explain the notion of the earth and its dynamics. Boje (2008) articulates how a story defines people, places, products, etc, pointing out that every entity is known by its story in a given context. In view of the pervasive nature of the story it would be appropriate to argue that the story reminds of the past, shapes the present and inspire for the future; hence the story is the life that was, is and will be.