Everybody's talking about "the story." You can't throw a stone down Madison Avenue without hitting someone who's prattling on about "narratives" of one kind or another.
Brands don't have "value-propositions" anymore, they have stories. Their stories are their source of their "authenticity." Customers don't want products anymore, they want to become a part of the brand's "hi-story"; to have their own personal story merge with the brand's story.
So, how did this ancient social currency become so hot?
It's all about the meme, baby.
Almost a decade ago, Susan Blackmore wrote a dense little book called The Meme Machine. In it, she described a Richard Dawkins-inspired notion: cultural elements (e.g., ideas, theories, habits) propagate in a genetic manner. That is, memes spread in accordance with Darwinian laws. They replicate, morph and mutate in the service of continual propagation.
Successful memes swamp cultures.
So, here we have a story about the story meme becoming a major story as a result of the successful meme propagating capacity of storytelling.
But, if storytelling meme carriers start getting thrown out of brand builders' offices, the brand story meme will cease to propagate as widely/quickly as they are today, and stories will once again go back to being the things that following those four little memetically magic words: "Once upon a time..."
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