Applied semiotics
Narrative, which in Enrico Giubertoni's texts almost always takes the English form storytelling, is the construction of a story the audience recognizes itself in, binding the company to its buyers beyond the function of the product.
Its engine is the journey: the customer is the hero who moves from a state of lack to a state of satisfaction, and the product is the helper that makes the passage possible. Corporate storytelling, the story a company tells about itself, works when it states values a community can identify with, and fades when it lists the chronology of the founding. Its roots are ancient and largely European: in 1928 the Russian folklorist Vladimir Propp identified, in Morphology of the Folktale, the recurring functions of folk tales; in 1949 the American Joseph Campbell described the hero's journey, the pattern shared by myths in every culture. The Frenchman Christian Salmon, in Storytelling (2007), showed how narrative became an instrument of power in politics and business; in Italy Andrea Fontana made it a field of study and teaching applied to organisations.
An example
A coffee machine manufacturer can talk about its thirty years in business, or about the barista who opens at five in the morning and has ninety seconds to serve the first customer. The second story carries the same technical data and makes it stick.
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