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Issue 1 > Stories that shake the world.

Stories that shake the world.

Seth Godin suggests why marketers should stop trying to communicate facts and instead tell powerful stories.

Anyone who wants to save the world must understand the power of marketing to make things better—or worse.

I have no intention of telling you the truth. Instead I'm going to tell you a story. This is a story about why marketers (which in some way includes most of us) must stop trying to communicate facts, and must instead tell powerful stories.

And this is not just a good idea for boosting business; it's necessary for changing the world. It's a fundamental shift in the paradigm of how ideas spread. Either you're going to tell stories that move people, or you will become irrelevant.

Before there was marketing, before stores, long before infomercials… people were telling stories to each other. People noticed, for instance, that the sun rose every morning and so we invented a story about Helios riding his fiery chariot across the sky.

Stories make it easier to understand the world. Stories are the best way we know to spread an idea. Marketers didn't invent storytelling. They just perfected it.

I believe marketing is the most powerful force available to people who want to make changes in the world… but with that power comes responsibility. We (anyone with the ability to tell a story online, in print or directly to the people in our communities) have the ability to change things more dramatically than ever before in history.

Marketers have the leverage to generate a huge impact in less time—and with less money—than ever before. There's no question that consumers (and voters and nations, and so on) are part and parcel of this storytelling process.

No marketer can get people to do something without their active participation. But that doesn't diminish the huge responsibility that rests upon marketers now because of their awesome power to tell stories in an era when communications technology knows no bounds.

Marketing is about spreading ideas, and spreading ideas is the single most important work of our civilization. Hundreds of thousands of Sudanese people have died recently because of bad marketing. Children are educated, companies are built, jobs are gained or lost… all because of what we know (and don't know) about spreading ideas.

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