Published on: April 21, 2026 at 12:25 pm
Whether you’re an entrepreneur bootstrapping a startup or an established company advertising a new product, audience engagement is a key to success. According to Academy of Management Scholar Tim Pollock of the University of Tennessee-Knoxville, how businesspeople use language matters, and storytelling is a crucial skill that can do just that.
Successful storytelling helps people to engage their target audience and paint a convincing picture capturing the uniqueness or value proposition of a product, service, person, or organization.
“You need to be able to identify who’s the protagonist in the story,” Pollock said. “It’s not going to necessarily be the person that you’re targeting, but it’s going to be what you’re writing about.
“So, the protagonist might be the product or the service that you’re offering,” he said.
According to Pollock, successful marketing, advertising, or pitching involves creating a dramatic narrative that appeals to the emotions of the target audience, giving them a reason to consider why your business’s service or product should be their solution of choice. Pollock compared successful marketing to Freytag’s Pyramid, a five-part storytelling framework: exposition, rising action, climax, falling action, and denouement.
“The exposition is providing that background information and then there’s usually an inflection point where the rising action starts,” Pollock said. “The rising action builds the tension, and the climax is the point of maximum tension.”
“That’s where we find out the answers—the solutions to the problem that we have set up that our protagonist was facing,” he said. “If you’re just throwing out facts and numbers and statistics, that’s not telling the story.”
“You want to weave those into a narrative with a clear character, and then the audience can see not just how the protagonist is moving, but also showcasing their product or service in a way that demonstrates how they’re going to benefit from it.”
However, the power of storytelling applies to many domains outside of marketing campaigns and advertising targeting segments of consumers. Providing a dramatic narrative to call attention to a business’s product or service could also lead the way to finding investors, in the case of a startup, boost the stock price, in the case of public companies, or get a project approved by upper management.
“What role can the audience play in this journey?” Pollock said. “It might be providing you funding, getting them to develop products you want, encouraging them to become part of your movement, or whatever it may be that you’re trying to accomplish.”
