#575: Elliott Rayner on Why 81% of Your Team Can't Tell Your Story
About this episode
Elliott Rayner discusses the importance of storytelling in organizations and how to operationalize brand narratives to enhance customer engagement.
Only 19% of employees can consistently tell their company's story. That means 81% of your brand touchpoints are leaking narrative — and costing you customers. Elliott Rayner's groundbreaking research explains why, and what to do about it. Elliott Rayner — fractional Head of Storytelling and author of The State of Storytelling 2026 — analyzed 25 emerging Chief Storytelling Officer job descriptions from the world's most sophisticated companies to uncover a seismic shift: the best organizations are no longer treating brand narrative as a creative function. They're operationalizing it. In this episode, Elliott and host Park Howell reveal: Why Narrative Entropy is the silent killer of brand growth — and the single metric that exposes it instantly What a Chief Storytelling Officer actually does (hint: it's far less about creating stories and far more about creating alignment) The 3-question survey you can run inside your company this week to make the business case for StoryOps™ Why "execution has become cheap but meaning has not" — and what that means for your competitive strategy in the AI age How to get your head of sales, legal, product, and finance all telling the same story…
People in this episode
Host: Park Howell
Guest: Elliott Rayner
Topics covered
- storytelling
- brand narrative
- employee engagement
- organizational alignment
- business strategy
- AI impact
Keywords
- storytelling
- brand narrative
- employee engagement
- Chief Storytelling Officer
- narrative entropy
- StoryOps
- business strategy
Mentioned in this episode
Books & works: The State of Storytelling 2026
More episodes of Business of Story
- #577: How Almost Nothing Changes Everything in Your Brand Storytelling, With Ryan Kohn
- #576: The Power of Pull: Find Customers Who Are Already Sold, With Rob Snyder
- #574: Jason Swenk: Own Your Business Before It Owns You!
- #573: A Tech Titan's Warning: Better AI Won't Save Us. Better Humans Will, With Brett Hurt.
- #572: How to Simplify Complex Ideas to Get Your People to Act, With Rob D. Willis
- #571: AI Doesn't Replace Your Story. It Helps You Tell It Better, with James Taylor
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