Master the Primal Art of Business Storytelling
The Business of Story Podcast With Park Howell
Transform Your Business Through Proven Narrative Mastery
Every marketing director, business owner, and sales professional understands that the right story can transform how customers respond to their message.
What matters most is mastering the vital storytelling structures that have driven human engagement for millennia, especially when your business success depends on authentic connection with your audience.
But here’s the frustrating reality most professionals face: conventional brand storytelling advice offers generic tips and surface-level techniques instead of the primal storytelling principles that actually create lasting impact.
This happens because most business storytelling approaches focus on modern tactics without understanding the sacred narrative structures that have influenced human behavior for thousands of years.
That’s exactly where The Business of Story podcast transforms your approach to business communication.
Through Park Howell’s proprietary guidance, you gain access to primal storytelling amplified with cutting-edge technology, enabling you to excel through the stories you tell while accelerating your Return on Intelligence through remarkable storytelling mastery.
Your Guide to Storytelling Excellence
Park Howell brings over two decades of proven expertise in marketing storytelling, combining primal narrative wisdom with modern precision.
As the creator of the revolutionary Story Cycle System™, which has grown brands by 600 percent, propogator of the ABT (And, But, Therefore) narrative framework, and co-creator of the StoryCycle Genie™, Park has pioneered “Vibe Branding”.
Vibe Branding combines emotional intelligence with artificial intelligence, guided by proven storytelling structures, to accelerate ROI: Your Return on Intelligence.
His sacred mission: help you excel through the stories you tell, delivering measurable results through systematic application of primal storytelling principles.
Latest Episodes: Primal Storytelling in Action
Recent Releases:
- 10 Essential Story Elements of Vibe Branding That Make Your Brand Narrative Enthralling
- The Five Essential Elements (the H.E.A.R.T.) of the Perfect Pitch With Ben Wiener
- How to Unlock Brand Alignment to Accelerate Your Business Growth With Brandon Coleman Jr.
- How to Tell Your Startup Lifecycle Story to Sell Investors & Customers on Your Brand With Gregory Shepard
- How to Effectively Position Your B2B Brand With April Dunford
Each episode delivers actionable insights you can implement immediately, combining proven primal storytelling frameworks with contemporary business applications for remarkable results.
Begin Your Storytelling Mastery Journey
Subscribe now and join thousands of professionals who’ve transformed their business communication through primal storytelling principles amplified with today’s technology. Available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts, and all major platforms.
Exclusive Subscriber Benefits:
- Access to primal storytelling resource library
- StoryCycle Genie™ early access updates
- Monthly storytelling mastery workshops focused on Return on Intelligence
- Direct connection with the storytelling excellence community
Or subscribe anywhere you get your podcasts.
Subscribe to Top-Rated Storytelling Podcast and Make Your Brand Story Stand Out
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#303: The 5 Laws of High-Impact Sales Presentations
PowerPoints don’t kill ideas. PowerPoints riddled with bullets kill ideas.
Presentations are the language of business. But the key to using PowerPoint to tell your story is to envision it from your customer’s point of view. What do you want them to think, feel and do? Their decision to move forward with working with you is strongly influenced by how you make them feel in your presentation.
If you can tell a story through PowerPoint that changes the minds and behaviors of people, you can write your ticket in the corporate world.
Here to share her expertise on how to deliver amazing presentations that will result in decisions is Ginger Zumaeta. She is the Founder and CEO of Zumaeta Group and author of the forthcoming book Deckonomics: Design Presentations that Spread Ideas, Drive Decisions, and Close Deals.
Ginger is a three-time Emmy Award-winning writer and producer. She successfully turned her TV storytelling skill into a consultancy helping companies on positioning and communicating big ideas. Ginger uses her experience in storytelling and persuasion to train corporate teams in telling better business stories to move high-stakes work forward with clear and succinct presentations that are grounded in story structure and backed by brain science.
Listen as she shares her five laws for delivering high-impact presentations and how storytelling makes it all work.
#302: How to Make Your Stories More Accessible for Your Audience
It’s not enough just to share a good story – you have to make it accessible for your audiences. Access IS success, but we’re not talking about media channels. We’re talking content that is timely, relevant and most importantly shared from your audience’s point of view.
One man who is an expert at making his storytelling accessible to his audiences, his readers, his viewers, and his customers is Neil Nelson. Neil is the founder of Atlanta Black Star, a top-ranked national online news outlet covering politics, social justice issues, entertainment and culture for Black Americans. As a multi-business entrepreneur, Neil has played a pivotal role in the digital media landscape for African-American audiences, successfully developing numerous online platforms and partnering with Fortune 500 companies to maximize consumer engagement.
He grew Atlanta Black Star to be one of the largest digital media properties in under three years through accessible storytelling.
In this episode, you will learn how to make your brand, business, and sales storytelling more accessible to your audience. Listen as Neil shares his exact storytelling methods that quickly grew his digital media properties.
#301: How to Reinvent Your Business Story to Thrive in Chaos
2020 forced many of us to reconsider how we do business. We adapted, and many businesses came out better than ever. Catalysts for change are often unexpected. But it’s how you deal with and manage the chaos (and all the changes it’s calling you to do) that can make or break your business.
How do you approach change? Do you run away from it, or embrace it? In this episode, Dr. Nadya Zhexembayeva shows you how to be better prepared the next time unexpected chaos comes your way so you can not only survive, but thrive.
Nicknamed “The Reinvention Guru”, Dr. Nadya Zhexembayeva is a scientist, entrepreneur, TEDx speaker and resilience and reinvention expert who has worked with brands including Coca-Cola, IDM, CISCO, L’Oréal, Danone and many more to help them reinvent their products, leadership practices and business models to meet new market demands and prepare for incoming disruptions.
Her new book, The Chief Reinvention Officer Handbook: How to Thrive in Chaos, provides a powerful blend of cross-disciplinary research and battle-tested tools to help your brand diagnose, design, and implement a reinvention system that allows your company to stop resisting change and instead help you turn any disruption into an opportunity to reinvent your business and story. (more…)
#300: Ten Storytelling Tips That Will Ignite Your Sales
I began my advertising career over 35 years ago as a writer and producer of radio commercials. Back then I had absolutely no idea what I was doing and had little to no guidance. So I winged it. Learned by doing. Loved it!
But in those clueless formative years, I uncovered a ton of invaluable insights on how to use storytelling to sell a product or service.
To celebrate my 300th episode of the Business of Story, I pulled my old cassette radio recordings out of the vault and selected 10 spots and a unique lesson in sales storytelling from each to share with you. Oh, and there’s a couple of bonus tips in here, too.
These story strategies are more effective now than ever, providing you have the courage to use them in your sales.
#299: How to Use S.P.A.C.E. to Share Your Business Story
There are many frameworks to tell great brand stories. But you have to find the right one for you and your business that feels totally natural – not forced.
In this episode, we will explore a special acronym and storytelling technique created by Scott Page, an accomplished musician whose saxophone and rhythm guitar work has collaborated with bands such as Pink Floyd, Supertramp and Toto and has led to a remarkable entrepreneurial career with several successful tech companies.
#298: How to Scale Your Brand Storytelling for Reach and Impact
Good stories – and brands – scale. The key is that you have to share your story from your audiences’ perspective so that they will make your story their story. What makes you special, and are you fulfilling that promise at every level? When you deliver on those promises to your customers, the scaling begins.
Two people who know a ton about brand story scaling are Jaci and Michael Russo of brandRUSSO, a strategic branding agency in Lafayette, Louisiana. I’ve known Jaci since 2008 when Michael Gass of Fuel Lines hosted five of us agency owners in Birmingham, Alabama to help us sort our our own brand stories.
Listen as Jaci and Michael provide another way to look at your brand story through their four-step process. (more…)
#297: Business Storytelling and the Art of Practical Empathy
One thing we can probably all agree on is that we’ve never lived in a more polarized time. But on either side of an argument, facts just don’t work when you want to try to change someone’s mind. If you focus on using story to help your audience comprehend your story internally in their own hearts and minds, your message has a much higher chance of being understood, appreciated and remembered.
On this week’s show we have one of my favorite authors on storytelling, Lisa Cron, here to talk about her new amazing book, Story or Die: How to Use Brain Science to Engage, Persuade, and Change Minds in Business and in Life. It’s a step-by-step guide to using the brain’s hardwired need for story to achieve any goal.
Lisa is a story coach, speaker, and the author of Wired for Story and Story Genius. Tune in as we explore the art of practical empathy and why your audiences are moved by emotion – not data.
#296: The T.R.I.P.S Storytelling Framework to Drive Results
Many people believe storytelling involves long-winded narratives. But brevity can be even more impactful.
Matthew Woodget shares his unique T.R.I.P.S. storytelling framework (based on his studies of the intersection of story structure) that can help your audience understand and retain your stories. He loves to use metaphors like “Story API” because he says metaphors are a shortcut to meaning.
Matthew is a technologist, marketer, and storyteller whose marketing pedigree spans over 20 years. He heads up Go Narrative where he helps marketers and entrepreneurs reduce frustration, increase reach and drive growth using story structures. He’s a status quo challenger who is passionate about finding a better way to clarity.
Listen as he shares his expertise on how to utilize metaphors to convey big ideas and data to make your stories stand out.
#295: How to Create Amazing Customer Experiences Using Story
Shep working at the Playboy Club
Are you always looking for your next new customer? Many brands focus too much on growth and not delivering excellent service to their existing customers.
Customer service experience expert, best-selling author, and Chief Amazement Officer of Shepard Presentations, Shep Hyken, shares some easy things you can do to create what he calls “Moments of Magic” with your employees, customers, vendors, and anyone who comes in contact with your brand to drive loyalty.
Shep works with companies and organizations who want to build loyal relationships with their customers and employees and has authored six books including Moments of Magic®, The Loyal Customer and The Cult of the Customer.
Listen as Shep shares how to use business storytelling to create amazing customer experiences to help make your story their story.
#294: Three Story Elements of a Winning Campaign
Have you ever had an ad campaign fall flat on its face? I know I have.
And it might be because I didn’t know what singular problem I was solving and specifically for who.
Had I only been taught the three story elements one should always consider when creating your content back then. Luckily my good friend Andy Wakefield, author of How to be More Famous Than Me in Advertising: By Someone You Have Never Heard of Before, shares the three proven elements to create winning campaigns he’s used in his 40+ year storied advertising career in this episode.
You can learn a lot about how to tell a story by modeling what Andy shares in his book. We’ll not only review his work, but you’ll learn the three proven elements that you should consider in creating any brand.
