“19% [of Millennials] say they have paid in the last year for a subscription service for eBooks or audiobooks such as Kindle Unlimited or Audible”- American Press Institute
“64% of Millennials consider a company’s social commitments when taking jobs and will not work for a company if they do not have strong corporate social responsibility (CSR) values”- Cone Communications
“Stories are a device… [that] provide managers with a form of social and intersubjective interaction that reflects belief systems, role expectations, interpersonal norms and conditions for work behavior”- International Journal of Management
“The most recent era in audio entertainment… users are asserting power over the medium to select particular content at particular times”- Mass Communication and Society Journal
“There is value in a story that is, designed to drive the simulation and to elicit the [employee’s] best performance”- Society for Human Resource Management
“Story-telling is an important element… involving the sharing of experiences and creation of mental-maps of the environment in which people are motivated to perform to their full potential”- Leadership and Organization Development Journal
“When it comes to digital storytelling for branding, there is, a more positive attitude towards the company when the employer branding message is using digital storytelling”- Management Dynamic in the Knowledge Economy Journal
“Online audio (podcasts, radio shows, music and audiobooks) has become more popular than ever before”- Publishing Research Quarterly
“Audiobooks have had a big shift in popularity in 2018 where for the first time, “a full half of all Americans ages 12 and older have listened to an audiobook, up from 44% last year”- Forbes
“Storytelling that integrates a moral and spiritual component can transform an organizational culture so members of the organization begin to feel connected to a larger community and a higher purpose”- Journal of Business Ethics
“The storytelling process yields positive impacts on internal and external stakeholder outcomes including increasing employees’ thriving and meaningful work, as well as the attitudes and trust of multiple external stakeholders”- Journal of Strategic Marketing
“Should produce positive effects on key audiences, such as increasingly positive attitudes toward the company and eventually behavioral intentions to support this company”- Public Relations Review
“The corporate world cannot ignore the demands and expectations of Millennials, who are devout in their desire to associate with companies aligned with their values”- Center for Social Impact Communication at Georgetown University
“[onboarding] can also aid employees in identifying values congruence which is critical to career contentment and commitment which can significantly impact retention to both the field and the institution long-term” - Journal of Research, Assessment, and Practice in Higher Education
“There are currently about 1000% more titles published since 2011”- Audio Publishers Association
“Storytelling is essential to successful branding, since your brand is the sum of all your corporate behaviors and communications that inform your customers’ experiences with your product or company”- The Journal of Business Strategy
“A focus on social responsibility is particularly important to attract, retain, and increase the commitment and engagement of Millennial employees and talented women”- Center for Creative Leadership
“Narrative presentation of corporate strategy, comparative advantage, is more effective at producing a consistent and confident choice of competitive advantage among an audience than a presentation of corporate strategy using a PowerPoint style, bulleted list approach”- Journal of Strategy and Management
“83% of Millennials would be more loyal to a company that allows them to contribute to social and environmental issues”- Cone Communications
“73% of the U.S. 12+ population (an estimated 209 million people) have listened to online audio in the last month, up from 68% in 2021”- Edison Research
“Employees have a deeper affiliation with the message through organizational storytelling due to aligning stories with their own experiences and understanding”- International Journal of Business and Social Science
“The audiobook market share shifted from 42% digital copy sales in 2009 to 87% digital copy sales in 2017”- Audio Publishers Association
“Brands can bring their CSR (corporate social responsibility) efforts to life through authentic storytelling [and] Millennials want to know what companies are doing to make the world a better place”- Center for Social Impact Communication at Georgetown University
“Spoken word audio listening is up 40% in the past seven years, and up 8% year over year”- National Public Radio Organization and Edison Research
“A poor cultural fit is frequently cited as one of the main reasons [an employee] decides to leave an organization… defining the organization's culture through storytelling should start with branding of the organization and continue through the interview and onboarding process”- Physician Executive Communication Journal
“Three uses for storytelling in organizations: (1) to motivate employees, (2) for education and (3) to consolidate corporate culture”- Journal of Marketing
“Audio narrative has recently benefited from profound cultural shifts in media consumption associated with on-demand television’s binge watching revolution and the advent of digital longform storytelling”- Journal of Radio & Audio Media
“Millennials are more technologically advanced than any previous generation [and] survey data has shown a correlation between age and reading preferences [where] younger people listen to more audiobooks than older Americans”- State University of New York
“Corporate storytelling is suggested to help demonstrate the importance of the corporate brand to internal and external stakeholders… as well as help a firm to bond with its employees”- Product & Brand Management
“The majority (79%) of Millennials want to work for a company that cares about how it contributes to society and 69% would refuse to work for a company that is not socially responsible”- Journal of Education For Business
“Employees have a deeper affiliation with the message through organizational storytelling due to aligning stories with their own experiences and understanding”- International Journal of Business and Social Science
“Over 71 thousand audiobook titles (were) published in 2020, a 39% growth between previous years”- Statista
“Audio platform superiority was about the desire to use an audio platform that is perceived to be superior to other audio alternatives, including on-demand convenience (time and place) and content (vari- ety and uniqueness)”- New Media and Society Journal
“Storytelling that starts with the persona allows us to tap into these deeper recesses, where the influence of attitudes and emotions is greater… loyalty and trust are found there”- Journal of Business Strategy
“Audiobook sales revenue has been on a steep rise since 2018, reaching 1.3 billion USD in 2020”- Statista
“Researchers have shown that storytelling strengthens the connections consumers have to brands, so that to a great extent what a brand means to a consumer is based . . . on the narratives he or she has constructed that incorporate the brand.”- Journal of Business Strategy
“[the way employees are on-boarded] sets the tone for the culture of a place, the people, and the values of a new institution and can have a significant impact on employees’ sense of belonging”- Journal of Research, Assessment, and Practice in Higher Education
“Maximizing success through onboarding by storytelling during orientations, [helps employees understand] the company's culture and values [and] its goals and history”- Society for Human Resource Management
“As technology evolves, people have more options available to them, which may explain why [reports] found younger adults to be more likely to opt for audiobooks and the multi-tasking they enable”- Forbes
“116% growth in spoken word listeners 13-34 years old in the past even years, with 18% growth in the last year”- National Public Radio Organization
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play_arrowBuild Your Brand and Keep Your Legacy Alive with an Audio Performance!SOMETHING THEY WILL REMEMBER
So many successful brand builders watch helplessly as the entrepreneurial spirit of their brand begins to fade as their company grows. It gets simplified and watered down with each new generation. The increasing division of specialized labor that you can finally afford to increase efficiency and reduce costs inevitably begins to dull that spirit. As the silos grow and the walls begin to thicken, your people can get isolated and insulated from the sale process. They can start to take your company’s history and what you had to do to overcome those early sales challenges for granted. They begin to forget what it actually took to get your business going in the first place. It becomes a given, no more special than any other place to work.
Get Buy In
How do you get that new engineer who says, “I have nothing to do with sales” to actively pitch in to support the efforts required to make sales happen? How do you get your accounting staff excited about what your company has been through to get to the point of solid, stable, and predictable cash flow? How do you set a fire under your decedents to remind them of not only what it took to build your brand, but how to emulate that spirit in their everyday efforts? And how do you give your salespeople the stories of all the ups and downs, challenges and solutions that you faced so they can remember and share them with their prospects?
Use Drive Time
You know they have a very limited attention span and don’t have a lot of time to read much these days. But we think there is now a new and effective way to get your message across and give your people the appreciation for the company you have so painstakingly built. We found a way that takes advantage of their “downtime“ when commuting or driving to their next appointment by amusing, entertaining, and engaging them in your story. It allows them to listen on their terms and in their time slots to a theatrical enactment of scenes from your company’s early days when it was more of a startup than an enterprise.
Entertain Them
We are talking about preserving your legacy and inspiring your people with the true story of your beginnings. We are not suggesting just reading to them by an audiobook narrator, but actually having your story performed by professional actors playing the parts in short scenes. We are talking about dramatizing where your company’s values came from and some of the seminal moments in its success, complete with sound effects and an original musical score.
Training Tool
We think business audio theatre should be used in every company as part of the orientation and training process as well as the sales program. It will give your new people, for years to come, a firm foundation in your company’s history and values delivered in a way that they will embrace. It’s more of a business adventure than a lecture and more of a story than a prescriptive text.
If you would like to experience an example of this new training tool, check out www.barefootaudiobook.com. If you think you or your company would benefit by keeping your legacy alive with an audio performance, check out www.biz4budz.com. We would love to help you perform your story for your people!
