When my daughter was little, I used to switch the narrative in one of her favorite bedtime stories and change the country where the protagonist lived. I alternated among a little girl who plays softball and rides the subway in New York, a little girl who plays soccer, uses the U-Bahn and lives in Berlin and a third who plays beach volleyball and eats hummus in Tel Aviv.
As soon as I read out loud the sport the little girl played, my daughter squealed with delight because she knew where the story was headed and which country would be at its center.
The narrative connected with her on an emotional level (we live in New York, and our extended family is located in Berlin and Israel). She frequently interrupted me to embellish the story with the little girl’s favorite food and song, cousins’ names, a favorite TV show and book character, places she visits and the name of her kindergarten teacher.
My daughter connected with the story on a visceral level. It reached her heart, and she intuitively localized each detail for the appropriate country.
Humans have always relied on stories. Every tribe in every culture cherished its storytellers, at night, around the campfire, passing lore from generation to generation, shaping cultures.
Storytelling is the world’s oldest occupation and a universal tool to connect. A red hand stencil in a cave in Sulawesi, Indonesia, dating to 67,800 years ago, has recently been recognized as the earliest known record of storytelling through pictures.
Only 46,000 years later, stories were written down and inscribed on clay tablets in Mesopotamia.
Writers inspire other writers. James Baldwin credited Honoré de Balzac with teaching him about France. Toni Morrison said Baldwin gave her both language and courage. Virginia Woolf read James Joyce; the competition spurred her on.
But for stories to be relatable, they have to be localized to fit a specific locale.
“At the highest level, a good story has to reflect its audience while modifying that reflection, writes Joshua Rothman in The New Yorker. “One conception of storytelling is pastoral.”
We thrive on stories. And it has taken a while for brands to discover that all-too-human fact. Brand storytelling has become the hottest new strategy to introduce products or services. Brands went from selling and persuasion to bonding with their consumers.
Companies want to reach their customers’ hearts because they know it works. They want to be more “human” and global in their narrative approach (while, at the same time, heavily relying on AI).
As a professional writer and localization expert, I find this trend interesting to watch.
Marcello Grande, CSO and Executive Creative Director at FirstPerson, sees brand narratives as a business system, not a branding flourish. Vision, category and narrative sit at the core, held together by alignment inside the company and activation in the market: “The most successful companies—the ones that define markets, not just compete in them—do something radically different,” he says. “They put Story at the Center. Not as branding. Not as content. As strategy.”
The Wall Street Journal calls storytellers “corporate America’s latest hot job”. They’re hired to “coordinate blogs, speeches, podcasts and campaigns into a single, durable point of view, not just to write nicer headlines.” Companies want a story and a coherent narrative at the center.
Google and Microsoft build “storytelling teams”. “As storytellers,” a Google job ad envisions, “we play an integral role in driving customer acquisition and long-term growth.”
Corporations have seen the light. Instead of churning out fluff, they want “branded storytelling” and yearn for writing skills and desperately needed expertise from people whose skill sets they had played down not too long ago.
Yes, stories are back. But if you want to engage with your readers wherever they are, you must also mindfully localize your storytelling and adapt it to other cultures.
Larger brands have already begun localizing their content. Nike shoes are marketed differently in Germany (just compare the company’s US-based homepage visuals with the German-language localized version). And even though Nespresso is a hard sell in Italy, and it’s not easy to convince Belgians to give Hershey bars a fair shot, both companies try. Chain restaurants have already introduced local menu options or eliminated some ingredients for global marketplaces a while back.
Sometimes, though, localization attempts fail spectacularly: KFC’s “finger-lickin’ good” slogan turned into “eat your fingers off” in Mandarin.
So, unless brand narratives are authentic, highlight our shared humanity, avoid stereotypes and carefully adapt their message to others, they’ll flop.
You won’t make the same mistake, though.
When you need to tell a global story
- treat narratives as a shared project across product and brand, not as a last-minute add-on
- design a “master story” for translation and transcreation from the start, with clear shared emotional arcs for each locale
- codify what is non-negotiable in your narrative, then document where local teams can reinterpret, remix or push back
- write for emotional legibility first and format/styling second; if your story cannot survive retelling in another language, it will not travel far
- stay curious, observe and don’t be judgmental
Back to my daughter’s bedtime ritual: I made sure the story’s emotional arc was clear from the get-go and that it triggered memories (this technique was also behind the Winnie-the-Pooh books, in which the author’s son, Christopher Robin, shared a world with his own stuffed teddy bear, who sprang to life).
My daughter then added cultural specificity and created her own localized storyline that was close to the “master story”, placing the same little girl at the center of other locations in the world. The story was emotionally resonant and anchored to my daughter’s own experiences. She became immersed in it.
As a storyteller, your job is to hold a coherent, engaging narrative (shout out to feature journalists who have known this for centuries).
Let the reader feel emotions that are aligned with their experiences. Make the story relevant to them, wherever they may be.
That’s global storytelling. You will not just transcend borders and build bridges mindfully and respectfully, but also deeply connect with people far, far away.
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