INSIGHTS
You're in the People Business
Regardless of what you do or what you want to believe, you're in the people business.
Before we dive in, do this really quickly. Type "Human Connection" into your search bar.
Ok, don't actually do that because you'll go away, so we'll do it for you.
A few years ago, if you typed "Human Connection" into Google, you'd get about five and a half billion results. Billion. Today you'd probably just ask ChatGPT. Which, if you think about it, is a pretty ironic place to go looking for human connection.
But the number still tells us something. That's an astronomical amount of people creating ideas and content around one thing. Connection.
In sales and marketing, there is often this idea that we need to really drive home the facts and features. The features and benefits. The "LOOK HOW COOL THIS THING IS WE MADE AND HOW MUCH STUFF WE PUT IN THAT'S GOING TO MAKE YOUR LIFE SO EASY. SEE. SEE. SEE."
We get so caught up in the "I have to tell everyone all the things I put in my product" of it all, that we often forget at the core of what we all do, we're simply bringing an idea, or product, or service to people. Regular, everyday people.
If you're in the B2C world, you're connecting to people.
If you're a B2B business, you're connecting to people who work at a company.
In fact, all of the terms we use in marketing and strategy, well, you'll see the pattern:
Audience = People
Customers = People
Clients = Still People
Consumers = Also People
Persona = The people we believe might be your people
Donors = Generous people
Company culture = Your people
Regardless of what you do or what you want to believe, you're in the people business.
Why characters are the mechanism, not the decoration
As a social species, we thrive on connection. Real, genuine, honest relationships that are forged on trust and common ground. We're constantly searching for places we fit in, groups we want to be a part of. More simply put, we're constantly searching for our tribe.
The science backs this up in a specific way. Research on character identification, published across multiple studies in psychology and neuroscience, shows that when audiences identify with a character in a story, they temporarily adopt that character's perspective, goals, and emotions as their own. The boundary between self and other blurs. We experience events as if they were happening to us.
This isn't metaphorical. Psychologists Melanie Green and Timothy Brock's research on narrative transportation found that when a person becomes absorbed in a character's story, their defenses against persuasion drop. Not because they're being manipulated. Because the brain is consumed by the experience of being someone else. The mental resources that would normally be spent skeptically evaluating claims are instead spent living alongside a character.
The practical implication for brands is specific. If your audience connects with the character, they connect with the story. If they connect with the story, they connect with the values the story carries. And if those values align with your brand, the brand earns something advertising can't buy.
But none of that happens if the character isn't right.
What makes a great character
When it comes to the people at the center of your stories, there are three things that determine whether an audience will connect with them.
What do they want? Every story needs forward motion. A character who wants something gives the audience a reason to follow them. This doesn't have to be dramatic. It can be as simple as a teacher who wants to build a program, a craftsperson trying to perfect a technique, or a founder trying to prove that the way they've chosen to build actually works. Desire propels the story.
Why do they want it? This is where connection deepens. When we understand not just what someone is pursuing but why it matters to them, we start to care. Motivation draws the audience closer because it reveals what's underneath the surface. The teacher who wants to build a program because she grew up without access to one. The founder who chose integrity over scale because of a specific moment that changed how he saw the industry. The "why" is what creates empathy.
What makes them unique? This is the detail that makes the audience lean in. It's the thing you haven't seen before. The hospital clown who's also a software engineer. The fire-breathing glacier guide. The Indigenous woman who learned to sew so she could make products for women she's never met in another country. Uniqueness is what separates a character worth watching from a character you've already seen a hundred times.
Research supports this specific combination. Paul Zak's neurochemistry work shows that character-driven stories with clear desire and emotional stakes trigger oxytocin, the neurochemical associated with empathy and trust. As his team found, "to the brain, good stories are good stories, whether first-person or third-person, on topics happy or sad, as long as they get us to care about their characters."
When all three are present, the audience doesn't just watch. They identify. And identification is where belief changes.
Fieldwork, not focus groups
So how do you find these people?
Most studios start with a creative brief. The brand writes down what it wants to say, the agency scripts something that says it, and the production company films it. The characters in that process are cast, not discovered. They serve the message. The message doesn't emerge from their lives.
We work differently. Before we write a word or turn on a camera, we do what we call Field Work. It's borrowed directly from journalism. Go to the people. Sit with them. Ask questions you don't already know the answers to. Listen for the story that's actually there, not the story the brief asked for.
Field Work means talking to employees, customers, founders, and community members with genuine curiosity. Not to validate a message, but to discover one. The best stories in and around any brand are the ones nobody in the marketing department has heard yet, because nobody thought to ask the right person the right question.
What we're listening for is specific. We're listening for desire, motivation, and uniqueness. We're listening for conflict. We're listening for the moment someone's voice changes because they've arrived at something real. 4,000+ interviews over a decade in newsrooms taught me this: the most important thing a person will tell you is usually the thing they didn't plan to say.
Building a system, not a one-off
Here's where most brands get this wrong. They find one great character, tell one great story, and then go back to business as usual until the next campaign.
The brands that build real storytelling power treat character discovery as an ongoing discipline, not a project. In every organization, internally and externally, there are hundreds if not thousands of stories. The janitor who teaches music on weekends. The hotel room attendant who keeps her traditional Balinese culture alive through dance. The customer whose life changed because someone at your company made a decision that wasn't in the manual.
Those stories are already happening. They don't need to be invented. They need to be found.
The difference between a brand that tells one good story and a brand that builds a storytelling engine is the system behind it. Someone in the organization needs to be actively listening. Collecting. Recognizing when a character emerges who represents the brand on a deep, connected level. Someone who shares your values, believes in your cause, or means more to your community than you might know.
When you build that system, you stop scrambling for content and start choosing from an abundance of real stories. You can plan across months and years instead of reacting campaign to campaign. And the stories compound. Each one reinforces the others because they all come from the same authentic place.
Uncovering, not manufacturing
There's an important distinction here that's worth being direct about.
Some studios and agencies bring story ideas to brands. They pitch concepts, write scripts, and find characters to fit a predetermined narrative. That can work. But it's not what we do, and it's not what builds the kind of trust that compounds over time.
We believe the best stories are real ones, told well. That means we uncover stories rather than manufacture them. We go into the field, we talk to people, and we let the story reveal itself. The journalism instinct is the foundation. If the real story isn't there, no amount of production will save it.
When it is there, and it almost always is when you look carefully enough, the result is something an audience can feel. Not because it was designed to manipulate them. Because it's true.
If one person's story has the ability to change how someone else sees the world through your brand, your cause, your organization, don't you think you should tell it?
Author:
Braden Dragomir
