INSIGHTS
Does Your Brand Have a Chief Storytelling Officer?
If you search for “human connection” on Google you’ll get about 5,570,000,000 results.
One of the first questions I always ask is: who is responsible for your brand's stories?
Inevitably, someone points to the CEO or the Executive Director, then they point to the CMO, then I get blank stares. Most brands don't actually know who is responsible for their stories. And most companies, regardless of their size, don't have a Chief Storytelling Officer.
I know, I know. You're probably thinking of the Chief Storytelling Officer as one of those joke titles. Director of Fun. Something something "guru." Or you're going to think it just means they're another marketer.
But I truly believe that every company needs to have one. And the gap between where brands are and where they need to be has never been wider.
Everyone wants a storyteller. Almost nobody knows what that means.
In December 2025, the Wall Street Journal ran a piece called "Companies Are Desperately Seeking 'Storytellers.'" The percentage of LinkedIn job postings in the U.S. that include the term "storyteller" had doubled in a single year. Executives said "storyteller" or "storytelling" on earnings calls 469 times that year, up from 147 times in 2015.
Google is hiring a "customer storytelling manager." Microsoft's security organization recruited a "senior director of narrative and storytelling." A compliance tech firm offered up to $274,000 for a "head of storytelling."
The demand is real. The problem is what they think storytelling means.
Google's storytelling team published an article titled "Lowe's innovation: How Vertex AI helps create interactive shopping experiences." A financial services company hired "storytellers" to write guides to mental health benefits and polish executive speeches. These aren't stories. They're content. There's a difference, and it matters.
Designer Stefan Sagmeister put it bluntly in the same piece: "People who actually tell stories, meaning people who write novels and make feature films, don't see themselves as storytellers. It's all the people who are not storytellers who suddenly now want to be storytellers."
He's right. And the result is that "storytelling" is becoming one of the most abused words in business. Companies are hiring storytellers at record rates and producing almost no actual stories. They're producing blog posts, product explainers, earnings call talking points, and social media copy, then calling it storytelling because the job title says so.
Real storytelling has characters. It has conflict. It has structure that earns and holds attention. It creates an emotional experience that changes how the audience feels about something. That's not a content calendar. That's a discipline.
Why this role actually matters
Peter Buck from R.E.M. once said something about writing "Losing My Religion" that stuck with me. He said that when you release a song into the world, it's no longer your song. Your audience can perceive it however they're going to, and to them, it's going to have its own meaning. No matter how iconic that song might be, it means something different to every fan.
The same goes for your brand. Your brand is not what you think it is. It's how your audience perceives it.
That means there is a lot at stake if you're not intentionally shaping your brand's narrative. And in 2026, the landscape for doing that has fundamentally changed. Twenty-five years ago, brands communicated through a handful of channels. Print, broadcast, radio. You controlled the message because you controlled the medium.
Today, every brand is a publisher. Social media accounts, YouTube channels, podcasts, newsletters, owned platforms. The channels are endless and the content is all over the place, all chasing random metrics. Meanwhile, your audience has just as much power to shape the narrative as you do. One customer with a few thousand followers can redefine how people see your brand overnight.
If nobody in your organization is responsible for the story you're telling across all of those touchpoints, your brand doesn't have a narrative. It has noise.
What a Chief Storytelling Officer actually does
The CSO sits at the intersection of brand, marketing, communications, culture, and leadership. They're not a content producer. They're the person who ensures that every story the organization tells, internally and externally, reinforces a coherent narrative that actually means something.
Here's what that looks like in practice:
Narrative strategy. Not random acts of content. Someone needs to understand the Four Disciplines of Brand Storytelling well enough to know which stories serve Awareness, which build Affinity, which drive Action, and which earn Advocacy. The CSO maps the storytelling system and makes sure every investment has a clear purpose.
Field Work and story discovery. You can't just tell the first story you can think of. Sometimes you're crafting a founder's origin story. Other times you're building company culture, revealing the impact you're making, or telling the story of a customer whose life changed. Each of these requires a carefully chosen character and narrative. The CSO is always listening, always in conversation with employees, customers, and community members. They're the person who recognizes when a great character emerges, someone who represents the brand on a deep, connected level.
Story quality. This is the part most brands skip entirely. Someone needs to be the standard-bearer for what counts as a real story versus what's just content wearing a storytelling costume. A story has a character. It has conflict. It has structure. It makes you feel something. If the work doesn't meet that bar, it shouldn't ship under the banner of storytelling. The CSO protects that standard.
Measurement. Creating metrics and KPIs that actually track what storytelling does. Views and likes are surface-level. The metrics that matter are the ones that reflect belief. Brand consideration. Completion rates. Reply rates. Forward rates. Whether someone watched a film and then told someone else about it. The CSO ensures the organization is measuring the right things.
Culture. Who would have a better understanding of the stories within your brand than the person whose job it is to find them? The CSO can help leadership communicate more effectively with employees. They can share stories across departments to unify organizational narratives. They can surface the stories that prove the company's values are operational, not just aspirational.
The bar for storytelling is not where most brands think it is
Here's the thing that most companies hiring "storytellers" don't want to hear. The bar for genuine storytelling is much higher than what they're producing.
Writing a blog post about your product isn't storytelling. Publishing a case study with a customer quote isn't storytelling. Putting a founder on camera to read a script about the company's mission isn't storytelling.
Storytelling is finding the janitor who teaches music on weekends and understanding why that matters to your audience. It's sitting with a customer long enough that they stop giving you the polished version and start telling you what actually happened. It's identifying the conflict at the heart of your brand's existence and having the courage to put it on screen instead of burying it in corporate language.
The brands that do this well, the ones who invest in documentary-quality storytelling with real characters and real stakes, build something advertising can't touch. They build trust. They build affinity. They build the kind of loyalty where customers don't just buy from you. They tell other people why they should.
The brands that call their content calendar "storytelling" and hire writers to polish product descriptions are going to keep wondering why nothing they produce gets shared.
If you don't have a CSO, start here
If your organization isn't ready for the title, the questions still matter:
Who is responsible for your brand's stories? Not your content. Your stories.
Who is actively listening for stories happening in and around the company?
How are you learning the stories of your customers?
How are you learning the stories of your team members and leadership?
When a great story surfaces, who decides how to tell it and where it lives?
Regardless of what title you give them, someone must be responsible for intentionally driving your brand's ongoing narrative. Someone who is constantly talking with both internal team members and customers. Someone who's always curious to find the next story worth telling. Whether they're a current employee, a new hire, or a partner, you need someone who treats your brand's stories with the same seriousness that a filmmaker treats a documentary or a journalist treats a beat.
You need a Chief Storytelling Officer.
Author:
Braden Dragomir
