Why is Fast Company talking about storytelling?

[Dcrux]

In What's Your Story? Fast Company tracks storytelling as replacing the "Corporate Sominex" of business presentations. Apply the Purple Cow to Your Storytelling relates storytelling skill to brand sucess and business identity.

Where most companies think a business identity is a logo and a blithely innocuous tagline, the business story of your Unique Selling Proposition can set you apart from competition. Think of marketing as storytelling, the story customers tell themselves about a product or service and you get the idea. Yet can anyone point out the web site which has done a great job at this content creation skill?

The J Peterman Company doesn't do a bad job.

And Apple's Thomas Erickson compares interface design to storytelling.

I almost always begin design by talking with users. Initially, my goal is simply to collect people's stories. I believe that the stories people tell about what they do and how they do it contain information vital to designing good interfaces. Stories reveal what people like about their work, what they hate about it, what works well, what sorts of things are real problems.
-- Design as Storytelling

A forum on content would certainly be incomplete without a single post on storytelling. Personas, storyboards and scenarios are common to business planning, marketing, and interaction design. Yet talk about storytelling and you might as well be talking about alien abductions. As a proverbial king, content creation is going to need a lot of on-the-job training.