Over the past year, a striking phrase has started to appear in headlines, hiring reports, and leadership conversations. Companies are not just looking for marketers, communicators, or content leads. They are “desperately seeking storytellers.”

As the co-author of two bestselling books on brand storytelling that has also been an in-house brand storyteller and fractional CMO, I’ve spent the past two decades working with companies at very different stages of growth. What I’m seeing right now is not a renewed interest in creativity, but a growing recognition that many businesses have lost narrative clarity as their complexity has increased.

That wording is revealing. It signals urgency and uncertainty. More importantly, it signals that something fundamental is no longer working the way it used to.

This is not a creative trend. It is a structural one.

Organizations are not hiring storytellers because storytelling is fashionable. They are hiring storytellers because their existing systems for communication, differentiation, and growth are no longer sufficient in an environment defined by automation, fragmentation, and overload.

Let’s dive deeper into this trend, why it’s happening, what companies are really looking for, and how the smartest companies are thinking about storytelling as a result of this shift.

The Hiring Signal Everyone Is Misreading

At first glance, the rise of “storyteller” roles looks like a branding or content shift. It is easy to interpret it as another evolution of marketing titles, similar to the rise of content strategists or social media managers over the past decade.

That interpretation misses the point.

When companies change the language they use to describe what they need, it usually means the problem they are trying to solve has outgrown existing functions. Organizations already have people who write. They already have teams who produce content. They already have specialists for channels, platforms, and performance.

What they are lacking is coherence that connects storytelling to commercial outcomes.

The demand for storytellers is not about producing more content. It is about making sense of too much content, too many channels, and too many competing messages that no longer add up to a clear, commercially grounded point of view.

This is where many organizations struggle. They conflate being good at storytelling with being good at content creation. The two are not the same.

Strong content creators know how to craft engaging posts, videos, or campaigns. Strong storytellers understand how narrative supports brand strategy, business priorities, and commercial goals. They take a 360-degree view of the organization, including product, pricing, customer experience, distribution, and growth targets, and ensure the story reinforces those realities rather than distracting from them.

Today, storytelling that is not anchored to business objectives is no longer enough. Stories must ladder back to what the company is trying to achieve, whether that is driving conversion, protecting margin, building loyalty, entering new markets, or sustaining trust through change.

Without that commercial mindset, storytelling becomes noise. With it, storytelling becomes a growth lever.

The Long Build Up to This Moment

This shift did not happen overnight.

For more than a decade, brands have been adding layers to their communications stack. Social platforms multiplied. Owned media expanded. Digital advertising became more precise. Internal communications became more visible. Executives became publishers. Employees became advocates. Customers became creators.

Each change was manageable in isolation. Together, they created systems that are increasingly difficult to coordinate.

Messages began to overlap. Narratives contradicted each other. Content performed in isolation but failed to build memory. Campaigns delivered short-term results without reinforcing long-term meaning. Trust became harder to earn and easier to lose.

This is where weak, fragmented storytelling shows up as higher returns, heavier promotional pressure, lower lifetime value, and slower conversion cycles. Strong storytelling tightens the gap between promise and reality, which improves revenue quality, not just volume.

For example, Zalando’s work on reducing returns highlights a misunderstood truth about storytelling. Returns are not just a product or sizing issue. They are often a storytelling issue. When the narrative told through marketing, imagery, and PDPs over-promises or lacks context, customers buy with uncertainty. Strong storytelling does not exaggerate. It aligns expectation with reality, which lowers returns and improves revenue quality.

Storytelling does not replace performance marketing, but it does make it more efficient.

Why Storytelling Is Not Just A Marketing Function

One of the most important shifts behind this hiring trend is where storytelling now sits inside organizations.

Historically, storytelling was treated as a marketing output. It appeared in campaigns, brand films, and creative briefs. It was applied late in the process to make messages more engaging.

While storytelling will still appear in these forums, the model has evolved.

In modern organizations, storytelling influences product positioning, e-commerce conversion, leadership communication, employer brand, customer experience, and reputation. It shapes how value is framed and how decisions are explained.

Nike is a clear example of this in practice. Its long-term investment in narrative allows the brand to sustain stronger full-price sell-through and reduce dependency on discounting. That storytelling discipline protects margin by reinforcing value before price ever becomes part of the conversation.

This means storytelling leadership should operate upstream of execution – but that’s not the reality in most companies. The risk in this “desperately seeking storytellers trend” is that companies are placing storytelling roles are far too downstream. In roles that are too downstream, companies expect storytellers to work on tactical outputs rather than helping shape the overarching strategy for the business.

Having storytelling leadership is also critical when the product, experience, or offer cannot support the story being told. Storytelling is not a band aid to fix what’s wrong with your business and smart leaders call out those problems and mobilize teams to tackle them head on. And, let’s be honest, that can make for a powerful story that drives customer trust, loyalty and purchases.

The Real Problem Storytellers Are Being Asked to Solve

Most organizations would not describe their challenge as a storytelling problem. They would describe it in business terms.

They might say their brand feels fragmented or customers don’t “get” them. They might say their brand, product or service differentiation is eroding. They might say campaigns are not sticking or hitting their target KPIs or sales goals. They might say that AI has increased output but reduced impact. They might say that customers are harder to convert or retain.

These symptoms point to the same underlying issue – the organization does not have a clear narrative system that aligns brand ambition with commercial reality.

Without a shared narrative, teams optimize within their function or tactical output instead of collectively. Marketing focuses on performance. PR focuses on coverage. Product focuses on features. Leadership focuses on vision. Each message may be correct in isolation. Together, they feel disconnected.

Peloton is an example of a company that went through a disconnect. The company’s early growth was fueled by a powerful story of belonging and identity. However, as messaging fragmented and shifted toward hardware features and pricing, churn increased. There were also a few brand crises that were managed poorly. Through all of this, the product did not suddenly change. The narrative did and that shift had a direct impact on lifetime value.

This is why storytellers are being hired to reconnect the dots.

AI Did Not Create This Need but It Exposed It

The acceleration of AI has made this problem impossible to ignore.

Generative tools have dramatically reduced the cost and effort required to produce content. Teams can now create copy, visuals, and variations at scale.

What AI has not done is make content more meaningful.

As output increases, differentiation decreases. As personalization scales, sameness becomes more visible. AI removes friction from execution, which exposes gaps in strategic clarity.

When organizations cannot articulate a clear story, AI amplifies the confusion.

Companies like Stripe and Notion show the opposite approach. In complex categories, clear narrative framing reduces cognitive load, accelerates trust, and shortens conversion cycles. Storytelling here is not simplification of the product. It is simplification of the decision.

This is why storytelling is now being reframed as governance rather than creativity. Someone has to decide what the organization stands for, what it is building toward, and how those ideas show up consistently across channels and systems.

The View Ahead

For many companies, the challenge is not a lack of effort, talent, or technology. It is a lack of narrative alignment.

This is the work I focus on today through my consultancy and fractional leadership roles: helping companies clarify their core story, connect it to real business objectives, and translate it into customer-facing experiences that drive conversion, loyalty, and long-term value. That work spans brand strategy, go-to-market, e-commerce, internal, external, and leadership communication, and the systems that sit underneath them.

If your organization is investing more in content, performance, and AI, but seeing diminishing returns, the issue is rarely volume. It is usually clarity.

Storytelling is not a campaign fix. It is an operating system.

For the companies getting it right, it is becoming one of the most durable sources of competitive advantage they have.

Jessica Gioglio is the co-author of The Laws of Brand Storytelling and The Power of Visual Storytelling. Professionally, Jessica has led innovative marketing and public relations programs for Dunkin’, TripAdvisor, Sprinklr, and more. Today, Jessica is a keynote speaker (book her here) and founder of With Savvy Media & Marketing, a strategic branding, storytelling, and content strategy consultancy.