Episode Details

Only 19% of employees can consistently tell their company's story. That means 81% of your brand touchpoints are leaking narrative — and costing you customers. Elliott Rayner's groundbreaking research explains why, and what to do about it.

Elliott Rayner — fractional Head of Storytelling and author of The State of Storytelling 2026 — analyzed 25 emerging Chief Storytelling Officer job descriptions from the world's most sophisticated companies to uncover a seismic shift: the best organizations are no longer treating brand narrative as a creative function. They're operationalizing it.

In this episode, Elliott and host Park Howell reveal:

• Why Narrative Entropy is the silent killer of brand growth — and the single metric that exposes it instantly
• What a Chief Storytelling Officer actually does (hint: it's far less about creating stories and far more about creating alignment)
• The 3-question survey you can run inside your company this week to make the business case for StoryOps™
• Why "execution has become cheap but meaning has not" — and what that means for your competitive strategy in the AI age
• How to get your head of sales, legal, product, and finance all telling the same story without a fight

Whether you're a CMO, a founder, a product marketer, or someone quietly operating as your organization's unofficial head of storytelling — this episode is your mandate and your blueprint.

Resources mentioned:

• Download Elliott's free report: The State of Storytelling 2026 — find it on his LinkedIn profile
• Elliott's Maven storytelling cohort: productnarratives.com
• Park Howell's StoryOps™ platform: storycycle.ai