YouthNation: Building Remarkable Brands in a Youth-Driven Culture

Chapter 16A Story Worth Sharing

As children we all loved to be told stories. As our parents flipped through oversized books with images that seemed larger than life, we learned how to understand concepts that connected in a progression to create something lasting. Stories sparked our imaginations and calmly fueled our dreams before sleep. The power of stories has always been magical. It's how we learned early on to connect, share, and explore the world around us. For centuries, it's how we passed forward our histories and culture to future generations. And today, enabled by technology and social media, stories are more present in our daily lives than ever before.

Today, we are bombarded by hundreds, even thousands, of messages from our “friends” and those we follow on a 24-hour cycle. It's the stories we see and hear (rather than the ads we avoid) that make us laugh, cry, or smile: stories that in some ways remind us of our comfy bedtime routines as children.

It's clear that YouthNation is gravitating toward perpetual stories as a primary path in communicating with one another. The ways in which America's youth converse have become never-ending threads of short-form text and image-based messaging which over time tell the story of evolving relationships.

The Death of the Phone Call

The traditional paths by which previous generations communicated with one another when not face-to-face has lost most of its relevance with YouthNation. The reasons why phone calls are going the ...