Everyone is talking about storytelling (and desperately looking for it), and while “storytelling” is a terrible buzzword, I decided to attempt a little case study and turn something boring into something interesting via story.
Our Use Case #1 is a generic office stapler. In the future I might create a story for industries such as:
waste management, commercial cleaning services, industrial lubricants, payroll processing, freight forwarding, document shredding, elevator maintenance, water treatment plants, HVAC servicing, packaging manufacturers
PS: Of course I used ChatGPT to write the below story, as the point of this article is to illustrate what “storytelling” does.
The Quiet Cohesion
Every morning, when the coffee machine hums and keyboards chatter to life, a small hero waits at the edge of the desk:
The stapler.
No one cheers when it arrives. No one tweets about it. But take a moment and watch its rhythm — plink-plink — like a heartbeat syncing scattered pages into unity.
The stapler doesn’t rewrite documents. It doesn’t design slides or craft strategy. What it does is deeper: it creates cohesion from chaos. A report without it is a forest of loose leaves. With it: a story with structure.
In every stapled stack there’s intention. A contract is ready to be signed. A pitch is ready to be shared. A brainstorm is now a blueprint.
Some might see a tool. Others see a token of order in a world that often threatens to fragment into noise. The stapler doesn’t just bind pages — it binds purpose to people.
And at the end of the day, when the office quiets, it rests — not unnoticed, but quietly proud. Because what it does? It’s the first ritual of every idea that’s taken seriously.
The Takeaway
This small storytelling case study shows what business storytelling and corporate storytelling actually do: this is not about “embellishing” reality, but more about creating meaning.
If a stapler can carry a narrative, then so can payroll software, waste management, or water treatment plants. This is the core of brand storytelling and narrative strategy (turning functional, overlooked products into stories people remember).
And especially in the era of AI-generated content, what still differentiates companies is human storytelling: context, judgment, and the ability to make boring businesses feel coherent, intentional, and real.
Swetlana AI 