Companies overseas are hiring storytellers, and the people winning the roles are journalists. This tells you something useful about what brand storytelling actually is and what New Zealand businesses should be asking for instead of more content.
When the American fintech Chime advertised for a director of corporate editorial and storytelling, more than 500 people applied. The pool was made up largely of current and former journalists.
The share of United States job listings on LinkedIn containing the word "storyteller" doubled in the year to late November. Vanta advertised a head of storytelling at up to US$274,000. Notion folded its communications functions into a 10-person storytelling team. USAA is hiring its fourth staff storyteller. On earnings calls, executives used the words "storyteller" or "storytelling" 469 times last year, against 147 times a decade earlier.
These companies could have advertised for a content manager, a copywriter, or a head of brand. They chose a different word, and the people who answered were the ones trained to walk into a room knowing nothing and walk out with the story.
What the hiring boom is actually buying
It is tempting to read all of this as a fashion in job titles, and some of it is, but the thing being bought underneath the title is real, and it's not writing.
Writing is the last stage of the work and, increasingly, the easiest stage to buy or to generate. Any business can produce endlessly now, faster than it ever could, and so can every one of its competitors. Production is not the constraint.
What these companies seek is judgment on which things about their business are worth saying out loud. The material is already there, sitting in the building, in the heads of the people doing the work.
Somebody has to go and get it: ask the questions nobody thought to ask, work out what is actually true about the business now, and decide which of those truths a reader outside the business would care about. Then, and only then, does anyone write anything.
This is not a marketing skill borrowed and repurposed. It is reporting, and it explains why journalists are the ones filling these roles.
Why brand storytelling in New Zealand looks different
The salaries in the American story are not a market signal for anyone here. No growing New Zealand business is creating a head of storytelling role, and you don't need to.
Most established New Zealand companies are owner-led, referral-fed, and genuinely good at what they do. The work has moved on, the team has grown, the standard has climbed - and the way the business describes itself has stayed where it was the day someone wrote it quickly between jobs. What clients say about the business in a room is nowhere on its website.
The instinct in that situation is to reach for more marketing. More posts, more ads, more activity, on the assumption that the problem is visibility. Usually the problem is that the business is still telling an old, smaller story about itself, and more marketing only makes that story louder.
What Kiwi businesses need to tap into is truth.
What reporting looks like in practice
A bathroom renovation is not a story, and a builder posting about one is producing content. For Woodsmith Building Co. their recent bathroom project's story was in the structure: the original floor could not carry a level walk-in shower, so they put in new joists and four more piles with a consent variation mid-build to allow the work. What a visitor sees in the finished bathroom is a flat floor. Everything that made it flat is underneath, and i's the most impressive part of the job.
Written down and put in front of the people deciding whether to hire them is worth more to a builder than any number of photographs of finished bathrooms.
The same instinct works at a different scale. When Automotive Solutions marked 25 years, the anniversary book had to draw its content from 65 independent workshops the length of the country, and what came back was uneven. Some members sent three pages, some sent three sentences. The decision that mattered was editorial rather than creative: every member got one page at about 250 words with equal visual weight, so nobody was diminished by how much they had written.
In neither case was writing the hard part. Knowing what to do with the material was.
The part that doesn't transfer
A newsroom background is not a qualification on its own. Plenty of beautiful features have moved nobody and sold nothing. The trade produces as much writing that admires itself as writing that works. The part that transfers to a business is narrower than the job title suggests: the questions, the reporting, the refusal to accept the first answer, and the discipline of cutting whatever does not earn its place.
So the useful version of what those American companies worked out is not "hire a journalist". It is "hire for reporting". Ask whoever you are considering how they intend to find out what is true about your business, and listen carefully to the answer. If the answer is a content calendar, you are buying production. If the answer is a set of questions, you are buying judgment.
Where to start
Judgment of that kind is hireable, and it does not have to be hired full time. For most established New Zealand businesses it arrives as a project: someone asks the questions the brief forgot to ask, establishes what is true about the business now, decides what earns its place, and leaves behind a position and a story that hold up wherever you put them - the website, the tender document, the conversation on site.
Most of the businesses I work with have already done the hard part. They have built something worth talking about. What they are missing is someone whose entire training is finding out what it is.
If that sounds like your business, a discovery session is the place to start.
