My LinkedIn feed has been inundated with people sharing the recent Wall Street Journal article Companies Are Desperately Seeking ‘Storytellers’. Writers, editors, and content managers everywhere are rightfully sharing it as a way to validate the kind of work they’ve always done.

Which has merit. Obviously storytelling is great and important and some people are well equipped to be great storytellers.

But it’s clear to me that this “storyteller” trend is more buzzword than substance. Companies are seemingly slapping the word onto various roles across media relations, copywriting, communications, social media, influencer marketing, and more without any appreciable changes to what these employees are actually expected to accomplish. It all seems pretty superficial.

At best, these are knee-jerk reactions from companies who are beginning to see just how un-storytelling-esque A.I. can be. At worst (and more likely) these companies don’t really know what they’re doing. They’re essentially admitting they don’t understand how to engage with their current and potential customers, don’t know how to build brand awareness, and don’t know how to transition any of that into tangible business.

Because if they did, they’d know that throwing a soupçon of “storytellers” into the corporate recipe isn’t going to make a difference.

If this type of trend sounds familiar it’s because it’s happened before. The WSJ article’s author, Katie Deighton, alludes to this — “the heyday of technology gurus, developer ninjas, SEO rockstars and at least one digital prophet have long since passed” — but doesn’t go so far as to suggest the same thing is happening here.

The same thing is happening here.

Don’t misunderstand. Everyone has a story to tell. I actually have a training I’ve given called "Everyone Writes." It starts with a cover image of the book "Everyone Poops," and the main message is that the hurdle of getting the words down on paper can be too much for some people to overcome, but they are perfectly capable of being excellent at all the other steps of writing. So just like everyone poops, everyone writes — or, to put it another way, everyone has a story to tell — even if they're not the ones putting pen to paper.

That’s not this. This storyteller trend is the same aimless labeling that brought us stuff like “integrated marketing” (which mostly meant slapping your corporate logo on a brochure and a banner ad and a keychain), “viral marketing” (which was, for some reason, seen as both replicable and entirely organic), and “web 2.0” (which just meant giving users the ability to add comments to everything and it was awful). It’s a vague promise of something new and exciting and different, with no operational distinction and zero correlation with specific outcomes. With this storyteller trend, marketers especially (but also PR, communications, media relations, and others) are being given one more mandate from leaders who still have no idea how marketing fits into their organization.

And we marketers will fall for it. We always do. We’ll be drawn in by the allure — the excitement of being considered a guru, a rockstar, a ninja, or now a storyteller — and then when it doesn’t work everyone will be, for some reason, shocked.

The problem isn’t not having enough storytellers (or that we haven’t been calling them storytellers); the problem is not having the basics in place that drive customer acquisition and long-term growth.

Marketing is there to build awareness of a company's products or services among current and potential customers. Storytelling can be a great way to do that — but not necessarily any better than all the other various tools in the marketing toolbox, and only when the rest of the system is already working.

Hiring more storytellers doesn’t change what marketing does or how they do it. It will, however, make the quarterly marketing review failures sound all the more poetic.

If this resonates with you, consider subscribing. Each week I’ll share essays and commentary drawn from today’s marketing trends and my upcoming book Marketing Isn’t Special — all focused on improving how marketing is understood, measured, and valued.

If this doesn’t resonate with you, I would never begrudge someone wanting a less cluttered inbox.