Since my childhood, I’ve always had difficulty memorizing things. People around me believed that I had a learning disability because in their eyes I was struggling to understand new information. However, the reason for this apparent struggle was the fact that my brain is a scavenger.

If I could create a suitable context for every new thing I was trying to learn, the complexity of the subject was eradicated, leaving only the simple remains behind which my brain could process much better. In a way, I was forming a story for every new piece of information so that my mind could perceive it in its entirety.

This is the magic of storytelling.

Simply stating facts can leave audiences bored and looking for entertainment elsewhere. To captivate those around you while you’re speaking, you need to create an interesting background and context for the facts that you present — A story.

A story shapes the way you perceive things. For instance, in the image below, the two black circles are of the same size but the varying nature of the surrounding circles gives a different impression of the black circles. The background story plays a pivotal role in shaping the way we see things.

This is well-known to many but it’s still surprising that many brands make the mistake of not having a good story to enthrall potential customers. By focusing only on trying to educate people about the product, they miss out on the opportunity to engage with customers and convert them into long-term buyers.

Let’s try a simple exercise.

Try naming any brand that comes to your mind. Is there one word or phrase that can describe it? Or can you visualize an image in your mind right away when you just think of the name of the brand?

In most probability, the answer would be yes which demonstrates that the brand was successful in building a story around itself. And not just that, it was even successful in making you relate to it.

The essence of a good story is that not only is it memorable, it also becomes your identity. I could have incorrectly stated my learning predicament earlier and projected myself as an all-knowing being. However, every individual is transparent at the end of the day and audiences can easily see through a made-up story.

Being truthful about your personality resonates better with the audience than creating a false identity. Getting somebody’s attention requires an accurate persona because your falsehood will be detected within a few minutes when you address them.

A good story also provides a deeper connection with the audience and makes the brand seem more human-like. Here are some examples of brilliant brand storytelling.

Coca-Cola: Emotion-driven story

A bottle of Coca Cola has become synonymous with spreading happiness because of the years the brand has put into advertising. In its earlier days, the brand tried promoting itself through free samples. It was in the latter half of the 1900s that the marketing team began laying emphasis on a brand identity fuelled by fun and happiness.

The team successfully identified the emotion most people feel when they taste a carbonated soft drink that quenches their thirst in a manner so unlike water. One of the main reasons for its success is the fact that despite the numerous changes in the market, the brand has stuck with its original brand story of equating happiness with a bottle of Coke. The team recognized the importance of selling an experience, not just a product.

In fact, this is what Kate Santore, the creative content manager of Coca-Cola says about the brand’s strategy, “We want to create Coca-Cola stories and not stories by Coca-Cola. That holds true when our product is a character in the story with a credible role to play. If you read a script or even partner-created content and say to yourself, ‘Can I tell this story without Coca-Cola?’ and the answer is yes, then it’s not a Coca-Cola story.”

Toms Shoes: Human side of a brand

The brand started out with the intention of providing shoes to the children in need of them. The founder of the brand was traveling through Argentina when he noticed the hardships of children who were growing up without shoes.

The company was launched with the message that every shoe sold would be replicated to provide a new pair to the ones who could not afford to own them.

By 2013, Toms was reportedly making $250 million in sales a year and had donated 10 million pairs of shoes since its launch. Just one year later, the company was valued at $625 million. The reason for this success? In this age of abundant data and intense competition, consumers have introduced a new concept for evaluating every brand — “are you likeable?”

Brands have now been transformed into living breathing entities with personalities, goals, and values. Consumers want to feel not only like they are getting a good product, but that they are getting it from a good brand.

Toms combined their product with a robust brand story and were able to scale up in a highly competitive market with numerous similar products by making people feel good being part of their community.

GoPro: Consumer-driven story

It started out to help athletes document themselves, but realizing the true potential of the product, GoPro broadened their market and urged more people to capture themselves in the moments that they enjoyed the most. This brilliant strategy made GoPro synonymous with the feeling of excitement and “your happiest place”. After all, the best stories are the ones where we play the lead role.

The icing on the cake was GoPro’s use of user-generated content (UGC). The brand urged people to post videos of themself that have been curated on GoPro’s social media channels. AdAge reported that it would take almost three years to watch all of the video content that GoPro users uploaded in 2013.

Stories make your job of communicating your ideas easier to understand and connect to, a fact that even cavemen made use of while making paintings on their walls. The more expressive you are in communicating your story the better and more relatable it gets for people, and the higher the chances of them recalling it even after a long period of time.

With attention spans of audiences decreasing at a faster rate than ever, a good and capturing story is extremely necessary for a brand. The social media-driven population craves new content while ignoring things it doesn’t consider worthwhile. Staying relevant is part of the strategy of most brands, and good storytelling skills are a must in this scenario.

A study by Origin and Hill Holiday found that people spent more on everything from hotel rooms to paintings when products or promos were paired with a story. Similarly, a 2014 study by neuro-economist Paul Zak found that a character-driven story caused people to donate 56% more money to charity.

So how do you tell a good story?

To begin telling a story, you need to know about the characters. Similarly, it is crucial that you know your brand inside-out, what it stands for, the core principles and values, and the demographic you are targeting.

You can then begin to create your persona. Until you put a face or personality to your brand, it won’t be engaging. It pulls back the curtain to actually show what you stand for and the traits that can make people relate to you.

If you are solving a common problem that people face, showcase the unique manners in which you do so. With a little creativity in your approach, you can display an interesting persona of your brand, exciting potential customers in the process. The entire purpose is to cater to their needs, so you need to know your customers well and why you care so much about them.

Think about not just what you do, but how you improve lives. People connect with things that educate, entertain, inspire, or even celebrate them.

Building up from consumer experiences, if you are able to tell a good story, you will be able to answer all the customer’s queries regarding what you do and how you do that, while also being engaging and telling them why they should invest their time and resources in you.

If you’re not sure what type of brand story might resonate with people, map your buyer’s journey. This helps you see what types of messaging people need to hear at each stage — and can help you identify gaps in your brand storytelling.

I could have started this article by simply stating the reason why I believe storytelling is so important. However, I chose to begin with a personal anecdote that drew you into my world by way of a story. If you’ve read this far then you can see the power storytelling has on audiences and consumers in creating a brand identity.