Question:

If whatever you sell can also be sold by somebody else, if your competitors can offer more or less the same features, source similar materials, provide a similar service, charge roughly the same price and make many of the same promises, then what exactly are you expecting your customer to remember about you when the time comes for them to choose?

Because that is the uncomfortable reality of business today.

Almost everything can be copied.

Your features can be copied, your packaging can be copied, your pricing can be undercut, your website can be imitated, your social media strategy can be studied, your advertising can be recreated and, increasingly, even the language you use to describe your business can be reproduced in seconds.

But there is one thing that is considerably more difficult to copy, and that is the collection of thoughts, feelings, characters, experiences and associations that you have managed to place inside somebody’s mind.

That is where branding becomes much more interesting, because branding isn’t simply about what people see when they look at your business, it is about what remains in their mind when your business is no longer in front of them.

And one of the oldest and most powerful ways of making that happen is storytelling.

WHEN EVERYONE IS SELLING THE SAME THING

Imagine for a moment that I put ten candles on a table in front of you.

They are all beautifully made, they all smell wonderful, they all burn for roughly the same number of hours, they all come in attractive containers and they all promise some variation of relaxation, atmosphere, comfort, luxury or wellbeing.

Now imagine I remove the labels.

Which one do you want?

Suddenly, the decision becomes much more difficult because we have stripped away the meaning and left you with features, and features are useful when somebody is comparing products, but they are not always particularly useful when you’re trying to become the product somebody remembers.

This is a problem businesses face every single day because whatever you sell, somebody somewhere probably sells something remarkably similar.

If you’re a photographer, there are thousands of other photographers with excellent cameras and beautiful portfolios, and if you don’t believe me, go on Pinterest and see for yourself.

If you’re an accountant, there are thousands of accountants who understand tax.

If you run a café, thousands of other cafés can make a good cup of coffee.

If you’re a consultant, thousands of other consultants have experience and knowledge.

And if you sell candles, there are thousands upon thousands of candles that smell lovely, look beautiful and create a relaxing atmosphere.

So eventually we arrive at a question every brand needs to answer.

Why you?

FEATURES ARE IMPORTANT, BUT THEY AREN’T ENOUGH

I don’t think the strongest answer to that question is simply another feature, because if your answer is that your candle burns for fifty hours, somebody can make one that burns for sixty, if your answer is that your ingredients are premium, somebody else can source premium ingredients, and if your answer is that your customer service is excellent, almost every business in the country will happily tell you exactly the same thing.

Features matter, quality matters and your product absolutely has to do what you say it does, but once you enter a crowded marketplace where everybody is making similar promises, something else has to happen if you want to occupy a little piece of somebody’s memory.

You have to give people something to attach the product to.

And human beings have been doing exactly that for thousands of years through stories.

Long before websites, advertising agencies, algorithms, television commercials or social media existed, human beings were sitting around fires telling each other stories and passing information from one generation to another through characters, danger, humour, love, loss, conflict, adventure and imagination.

We remember people, we remember places, we remember unusual events and, perhaps more importantly, we remember how those things made us feel.

And this is where storytelling can transform a product, because the product stops existing on its own and begins living inside a much larger world.

GIVING THE PRODUCT A WORLD TO LIVE IN

A candle can simply be wax, fragrance, a wick and a container, or a candle can have a history, it can belong to somebody, it can represent something, it can have characters associated with it, a place where something happened, a relationship that developed, a moment when everything changed and a reason for existing that goes far beyond the physical ingredients inside the jar.

Once you’ve created those associations, you’re no longer asking the customer’s memory to store a list of product specifications.

You’re giving their imagination somewhere to go.

So rather than spending the next few minutes trying to convince you that one particular candle is better than another, I’m going to do something completely different.

I’m going to take you somewhere.

I’m going to introduce you to the enchanted world of Bonovinotte, to Veeno Bonovinotte and to Bellawitch Enchantino, whose family’s candles were already aromatic, therapeutic and soothing, but who desperately wanted to improve their secret healing formula.

And while you’re listening to the story, I want you to pay attention not only to what happens to Bellawitch, but also to something happening to you, because without asking you to memorise anything, I’m going to give your brain characters, places, relationships, products and events to connect together.

And when the story finishes, we’ll come back to the candle.

I think you’ll notice something has changed.

THE POWER OF STORYTELLING

Now let’s return to those ten candles I placed on the imaginary table at the beginning.

Something has changed, hasn’t it?

Because one of those candles is no longer just a candle.

You now know the Candle of Connections.

And notice that I said know, not simply remember, because something much more interesting than simple product recognition has happened during the last few minutes.

You’ve been let in.

You now know things about this world that somebody who hasn’t heard the story doesn’t know, and in a strange way, you now share some of the same knowledge that we, the people who created this story and these characters, have been carrying around with us.

You’re no longer an outsider looking at a candle on a shelf.

You know Bellawitch Enchantino.

You know Veeno Bonovinotte.

You know that they weren’t simply two random characters brought together to sell you something, because they were childhood sweethearts whose families knew one another, and you know the story of that childhood adventure when Veeno secretly took his parents’ magic carpet, flew Bellawitch towards his father’s vineyard, crashed into a cypress tree and eventually pulled her out of the mud after she lost her boots.

So when you think about that flying carpet now, it isn’t just a flying carpet anymore.

You know what it means.

YOU KNOW VEENO AND BELLAWITCH

You know that Veeno had feelings for Bellawitch and that Bellawitch had feelings for him too, you know they had history together and you know that when Veeno arrived with that rare bottle of wine and Bellawitch looked at it and told him she was impressed because he’d brought his best bottle, that bottle wasn’t simply a prop sitting in somebody’s hand.

You know the wine too.

That’s important.

Because now Bonovinotte doesn’t sound like a meaningless name somebody invented and printed on a wine label.

You know where it comes from.

You know Veeno.

You know his family.

You know the vineyard.

You know that Bonovinotte wine belongs to this world and has its own history, its own meaning and its own relationship with the characters you’ve just spent time with.

And this is where the story has hooked you into the brand without stopping to sell the brand to you.

You have acquired knowledge about it.

You know the candle and you know the wine.

You know the people behind them.

You understand references that you wouldn’t have understood before hearing the story.

If somebody now mentions Veeno Bonovinotte, your mind has somewhere to go.

If somebody mentions Bellawitch Enchantino, you know who she is.

If somebody mentions the Candle of Connections, it means something.

And if somebody puts a bottle of Bonovinotte wine in front of you, you’re not meeting that name for the first time.

You’ve already met it through the story.

YOU’VE BEEN PULLED INSIDE THE BRAND

This is the part of storytelling that I think businesses sometimes miss.

The objective isn’t simply to tell an entertaining story and hope somebody remembers your company name somewhere along the way.

A good brand story pulls the audience inside until they start possessing knowledge about the brand that makes it feel familiar.

Think about what has happened.

At the beginning, if I’d said Veeno Bonovinotte, the name probably meant absolutely nothing to you.

Now it does.

If I’d said Bellawitch Enchantino, you wouldn’t have known who I was talking about.

Now you do.

If I’d mentioned a flying carpet, a vineyard, a magical bottle of Bonovinotte wine and the Candle of Connections, they would have been completely disconnected things.

Now they’re connected.

And those connections are sitting inside your memory.

That’s the hook.

You’ve been given enough knowledge to understand references that somebody outside the story wouldn’t understand, and that creates familiarity because you are no longer being introduced to the brand every time you encounter it.

You’re returning to somewhere you’ve already been.

YOU DON’T JUST KNOW THE CANDLE, YOU KNOW WHY IT EXISTS

And this is where the Candle of Connections becomes particularly interesting.

Before the story, I could have shown you a beautiful candle and told you that it was aromatic, soothing, therapeutic and luxurious.

Fine.

There are thousands of candles I could describe using exactly those words.

But now you know Bellawitch’s motivation.

You know about her family and her healing candles, you know about her desire to take something that was already aromatic, therapeutic and soothing and discover something much more powerful, and you understand why this candle belongs in her world.

So now the idea of connections has meaning.

The name isn’t simply marketing language anymore.

There’s something behind it.

And that’s a completely different relationship between a listener and a product.

YOU EVEN KNOW THE WINE

And perhaps the best demonstration of what has happened is the wine, because we’ve been talking about how storytelling can make a candle memorable and yet somehow, along the way, you’ve also got to know a wine.

I didn’t interrupt the story and say, “Right, now let me advertise Bonovinotte wine to you.”

I didn’t give you its price.

I didn’t list its features.

I didn’t give you a sales pitch.

The wine simply existed naturally inside the world you were experiencing.

You saw it connected to Veeno, to his family, to the vineyard, to Bellawitch and to their date.

So now, if I put an ordinary bottle of wine beside a bottle labelled Bonovinotte, one of those bottles already has something the other one doesn’t.

A memory.

The ordinary bottle has to introduce itself.

Bonovinotte doesn’t.

You’ve already met it.

THE VOICE BECOMES PART OF THE MEMORY

And there’s another element of this which I don’t want to overlook, because you haven’t merely been given characters and events through words on a page, you’ve heard them brought to life through the warm, heart-warming storytelling voice of Paulette Hallam.

Her voice becomes another layer of the memory because storytelling isn’t merely about words, it’s about rhythm, warmth, emotion, personality and the human voice carrying those characters into your imagination.

Years from now you may not remember every single sentence from this story, but you may remember Bellawitch, you may remember Veeno, you may remember their date, the flying carpet, the candle and the wine, and you may remember the warmth of the voice that brought all of those things together.

And that’s exactly the point.

FROM A PRODUCT TO A POINT OF REFERENCE

So let’s go back one final time to our original problem.

Whatever you sell, other people sell it too.

Your competitor may have the same features, they may use similar ingredients, they may have equally attractive packaging and they may even be cheaper than you.

But they cannot simply copy the place you’ve already created inside somebody’s memory.

Because now if somebody says Candle of Connections, your brain has somewhere to go.

Bellawitch is there.

Veeno is there.

The flying carpet is there.

The childhood memories are there.

The vineyard is there.

The date is there.

Bonovinotte wine is there.

Paulette’s voice is there.

The magic is there.

And the emotions created by all of those things are there.

Suddenly we’re no longer talking about a piece of wax with a wick running through the middle of it.

We’re talking about that candle.

The one you know.

The one from the story.

THAT IS THE POWER OF STORYTELLING

And that is the power of storytelling in branding, sales and marketing.

Features tell people what your product does, while stories give people something to attach that product to.

Features give people information to compare.

Stories give people something to remember.

And once people remember you, recognise you and understand the references surrounding your brand, you’ve created something much harder for a competitor to reproduce than another feature or another discount.

You’ve created a memorable point of reference in their mind.

So the next time you’re thinking about how to sell your product, perhaps don’t only ask yourself, “What features should I tell people about?”

Ask yourself a different question.

“What am I giving people to remember?”

Because before you heard this story, Bellawitch Enchantino, Veeno Bonovinotte, their flying carpet, their wine and the Candle of Connections may have meant absolutely nothing to you.

Now they do.

You know the characters.

You know the candle.

You even know the wine.

You have the same point of reference that we have when we talk about them, and we’ve managed to give you that without asking you to sit down and memorise a single feature.

Now imagine what storytelling could do for your brand.