Brand storytelling isn’t a nice-to-have add-on to your marketing. It’s the difference between a reader who scrolls past your services list and one who remembers you weeks later. A Stanford marketing professor has put a number on something I’ve been telling clients for nearly twenty years: your story does more work than your services list ever will.
The research behind it
The number is 22. Jennifer Aaker’s research at Stanford found that a story can be remembered up to 22 times more than facts or figures on their own.
That’s not a minor edge. It means the paragraph on your website listing what you offer is almost certainly the least memorable thing on the page. The case study underneath it, the one with a real person and a real problem, is doing the heavy lifting.
Why it beats a services list
Memorability is only part of it. The stories people tell about you shape whether they’d hire you, buy from you, or simply like you. A services list can inform someone. It can’t make them feel anything, and feeling is what gets remembered, repeated, and referred on.
So the bit of your business that you’ve squeezed into a tidy list of bullet points is probably the least memorable thing about you.
Two things to steal straight away
You don’t have to be the hero. Your client can be the main character, with something at stake and a journey to get through, and you show up as the person who helped. That’s good news if talking about yourself makes you cringe.
Start with where you want the reader to land. Not what you want to say, but what you want them to think, feel or do by the end. It’s a much better filter than “does this sound good?”
It also explains why “we offer X, Y and Z” slides straight off people. Nothing’s at stake, and nobody’s going anywhere.
Why you can’t always see your own story
There’s a catch. When you’re too close to your own story, it’s hard to see which part will land. You know every detail, but you can’t tell which one actually means something to the person reading it.
This is true even when the material is obviously good. I found this out on my own camping trip. I’d written “camping takeaway” in my content calendar before we left, convinced I’d come home with an easy post. I came home with half a dozen moments, and no idea which one was actually worth writing about.
That’s exactly what my clients describe when they try to write about their own business. The story is there. The angle isn’t obvious from the inside.
Where I come in
This is the bit I do for clients: ask the right questions, spot the moment that makes people sit up, and turn it into something you’d actually want to hit publish on.
If you’ve got a business full of good stories you can’t quite see the shape of, that’s exactly the kind of thing I love digging into. Get in touch and let’s find yours.
