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Imagine sitting down at a restaurant.
Not just any restaurant, one like the one in Ratatouille. Parisian, candlelit, delicate piano dancing in between the smells. You order the house special. You’re expecting magic. A story on a plate.
But when the waiter returns, they set down a tray of raw ingredients. A sack of flour. A pat of butter. A sprig of thyme. A raw aubergine.
“Bon appétit,” they say, with a satisfied smile.
Technically, they’ve given you everything. All the components of something great. But it’s not a meal. It’s a list.
What’s missing is what Remy understood better than most humans. There’s zero craft. No care. The ability to take simple ingredients and turn them into something more.
Because food, like story, isn’t just about what goes in. It’s about what comes out. What it makes you feel. That’s where many brands go wrong.
They’ve found their thread, the truth, the spark of something real. But they stop there. They hand it over raw, expecting people to do the rest.
This article is about what happens next.
How to take that thread and weave it into something worth tasting, remembering, and feeling. Because having a story isn’t the same as telling one. And telling a story isn’t the same as making someone care.
Too Many Words, Not Enough Storytelling
Let’s zoom out for a second. If we took a shot every time we heard the word “storytelling” in a marketing pitch or agency case study, we’d be sozzled before the strategy slide and someone would have to carry us home.
Everyone’s doing storytelling now. Every Instagram grid, every brand film, every investor deck is supposedly a story. But so much of it falls flat.
Why? Because too much of what people call storytelling is really just noise. Shiny, well-shot, perfectly keyworded – but empty on the inside.
We’ve all seen the rebrand that swaps real insight for empty statements. “We believe in tomorrow.”
And the launch video that tells you what the product does but never why you should care.
Then there’s the well-meaning purpose pledge that gets applause at a shareholder meeting but means nothing to the people living the story outside the boardroom.
It’s not that these ingredients are bad. It’s that they’re raw. Undercooked. Dumped on the table instead of being made into a meal.
Meanwhile, audiences are savvier than ever. They’ve been burned by greenwashing, bored by same-same-slogans, numbed by noise. They can smell a bingo-card purpose from miles off.
Add in shorter attention spans, infinite scroll, and endless videos of dogs doing silly things and the bar for making someone pause is high. The bar for making them care is higher.
And yet, the brands that get storytelling right don’t shout louder. They don’t pile on more noise. They weave stories with care. They don’t just get seen – they get felt.
From Thread To Fabric
So how do we tell stories that make people care?
It’s taking the thread of an idea (if you don’t know what I’m talking about, go back and read the first article of this series, Finding the Thread) and turning it into a fabric. Something layered. Structured. Designed to wrap around the person who picks it up.
Threads are insights, truths, tensions. Fabric is what you make from them. Fabric has weight. Texture. Warmth. And most importantly, it holds together when you pull at it.
You can do this with three deceptively simple questions:
- Who is it for?
- What do you want them to feel?
- What are you really saying?
Who Is It For?
The question sounds basic, but watch how many brands get it wrong. If the story you write is about the brand, you’ve likely missed the point. A monologue doesn’t hold attention. A mirror does.
Look at Dove’s Real Beauty. That campaign didn’t start with soap. It started with an uncomfortable insight – the beauty industry profits off women feeling bad about themselves. So Dove flipped the mirror. They told stories about mothers and daughters, friends and strangers. They showed real skin, soft bellies, stretch marks.
Empathy isn’t soft. It’s design. It shapes the story you tell, the words you choose, the visuals you use, and the medium you pick. A thread can be true, but a fabric only holds if it fits the person it’s meant to cover.
What Do You Want Them To feel?
Information is cheap. Emotion is gold. Stories don’t persuade through facts alone. They linger because they hit somewhere deeper – your pride, your fear, your joy, your defiance.
Liquid Death are great at this. They don’t just sell canned water, they sell the feeling of gleeful rebellion. Their whole story is one big middle finger to plastic bottles, bland branding, and boring health talk.
When you drink a can, you’re murdering your thirst. Their ads drip with irreverence, fake horror movie trailers, tattoo parlours, punk gigs. The emotion is what sells it. Consumers feel like they’re in on the joke, part of a club that doesn’t take itself too seriously (all by choosing one can of water over another).
What Are You Really Saying?
Threads tangle when brands try to say everything. A good storyteller knows how to say (and keep saying) one thing on repeat. Brands don’t need consumers to remember swathes of information. They just need that one hook that’s going to land. So ask yourself, if you can only make your audience remember one thing, one feeling, what should it be?
Take Hiut Denim Co. They make jeans. But they have mastered the single idea behind the brand. Boiled it down to its most simple form. “We’re bringing jeans making back to Cardigan.”
Hiut Denim Co is based in a tiny town in Wales that lost one of its biggest factories – so many people’s livelihoods – when production went overseas. Hiut Denmin Co bought the factory and re-employed people. Every pair of jeans, every swing tag, every line on their site echoes that story: do one thing well, keep our town working.
It’s clear enough to stick and strong enough to pass on. Clarity isn’t about dumbing down. It’s about giving your audience a story they can carry, repeat, and claim as their own.
Techniques for Making People Care
So far, you’ve got your raw threads and the right questions to start turning them into something bigger. You know who you’re weaving for, what you want them to feel, and what you’re really saying.
But knowing it isn’t enough.
This is where craft takes over. The part where you spin those threads into a fabric strong enough to hold together, and warm enough to keep people coming back to it. Because great brand stories are meticulously designed. They follow simple but sharp principles that turn ideas into sticky, memorable, and effective narratives.
Here are a few practical “rules of weave” to guide you when it’s time to sit down and craft stories.
- Keep it simple
No one wants a story that’s all plot twists and no payoff. Less is more. Strip the jargon, kill the slides full of buzzwords. Get to the heart.
Think about Airbnb. “Belong Anywhere” is clean and repeatable. It’s also steeped in meaning.
- Show, don’t sermon
Purpose is worthless if you just shout it. Show it. Guinness told the story of a wheelchair basketball team, brothers who took turns sitting in the chair so their friend never had to play alone. They didn’t say “we believe in friendship.” They showed it.
- Echo the audience’s world
Stories travel better when they feel familiar. Spotify Wrapped works because it’s not about Spotify – it’s about you. Your year. Your soundtrack. It’s simple, shareable, and so personal you want the world to see it.
- Surprise without losing sense
Surprise is sticky. Remember the Old Spice guy? Or the Cadbury gorilla drumming to Phil Collins? Pure nonsense on paper, but perfectly woven into brands that didn’t take themselves too seriously. Surprise works because it’s a friction point, a little delightful snag that keeps you from scrolling past.
- Give people credit
Resist the urge to explain every pixel. Good stories give people space to find themselves in them. It’s the difference between a movie that makes you cry and a PowerPoint that tells you how you should feel.
- Have a strategy to back it up
A great story is only as strong as the context you drop it into. Where will it live? When will it show up? How will it bend and flex to meet the moment?
Think about the cultural moments your audience cares about – what seasonal, social, or emotional peaks do they gather around? Where does your story belong? A film, a tweet, a stage, a supermarket aisle? Good stories don’t vanish after launch day. They show up again and again, in the places and times your audience is most ready to feel them.
Make Them Care
In the end, storytelling isn’t magic. It comes down to craft and care. Are we willing to put the time in to build a story that has depth, meaning and emotion at its core?
The best brand stories aren’t the loudest or the longest – they’re the ones that sit on our chests and scratch out a little recess in our heads. The ones we share because they made us feel something real, even if just for a few moments.
Remy’s ratatouille didn’t just satisfy the critic’s hunger. It fed his soul. It reminded him he was human.
A good brand story can do the same. So yes, start by finding your thread. Dig for the truth, the tension, the transformation. But don’t stop there, or you’ll waste what you’ve found.
Take your thread and weave it. Shape it. Wrap it around the people who need to feel it most. That’s how you tell stories that people actually care about.
This article is the second in a three-part series called The Fabric of Story. You can read the first one here.
The series is written by Sam Lightfinch, a brand story strategist and the birdbrain who founded Lovebirds. Lovebirds is a story studio that works with organisations to tell the stories that make people care. Sam also writes a Substack called Stories With Heart.
Imagine sitting down at a restaurant.
Not just any restaurant, one like the one in Ratatouille. Parisian, candlelit, delicate piano dancing in between the smells. You order the house special. You’re expecting magic. A story on a plate.
But when the waiter returns, they set down a tray of raw ingredients. A sack of flour. A pat of butter. A sprig of thyme. A raw aubergine.
“Bon appétit,” they say, with a satisfied smile.
Technically, they’ve given you everything. All the components of something great. But it’s not a meal. It’s a list.
What’s missing is what Remy understood better than most humans. There’s zero craft. No care. The ability to take simple ingredients and turn them into something more.
Because food, like story, isn’t just about what goes in. It’s about what comes out. What it makes you feel. That’s where many brands go wrong.
They’ve found their thread, the truth, the spark of something real. But they stop there. They hand it over raw, expecting people to do the rest.
This article is about what happens next.
How to take that thread and weave it into something worth tasting, remembering, and feeling. Because having a story isn’t the same as telling one. And telling a story isn’t the same as making someone care.
Too Many Words, Not Enough Storytelling
Let’s zoom out for a second. If we took a shot every time we heard the word “storytelling” in a marketing pitch or agency case study, we’d be sozzled before the strategy slide and someone would have to carry us home.
Everyone’s doing storytelling now. Every Instagram grid, every brand film, every investor deck is supposedly a story. But so much of it falls flat.
Why? Because too much of what people call storytelling is really just noise. Shiny, well-shot, perfectly keyworded – but empty on the inside.
We’ve all seen the rebrand that swaps real insight for empty statements. “We believe in tomorrow.”
And the launch video that tells you what the product does but never why you should care.
Then there’s the well-meaning purpose pledge that gets applause at a shareholder meeting but means nothing to the people living the story outside the boardroom.
It’s not that these ingredients are bad. It’s that they’re raw. Undercooked. Dumped on the table instead of being made into a meal.
Meanwhile, audiences are savvier than ever. They’ve been burned by greenwashing, bored by same-same-slogans, numbed by noise. They can smell a bingo-card purpose from miles off.
Add in shorter attention spans, infinite scroll, and endless videos of dogs doing silly things and the bar for making someone pause is high. The bar for making them care is higher.
And yet, the brands that get storytelling right don’t shout louder. They don’t pile on more noise. They weave stories with care. They don’t just get seen – they get felt.
From Thread To Fabric
So how do we tell stories that make people care?
It’s taking the thread of an idea (if you don’t know what I’m talking about, go back and read the first article of this series, Finding the Thread) and turning it into a fabric. Something layered. Structured. Designed to wrap around the person who picks it up.
Threads are insights, truths, tensions. Fabric is what you make from them. Fabric has weight. Texture. Warmth. And most importantly, it holds together when you pull at it.
You can do this with three deceptively simple questions:
- Who is it for?
- What do you want them to feel?
- What are you really saying?
Who Is It For?
The question sounds basic, but watch how many brands get it wrong. If the story you write is about the brand, you’ve likely missed the point. A monologue doesn’t hold attention. A mirror does.
Look at Dove’s Real Beauty. That campaign didn’t start with soap. It started with an uncomfortable insight – the beauty industry profits off women feeling bad about themselves. So Dove flipped the mirror. They told stories about mothers and daughters, friends and strangers. They showed real skin, soft bellies, stretch marks.
Empathy isn’t soft. It’s design. It shapes the story you tell, the words you choose, the visuals you use, and the medium you pick. A thread can be true, but a fabric only holds if it fits the person it’s meant to cover.
What Do You Want Them To feel?
Information is cheap. Emotion is gold. Stories don’t persuade through facts alone. They linger because they hit somewhere deeper – your pride, your fear, your joy, your defiance.
Liquid Death are great at this. They don’t just sell canned water, they sell the feeling of gleeful rebellion. Their whole story is one big middle finger to plastic bottles, bland branding, and boring health talk.
When you drink a can, you’re murdering your thirst. Their ads drip with irreverence, fake horror movie trailers, tattoo parlours, punk gigs. The emotion is what sells it. Consumers feel like they’re in on the joke, part of a club that doesn’t take itself too seriously (all by choosing one can of water over another).
What Are You Really Saying?
Threads tangle when brands try to say everything. A good storyteller knows how to say (and keep saying) one thing on repeat. Brands don’t need consumers to remember swathes of information. They just need that one hook that’s going to land. So ask yourself, if you can only make your audience remember one thing, one feeling, what should it be?
Take Hiut Denim Co. They make jeans. But they have mastered the single idea behind the brand. Boiled it down to its most simple form. “We’re bringing jeans making back to Cardigan.”
Hiut Denim Co is based in a tiny town in Wales that lost one of its biggest factories – so many people’s livelihoods – when production went overseas. Hiut Denmin Co bought the factory and re-employed people. Every pair of jeans, every swing tag, every line on their site echoes that story: do one thing well, keep our town working.
It’s clear enough to stick and strong enough to pass on. Clarity isn’t about dumbing down. It’s about giving your audience a story they can carry, repeat, and claim as their own.
Techniques for Making People Care
So far, you’ve got your raw threads and the right questions to start turning them into something bigger. You know who you’re weaving for, what you want them to feel, and what you’re really saying.
But knowing it isn’t enough.
This is where craft takes over. The part where you spin those threads into a fabric strong enough to hold together, and warm enough to keep people coming back to it. Because great brand stories are meticulously designed. They follow simple but sharp principles that turn ideas into sticky, memorable, and effective narratives.
Here are a few practical “rules of weave” to guide you when it’s time to sit down and craft stories.
- Keep it simple
No one wants a story that’s all plot twists and no payoff. Less is more. Strip the jargon, kill the slides full of buzzwords. Get to the heart.
Think about Airbnb. “Belong Anywhere” is clean and repeatable. It’s also steeped in meaning.
- Show, don’t sermon
Purpose is worthless if you just shout it. Show it. Guinness told the story of a wheelchair basketball team, brothers who took turns sitting in the chair so their friend never had to play alone. They didn’t say “we believe in friendship.” They showed it.
- Echo the audience’s world
Stories travel better when they feel familiar. Spotify Wrapped works because it’s not about Spotify – it’s about you. Your year. Your soundtrack. It’s simple, shareable, and so personal you want the world to see it.
- Surprise without losing sense
Surprise is sticky. Remember the Old Spice guy? Or the Cadbury gorilla drumming to Phil Collins? Pure nonsense on paper, but perfectly woven into brands that didn’t take themselves too seriously. Surprise works because it’s a friction point, a little delightful snag that keeps you from scrolling past.
- Give people credit
Resist the urge to explain every pixel. Good stories give people space to find themselves in them. It’s the difference between a movie that makes you cry and a PowerPoint that tells you how you should feel.
- Have a strategy to back it up
A great story is only as strong as the context you drop it into. Where will it live? When will it show up? How will it bend and flex to meet the moment?
Think about the cultural moments your audience cares about – what seasonal, social, or emotional peaks do they gather around? Where does your story belong? A film, a tweet, a stage, a supermarket aisle? Good stories don’t vanish after launch day. They show up again and again, in the places and times your audience is most ready to feel them.
Make Them Care
In the end, storytelling isn’t magic. It comes down to craft and care. Are we willing to put the time in to build a story that has depth, meaning and emotion at its core?
The best brand stories aren’t the loudest or the longest – they’re the ones that sit on our chests and scratch out a little recess in our heads. The ones we share because they made us feel something real, even if just for a few moments.
Remy’s ratatouille didn’t just satisfy the critic’s hunger. It fed his soul. It reminded him he was human.
A good brand story can do the same. So yes, start by finding your thread. Dig for the truth, the tension, the transformation. But don’t stop there, or you’ll waste what you’ve found.
Take your thread and weave it. Shape it. Wrap it around the people who need to feel it most. That’s how you tell stories that people actually care about.
This article is the second in a three-part series called The Fabric of Story. You can read the first one here.
The series is written by Sam Lightfinch, a brand story strategist and the birdbrain who founded Lovebirds. Lovebirds is a story studio that works with organisations to tell the stories that make people care. Sam also writes a Substack called Stories With Heart.
