For most of my career, I worked with brands that many Australians would recognise. I spent years helping build stories around products that sat in supermarket trolleys and on family tables. Whether it was fruit products, tissues, sparkling wine or some of the country’s best-known consumer brands, the common thread was never the product itself. It was the story.
Watch the whole recording here.
When I started my own business in 2016, I experienced something many founders discover the hard way. You can do excellent work. You can deliver outstanding results. You can care deeply about your clients. Yet people still struggle to understand why they should choose you. That is not a capability problem. It is a story problem.
One of the biggest misconceptions in business is that people choose us because of our features, credentials, systems or processes. Those things matter, but they are rarely the reason someone remembers us. The businesses people talk about are not always the biggest, the cheapest or even the most technically capable. They are the ones that create stories worth repeating.
I use the word “remarkable” very deliberately. A remarkable business is not simply a good business. It is a business that people choose to remark about. People tell stories about your business whether you want them to or not. The real question is whether those stories are the ones you intended them to tell.
A few years ago, I found myself in the middle of one of the most difficult periods of my life. My mother had passed away, life felt chaotic, and I made the very rational decision to run away overseas for six weeks. In preparation for that trip, I decided I needed new luggage. After researching my options, I settled on July.
When I arrived at the store, it was closed. I was short on time and frustrated. A store manager noticed me waiting outside and, despite not being due to open for another hour, decided to let me in. I bought the luggage immediately.
A few days later, I discovered a minor issue with the backpack. The company offered to exchange it without hesitation. When I returned, the same store manager greeted me by name. During that visit, I was introduced to one of the founders. It turned out someone had seen a LinkedIn comment I’d made about the brand and shared it with him.
That interaction could have ended there. Instead, it became the beginning of a relationship. Over time, there were more conversations, more positive experiences and more small moments that reinforced how the brand operated. Months later, I ran into the founders unexpectedly at a café. We had a chat, went back to our breakfasts and, when it came time to pay the bill, discovered they had quietly covered it for us.
None of those moments were particularly expensive. None required a massive marketing budget. But together they created something incredibly powerful. They created emotional connection.
Today, I recommend July luggage constantly. I talk about it online. I tell people about my experiences. Someone once asked me how much the company paid me to say nice things about them. The answer was nothing. I became a brand ambassador entirely through a series of thoughtful interactions.
That is what stories do. They turn customers into advocates.
What fascinates me is that this process is deeply human. We like to believe we make rational decisions, but neuroscience tells us otherwise. Facts and figures are processed by the brain, but stories activate emotion. They make us feel something. Once emotion is involved, our brains pay attention.
Only after that emotional connection is established do we begin looking for logical reasons to justify our decision.
Think about your own buying decisions. Chances are you have chosen suppliers, advisers, restaurants, products or service providers because something about their story resonated with you. The logic came later. The emotional response came first.
This matters more than ever because businesses no longer control their brands the way they once did. When I first started in marketing, companies largely controlled the information that reached customers. Today, brands exist within an ecosystem of conversations, reviews, recommendations, comments and shared experiences.
Every interaction contributes to the story people tell about you.
I often see examples of this in businesses that have nothing to do with consumer marketing. One example shared during the session came from a construction business. Faced with a project that was heading towards significant failure, the team made the difficult decision to stop work, bring everyone together and challenge the established process. It would have been easier to continue and avoid responsibility. Instead, they took a risk, spoke up and helped save the client an enormous amount of money.
The real story was not about the process. It was about courage, integrity and doing the right thing when it would have been easier not to.
Another example came from a marketing consultant who helped a luxury home builder reverse years of declining sales. The eventual success was impressive, but the story that resonated was the discovery process. By taking the time to understand what customers actually valued, they uncovered that craftsmanship and attention to detail were the true differentiators. Once those insights became the foundation of the brand story, everything changed.
In both examples, the emotional truth sat beneath the technical details.
This is why facts inform, but stories transform.
Stories also accelerate trust. Many people think of marketing as a funnel where prospects gradually move from awareness to purchase. I see it differently. To me, it resembles a mountain. People need to move from awareness to trust, from trust to preference, from preference to loyalty and eventually to advocacy.
Stories shorten that journey.
When people see themselves in your stories, they feel connected to your business much faster than they would through features, credentials or technical specifications alone.
So how do we create stories people actually want to repeat?
The first step is to stop explaining what you do and start explaining why it matters. People connect with purpose far more readily than process.
The second is to replace facts with moments. Facts are forgettable. Moments are memorable. A single interaction, a challenge overcome, a customer helped or a problem solved often says more about your business than a hundred capability statements.
The third is to create experiences so meaningful that people cannot help but talk about them. The most powerful marketing often happens after the interaction has finished, when someone shares the story with somebody else.
As founders and business owners, we often overlook our best stories because they feel ordinary to us. We are too close to them. Yet those stories are often the very things that make us different.
If you are struggling to stand out, it may not be because you need a better website, a new logo or a bigger marketing budget. It may simply be that you have not yet uncovered the story that only your business can tell.
Take a moment to think about the interactions, decisions and experiences that have shaped your business. Think about the moments when you went above and beyond, when you solved a problem nobody else would touch, when you protected a client, supported a team member or made a difficult decision because it was the right thing to do.
Those are the stories people remember.
Those are the stories people repeat.
And those are the stories that turn a good business into a remarkable one.
If this has sparked an idea or reminded you of a story you’ve been overlooking, I encourage you to explore it. You may discover that the most powerful marketing asset your business has is something you’ve already lived. The challenge now is finding it, shaping it and sharing it with the people who need to hear it.