What Santa Taught Me About Storytelling.

When I was 13 years old, my mom sat me down and told me Father Christmas wasn't real.

I didn't believe her. Okay,13? I know. A little late to the party. But, to be fair, I had a wild imagination and a very strong belief that magic is real. So when my mom finally sat me down and told me that Father Christmas wasn’t real, I just didn’t believe her. Not for a second.

I could have sworn I'd heard the reindeer on the roof. I heard the bells on Santa's boots. I knew what I saw. I knew what I heard. And there was absolutely no way my mother was going to convince me otherwise.

Looking back, I think that's one of the best lessons I've ever had about the power of a great story.

Because a really good story doesn't feel like a story. It feels real. It pulls you in so completely that, for a moment, you stop questioning it. You don't analyse it. You don't pick it apart. You just believe.

A great story, when it’s really good, makes you feel like you're not being told a story. You feel like you're inside it. You see it. You hear it. You feel it. You believe it.

That's what brand storytelling can do.

I think we sometimes forget this when we talk about brands and businesses. We get so caught up in the strategy. The messaging. The campaign objectives. The deliverables. The content calendar. The algorithm.

But before any of that, there's a human being on the other side of the screen. And humans have been telling stories forever. We remember the story our grandmother told us. The movie that broke our heart. The book we couldn't put down. The advert we can still recite years later. The person who told us something at exactly the right moment and somehow changed the way we saw the world.

We don't necessarily remember the facts.

We remember how something made us feel.

Humans have always been wired for stories. Long before we had advertising, social media or screens, we were sitting around fires telling each other stories. We passed down lessons through stories. We made sense of the world through stories. We imagined different lives through stories.

And honestly, the best brands understand that.

They don't just tell you what they're selling. They give you something to imagine. A feeling. A world. A version of yourself you want to become. Something you want to be part of.

The brands I remember aren't necessarily the ones with the cleverest tagline or the most impressive campaign deck. They're the ones that made me feel something.

And maybe that's what my 13-year-old self understood before I ever knew anything about marketing. I didn't need evidence that Father Christmas existed; the story was enough for me to believe.

Every year, my mom told me the story of Father Christmas. She told me how he would arrive in the middle of the night, how he'd quietly enter the house, quickly drop off our presents and then hurry off to the next house because he had to get to every child in the world before the sun came up.

She explained that's the reason why we had to be asleep early on Christmas Eve. Because if Father Christmas found us awake, he'd skip our house (and girl, I wasn't about to risk missing out on every present on my Christmas list)

She told me that story every year, and I believed every word of it.

So when she eventually sat me down and told me Father Christmas wasn't real, of course I didn't believe her.

I'd already heard the bells.

I'd already heard the reindeer.

I'd already built and envisioned the entire story in my head.

And that's the power of a great story.