I came of age as a creative director during my years working at Arnold in Boston. It was there I learned, amongst other things, that there was more to our end of the business than just a great idea. That clients bought as much into the people as the idea they were presenting. And that even a perfectly self-evident brilliant idea still needed a story behind it to sell.

Another way of thinking about it would be that in addition to the “what” of the big idea one had to sell the “who” the people whose idea it was and the “why” reason it is a good idea in order to really get people to buy in.

I mention my time at Arnold because I was there in the heyday of their great and powerful ‘brand essence’ movement. Led by Fran Kelly, embodied in the VW work, and central to just about every new business pitch, strategy doc or even elevator conversation we were the agency of BRAND ESSENCE. And it worked. It was wildly successful.

At the heart of it all was the idea that brands have a rational meaning and an emotional meaning in the lives of consumers. Like in VW it was rational – affordable German engineering – and emotional – ‘drivers wanted’ with a very psychologically loaded definition of what who and what a driver is.

Brand Essence was the Kool-Aid they were serving and I drank deeply of it. But in the back of my mind I always had an unspoken, and probably heretical, idea about the rational/emotional framework. At some point, I realized that the rational part of the equation was there to sell the client on the idea and the emotional was truly the means of connection our work provided between our clients and their consumers.

I believe that the current focus on story and narrative are an affirmation of my earlier thinking. No one I’ve ever known has found a braggart convincing, appealing or even tolerable.

Furthermore, people are irrational. They don’t live their lives based on facts. Our feelings and emotions are at the heart of our decisions. Looking at your own life can probably prove this true to you but if not there are numerous books to turn to. Dan Ariely’s Predictably Irrational, Daniel Kahneman's Thinking Fast and Slow and most recently Robert McKee and Tom Gerace’s Stroynomics.

People like to like the things that are in their lives. Stories help them do that. Facts, not so much. Facts can help us rationalize why we like something but they’re not great at making people actually feel anything.

Back when TV ruled and commercials could interrupt people’s lives, stuffing communications with facts brought some effect. But even then, commercials that actually told stories were the ones that really made a difference.

And today with endless channels of communication, ad blocking, social sharing and all that, most marketers don’t even have the means to force feed a bunch of facts to anyone.

Story is the way. Emotional connection is the means. And although the state of things today have made understanding this imperative, it has always, always been the truth.