You know your friends will look at it and you know that you’ll want to show it to them. In either case, you’re going to need to explain to them why you bought it. Why exactly did you spend more money than you needed to, for a product which solves a need that you could have cured for a more cost-effective price?

You can’t tell them that you bought it because you wanted it as a show of social status. That wouldn’t work.

So, you look for other reasons why you’ve bought this product. You need to tell your friends, colleagues and acquaintances something, after all. But, what do you say? You will probably craft a story. Maybe your story will hold up, or maybe it will have holes. In any case, a story / justification must be told. Maybe you could use some help in telling it …

Enter, the brand that sold it to you. Have a look at their landing page for their product. In almost all cases (that work), they’ve crafted a story for you to on-tell (or ‘on sell’). Something easy for you to pick up, grasp and apply to yourself. The best brands do this with a swathe of features and benefits which can be lightly related to almost anyone.

The one brand that has mastered this above all others? Apple.

Apple doesn’t tell you that they’ve now got 24nm architecture chips in their iPhones, they tell you that they load graphics up to ten times faster. Oh, look here! — you’ve now got a reason you bought it — “I just couldn’t stand waiting for Google Maps to load again.”

Apple’s iPhone has a new camera…again. But they’ve already run a global advertising campaign showing off images that were “Shot with iPhone” and were supposedly good enough for billboards. If the iPhone’s photos were good enough for billboards a few years back, then why would a simpleton like me need a phone with a camera even better than that? Because now it has portrait mode.

And now I can make an Animoji that matches my facial movements to those of an emoji. My golly — “I need to be able to take photos for my Instagram page in portrait with blurred backgrounds.”

The best brands tell stories, not specifics.Specifics are confusing to the layman.Stories are understood by all.

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