Ding! Attention shoppers. You cannot just buy things anymore. There has to be a meet-and-greet. Coffee? It now introduces itself with the life story of the bean, under the care of a third-generation farmer who whispered affirmations to the soil. Kurta? The cotton is long-fibre, sun-dried, moon-blessed, hand-spun, and stitched by a single mother re-entering the workforce. Bacon? It comes from Peppa Pig’s second cousin, raised on a farm with classical music and a mud spa. Even gym leggings have lore. The fibre stretches because science, but also because intention.
The ads, the packaging, the labels – everything is a teachable moment now. It’s like a video you can’t skip, because at the end, there’s an exam: “Please rate the product or service”. You have not even stood up yet or let something make a first impression, but you should share how the experience made you feel.
A lot of this comes from marketing’s recent obsession with feelings. Not yours, the brand’s. It commercialises guilt (“Didn’t choose the pricier sustainable option? You’re personally responsible for melting glaciers, choking turtles, and the imminent collapse of the planet”). It milks pity (“Not choosing Struggling Aunty pickles or Bootstrapped Start-up tote bag? You’re a heartless cheapskate”). And it shifts blame (Your driver today is the sole breadwinner in his family of five, don’t mind the surge pricing”). Or it’s a straight-up flex (“As Seen On Shark Tank, thus the premium cost”).
Varun Agarwal, 37, a Bengaluru-based marketing entrepreneur and author, says that storytelling is the main character because so many competing products look and feel the same. The reason it’s irking us is because the very stories that were meant to stand out now sound the same. “Every brand went all in,” he says. “Now the stories are indistinguishable.”
Besides, shoppers, your browsing history is literally a record of every shopping site you browsed. It follows you like a stalker with a Jio connection, with personalised ads and pop-up notifications. Check out a brand once and it will remind you about it forever. As Agarwal puts it, feedback can be useful, but “if you bombard people, they block you. Or they stop buying”.
For small businesses, a good brand story is the difference between riding the current moment and drowning in obscurity. “Every business needs advertising, but every marketing campaign doesn’t need a lot of money,” says Mumbai-based pastry chef Sarah Patka, 32, who has run her confectionery brand solo for over a decade. The key is not how loudly you tell your story, but who you are telling it to. Some customers genuinely want in on the journey. Others just want dessert.
“If the product isn’t good, no amount of storytelling can help,” Patka says. Sob stories and pity parties get customers to try a product, not return to it over and over. It’s why so many content creators are surprised that their line of wellness supplements/ skincare potions/ weightloss plans/ snake oils don’t make it past the discovery stage. The glowing recommendation, the gushy endorsement, the before-and-after Reel, the “OMG, you guys” reviews only go so far. Because who wants a cacophony of fairy tales forever after?
