"For sale. Baby shoes. Never worn."

What's the story? #1 - why storytelling will always be the key to building great brands.

Anybody who calls themselves a writer – and lots of people who don’t - have probably heard the story. True or not, it goes something like this.

Ernest Hemingway was sitting in a bar one night soaking up daiquiris, with his fellow-writer and bullfighting buddies, when one of them bet him $10 that he couldn’t write the shortest story ever told.

He whipped out his pen, and on a napkin scribbled: "For sale. Baby shoes. Never worn."

It was around a hundred years before social media, but Hemingway understood it better than anybody. Because social media is just a channel to tell a story. And the story is what matters, whatever the media.

Great storytelling isn’t just putting words, or ideas, together that seem to make sense. You need to say something that grabs your audience emotionally, paints a bigger picture, punches them in the gut, or tickles their funny bone. Connect with them on human level, in a way AI alone can’t.

It is what sets great brands apart, and what so much “content” generated today has lost. And when you lose that, you lose your customers.