Most briefs arrive with a product that has no natural claim on attention. The category is established, the benefit is functional, and the audience has already decided how interested they are. These tactics don't try to manufacture interest from scratch — they borrow it. A story structure, a genre, a cultural ritual that arrives pre-loaded with the emotion the brief needs. The audience is already inside it before the product appears.
Here are five tactics from the Storytelling Engine that borrow the world to sell the point.
- Rewrite the fairy tale to prove the brand truth
- Turn the problem into a horror story
- Frame the benefit as a mission
- Use the training montage
- Disguise the truth as entertainment
1. Rewrite the Fairy Tale
Take a story structure the audience already knows — and twist it to prove the brand truth.
For Adults — Heinz, Wieden+Kennedy, 2022
Heinz needed to sell a No Sugar Added Ketchup without slipping into worthy health-speak. Wieden+Kennedy's answer: reverse the fairy tale. Instead of treating adulthood as a happy ending, the animated film shows it as the point where the fantasy collapses — bills, bad days, the slow indignity of real life. The product becomes one of the few small wins that survive the disillusionment. A functional reformulation became a culturally legible story about adulting. The fairy tale logic did the emotional work that a rational claim never could.
Volkswagen's Fairy Tales in Reverse retold classic stories backwards to dramatise the danger of reversing without a camera — using iconic narratives as a metaphor for product utility. The story structure became the product argument.
