Once upon a brand
Emotional storytelling in Property & Interiors
The world is noisy, fast and gloriously unpredictable - full of twists our brains were never designed to compute in real time. If we tried to analyse every decision in forensic detail we’d simply grind to a halt, paralysed by the sheer cognitive admin of being alive!
Humans instinctively rely on stories because the alternative is mental overload. We use narratives to impose shape on uncertainty, assign meaning and to help us choose - without combusting under the pressure of infinite variables!
Property and interior shoppers are navigating similar - if less existential - forms of uncertainty: choosing something within budget, shifting trends, overwhelming choice. A clear narrative is the one thing that can help them cut through, bring into focus who a brand is, what it stands for, and whether or not it feels right for them - far faster than any list of product features could.
Stories matter even more in our category because they’re naturally loaded with emotio,n and so too are the spaces that surround us. Somehow, the places we inhabit are particularly emotionally loaded. Think about your garden, your bedroom or your kitchen - how does it make you feel? Does it make you feel warm or secure? Perhaps you might have negative associations with a particular place? But I bet those spaces make you feel something?
The link between emotion and storytelling
Stories are more memorable than unconnected facts, that’s because we emphatically experience information, we don't just ‘see it’. Emotional cues activate the brain’s fast, intuitive processing. This is the part responsible for memory, recall and gut decisions. Emotional stories are remembered longer, understood faster and felt more deeply.
And this is exactly what brands can tap into.
When a brand tells emotionally resonant stories consistently, people begin to form strong associations: familiarity, safety, excitement, aspiration or belonging. These feelings become mental shortcuts. Over time, they develop into attachments - the sense that “this brand is part of my world”.
And once that attachment forms, decision-making becomes much more instinctive. People stop reassessing every option and instead rely on the emotional memory the brand has already built.
How this translates to emotional marketing
Facts, features and craftsmanship absolutely have value. In property and interiors, they can even be the foundation of a purchase but on their own they don’t shift behaviour. A list like “solid oak construction” or “precision joinery” does say something important, but it only connects when it’s translated into a narrative. For example, it could be woven into a story about trustworthy durability which supports moments of life. Unless you align your facts with meaning and emotion, you risk sounding like everyone else.
Our work with Stannah is an example of how storytelling can elevate positioning and performance. While trusted by an older generation, Stannah realised younger audiences (its future customers) lacked the same emotional connection. We led with narrative, not price or features, translating Stannah’s strengths into meaningful moments, independence and family rituals. Short cues such as “enjoy the life upstairs” reframed stairlifts and homelifts as enhancers of life, not limitations. Over 90% of respondents said they were more likely to consider the products after seeing the campaign, broader home-lift recognition reached 86%, and paid media efficiency also improved on reduced spend.
Cwtch Haus is an independent bespoke kitchen, bathroom and bedroom specialist in west Wales. When Adam Jones joined the business, he had seen firsthand in his advertising career how brand-led, insight-driven marketing consistently outperformed tactics-first approaches. But he was struck by how little of that thinking was being applied to the kitchen, bedrooms and bathroom industry - and how much opportunity there was for a brand willing to take a different approach.
So that’s what they did. Cwtch House aligned itself to something deeper than “buying cabinets and an island unit”.
People might want a new kitchen, but emotionally, they are looking for more than that.
“They want the backdrop to life’s most meaningful moments,” Adam says.
That statement became the foundation of the brand’s narrative. Rather than leading with materials or technical features, Cwtch Haus framed its work around family, belonging and the feeling of home, expressed consistently through language, imagery and customer experience.
Since adopting this approach, Cwtch Haus has delivered significant growth across turnover, profit and lead generation.
Emotional marketing pays the bills
Emotion is where the commercial benefits lie. When a brand taps into how a space could make someone feel, it becomes easier to hold price, to stand apart in a crowded market and to build loyalty. A story becomes the vehicle for that emotional connection.
You may think emotion is all about the warm mushy stuff but actually, the cold hard facts prove it works.
Orlando Wood’s 2012 paper, How emotion tugs trump rational pushes, tested 18 TV ads from well-known brands that had appeared in the IPA Effectiveness Awards database. These ads were chosen because they were already ‘good’, but some performed much better in the real world than others. The study found that:
Emotional response consistently predicted real-world business effects
Emotional ads drove more profit growth
Emotional response was strongly predictive of efficiency
So the ads with lower emotional scores - those with clear, specific messages, relied on persuasion, cut-through, message recall and brand linkage performed the worst.
The barriers of getting emotional
So should we all rush out and “just make something emotional”?
*Click fingers.* Job done.
In practice, it’s a bit trickier. Emotion is powerful, but not always logical. If the story a brand tells doesn’t connect emotionally with what its audience already believes, wants, or intuitively feels, it will fall flat.
Home and interior brands are comfortable (overly so, in our experience) investing in paid media because they can track the uplift. But they’re much less confident in commissioning market research to feed an emotional marketing campaign. The fears we hear most are: poorly gathered insights, spending money on research that is misread, landing on a narrative that doesn’t resonate or unintentionally weakening the emotional cues that were meant to make the investment worthwhile in the first place.
Do your research
If you think you can build emotional campaigns without research, then frankly, you’re just winging it. Market research is an investment in your brand’s storytelling capabilities and, therefore a de-risking mechanism. Spending £10k on proper insights will protect the £100k to £250k that follows in creative, production and media. Campaign budgets escalate quickly when you add shoots, film, styling, distribution and paid amplification. Research ensures fewer assumptions, better emotional coherence, and less wasted spend.
Reading between the lines
Your buyers are unlikely to articulate the emotional drivers behind their choices. They’ll talk budgets, practical needs, preferred colours and trends they like, but those surface-level answers aren’t going to reveal what moves them. Therefore, asking the right questions at the start is fundamental.
Bluesoup exists to get the set-up right from the outset. We design and organise the research that gives your storytelling a starting point that is truly rooted in the behavioural and emotional cues of your audience.
From there, we translate patterns into a distinctive brand narrative - identifying what people will respond to, even if they’ve not said it outright. We then ensure that your story flows consistently through media decisions, whether that’s video, photography, digital content, social, out-of-home or paid distribution. As a media-neutral agency, the focus is the story, not the channel.
Ultimately, we can help develop your story so that it's authentic, coherent and recognisably yours.
Finding the sweet spot to tell your story
This Venn diagram is a practical way to understand where brand storytelling works hardest.
The first circle is what customers want emotionally when choosing something for their home.
The second is what a brand does best, the strengths it can deliver confidently and consistently.
The third is what competitors can’t credibly replicate, claim or own in the same way.
A lot of brands are sitting in the wrong overlap. Some talk only about what they do well. Others chase what competitors are doing. Many guess what customers want without evidence.
The sweet spot is the overlap where your brand’s strengths match what people are already seeking and where your stories’ cues feel distinctive. And that’s the spot where emotional storytelling lives.
Choose research, don’t choose ‘Life’
For decades, Coca-Cola has conditioned audiences through emotional cues such as red, celebration, seasonal rituals and nostalgia - which signal ‘treat moments’.
But when the brand launched Coca-Cola Life in 2014, the green packaging and promise of more natural ingredients couldn’t trigger the red cue system people already carried in their heads.
A brown drink dressed in unfamiliar green made people hesitate; the story didn’t feel like Coca-Cola. What did it taste like for a start? Mint, tea, grass? The launch leaned on new emotional signals that didn’t match what customers had learned to expect. Sales dropped 73%, while the launch of Coke Zero grew 81% across the same period. Three years after Coca-Cola Life was launched in the UK, it was pulled.
The example shows how powerful Coca-Cola’s original story and cues already were. The emotional story conflicted with decades of learned expectation. They had shaped expectations so strongly that a new product line using conflicting signals never stood a chance.
If you’re ready to write (or even rewrite) your brand’s story to emotionally connect with your customers, then we’re ready to help you pen it. Drop us a message.
