A practical case for emotional resonance over price positioning

There comes a moment in every high-performance business when the numbers stop thrilling you. You’ve optimised the funnel, tightened your targeting, refined the ads, sliced the audiences, stacked retargeting layers, cross-checked attribution models, squeezed every last drop out of CAC, ROAS, LTV.

But something’s off.
The results might look decent, stable even, but the resonance is gone.
People are buying, but they’re not staying. They’re clicking, but not connecting. The machine works, but the heart isn’t in it. That’s the inflection point, the place where performance peaks, and the next lever isn’t another hack, it’s story.

The Moment I Felt It Break

I remember the exact moment this shift happened for me. I was running my e-commerce brand, Sussex Special, a small business I’d built from scratch, handcrafted every product, shot every photo and wrote every caption. At first, performance was everything. I was obsessed with conversion rates and cost-per-clicks. I knew how to make a product look appealing on a feed.
And it worked – for a while.

But over time, I noticed something, the customers who came through performance-driven ads were polite, transactional, often forgettable, they’d buy once and vanish.
The customers who came because they felt something?
They stayed, came back and left reviews. They messaged me at 11pm to say the candle reminded them of their grandmother’s garden or told me it’d given them comfort.
That’s when I realised: performance wins the moment, but story builds the memory.

When Performance Peaks: The Signals

Performance marketing doesn’t fall off a cliff, it plateaus and that’s more dangerous, because plateaus feel safe.

Here’s what I see when performance has peaked:

🔸Cost-per-acquisition is creeping up, but no one wants to say it out loud
🔸Every new “test” looks like a recycled version of last week
🔸Retention drops
🔸Differentiation disappears
🔸The team feels disenchanted, even though KPIs are being met
🔸The brand is forgettable or worse, interchangeable

It’s not that performance is dead it’s that, it hit its natural limit and now, the business needs a soul.

Why Story Wins Where Price Doesn’t

Price-led positioning is easy to optimise, but emotional resonance isn’t about efficiency it’s about meaning.
In saturated markets, supplements, skincare, software, even socks, price stops being a lever.
Everyone is discounting. Everyone has bundles. Everyone ships fast.

But story?
That’s where brands become uncopyable.
Story is what people remember when they forget your features.
It’s what they tell their friend when they recommend you.
It’s the emotional architecture that holds your brand in their memory, even when they’re not actively thinking about it and no one can undercut you on that.

From Funnel to Feeling – A Real Pivot

I once worked with a client whose performance funnel was textbook perfect, click-throughs, conversions, even LTV looked solid, but retention was declining, and new customers were treating the product like a commodity, not a relationship.
So we stripped it back, we didn’t start with the product, we started with the emotion.

What frustrated them about their industry?
What truth did they wish more people knew?
What did they believe that no one else was saying?

From there, we rebuilt the messaging.
We crafted origin stories, emotional context, micro-moments of resonance.
We stopped selling the product and started selling why it mattered.

The result?
A 23% increase in repeat purchases over 3 months.
Unprompted customer testimonials and product that suddenly felt felt not just functional.

That’s the power of emotional positioning, it moves people from transaction to transformation.

The Framework: Finding Your Story

Most founders don’t think they have a story or worse, they think “story” means something fluffy.

But story isn’t fluff it’s strategic architecture.
Here’s how I approach it:

1. Start with Frustration

What problem in your industry keeps you up at night?
What do you stand against?
The clearest stories often come from tension.

2. Flip the Funnel

Don’t lead with features, lead with feeling.
What will your customer feel after using your product: emotionally, practically, energetically?

3. Mine Your Language

Your best customers are already writing your story, check reviews, testimonials, DMs.
What words do they use? That’s your emotional signal.

4. Anchor in a Single Truth

You don’t need to say 20 things, say one thing: clearly, consistently with weight.
Everything else builds from there.

What Changes When You Lead With Story

People stop scrolling past your brand, they pause.
They sense there’s something deeper, a signal that resonates beneath the noise, and they don’t just buy, they belong.
Story isn’t just a marketing play, it’s a loyalty lever.

And here’s what shifts:
Retention goes up. People stay where they feel seen.
Referrals rise. People recommend brands that reflect their values.
CAC improves over time. Because you’re no longer just paying for clicks, you’re building resonance.
The brand becomes emotionally ownable. You occupy a space in their mind that no one else can.

And most importantly:
Your team feels re-energised, because now, they’re not just selling a product, they’re stewarding a narrative.

Metrics Still Matter, But They’re Not the Whole Story

Let’s be clear, I’m not against performance.
I am performance.
I built my career tracking conversion funnels, testing sequences, mapping customer journeys with forensic detail.

But I’ve learned to hold both:
Precision and poetry.
Data and depth.
Metrics and meaning.

You can still measure story, just not with the same instruments.
Measure the tone of your inbox, the surprise Dms, a customer who quotes your tagline back to you, because it became their mantra.
That’s ROI too, it’s just more subtle and far more powerful.

Story Is Not a Luxury, It’s a Lever

If you’ve mastered performance but feel something is missing, it’s not a new tool you need, it’s a new truth.
The brands that scale with grace are the ones that feel like something.
That say something real and stand for something clear.

In a world of endless options, story is the signal that cuts through noise, it’s what your customer remembers, long after the discount ends, and it’s the lever you pull when performance peaks.

Ready to pivot from performance to emotional resonance?
Start with this question:
What truth does your brand carry, and are you willing to say it out loud?

That’s your story.
And that’s your next chapter.