By Hezron Ochiel
I learned one of my earliest lessons about storytelling at seven.
I grew up in the village when watches and alarms were hard to come by. We often relied on the first cockcrow to know when to wake up and prepare for school.
My sister and I walked more than six kilometres to school, often barefoot.
One morning, we woke up much earlier than usual and set off while it was still completely dark.
The road was quiet. The grass was wet with dew, fireflies flickered along the way, and frogs croaked near the river.
Then the frogs suddenly went silent.
A shadow crossed our path.
We could not see clearly, but it looked like a person.
“Jajuok!” my sister screamed.
In the village, people took stories about night runners seriously. They were believed to move at night, frightening people, and children grew up hearing warnings about them.
My sister was nine. I was seven.
We were terrified and ran into the thicket without looking back. For a while, it felt as though whoever we had seen was following us.
Then we heard footsteps approaching from another direction, and the person behind us disappeared.
We ran towards school as fast as we could.
When we arrived, it was still dark. There was no electricity, so we sat at our desks waiting for morning.
My sister eventually fell asleep while I stayed awake.
When the first cock finally crowed, relief swept over us.
Morning had come.
The story followed me to school
Years later, that experience became the basis of a composition I wrote during my final examinations.
I called it “The Day I Will Never Forget.”
The story earned me an A, and my English teacher encouraged me to consider studying literature or journalism if I made it to university.
That advice stayed with me.
After high school, I eventually joined university to study journalism.
Looking back, I now realise that the composition taught me something I would continue learning throughout my career:
People remember stories that make them feel something.
Why the story stayed with me
Nearly three decades later, I can still remember the darkness, the silence near the river and my sister’s scream.
Those details stayed with me because they carried emotion.
Facts matter, and they’re easier to remember when you place them inside a human experience.
The same principle applies to brand storytelling.
What that childhood story taught me about storytelling
1. Emotion makes stories memorable
I remember that journey because I remember how it made me feel.
Fear, relief and hope gave the experience meaning.
Brands also create experiences that make people feel something. Good storytelling helps audiences connect those experiences to what the organisation represents.
2. Specific details help people see the story
The darkness, the silent river and my sister’s scream gave the story a sense of place.
Strong stories often depend on a few meaningful details rather than long explanations.
For brands, one well-told customer experience can often communicate more than a long description of what the organisation does.
3. Tension gives people a reason to continue
When the frogs went silent, and a shadow crossed our path, something changed.
That moment created a reason to keep reading.
A good brand story also needs movement, often through a problem, question or challenge that gives the audience a reason to stay with the story.
4. Meaning gives the story value
The experience became more than a frightening childhood memory because it eventually influenced the path I took.
Strong brand stories also reveal something meaningful about an organisation: what it stands for, what problem it solves or why its work matters.
Brand storytelling is more than promotion
Today, I work with stories in a very different setting.
Journalism taught me to look for the human experience behind events. Strategic communication taught me to connect those experiences to organisational purpose.
That is where brand storytelling becomes powerful.
It is about finding the experiences that reveal what an organisation stands for and telling them in a way people can understand and remember.
The communicator’s role is to find the meaning inside that experience.
This also connects with how I think about visibility, authority and trust in communication. A strong story creates more value when people can discover it, understand it and connect it to something meaningful.
The lesson I still carry
That morning journey to school happened many years ago, but the lesson has stayed with me.
Stories become powerful when they combine experience, emotion and meaning.
My seven-year-old self knew nothing about brand storytelling. I only knew that something frightening had happened and that I wanted to tell the story.
Years later, that same instinct would lead me into journalism and eventually into strategic communication.
Sometimes our professional journeys begin long before we have a name for them.
Hezron Ochiel is an award-winning strategic communications and public relations professional with over 15 years of experience in media, digital communication, and reputation strategy. He serves as the Deputy Corporate Communications Manager at the government-owned Kenya Medical Training College (KMTC) and is the founder of Hezron Insights, where he writes about AI visibility, Digital PR, SEO, GEO, and digital authority. His work has appeared on platforms including Reuters, The New Humanitarian, and The Standard.
