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Everyone has a story. And, more often than not in today’s retail marketplace, every brand, product and company has a story, or at a minimum is searching for a story, that is designed to connect and resonate with customers on a deeper level.

As a result, the concept of storytelling—and its impact on building customer loyalty or increasing sales—is one of the most-talked about trends in marketing and business today.

“Storytelling is simply a way in which to deliver a brand’s messages; one of several techniques for doing so,” Bob Hogan, who heads up the consumer services group for the advertising agency Triple Threat Communications, told Vision Monday. “If you can develop a brand story that is interesting and relevant to your audience, it can be valuable. However, it won’t make up for a product or service that isn’t relevant. It’s not a magic bullet for everything.”

Storytelling is not a new or revolutionary idea. Indeed, the concept of telling a meaningful story has been around since cavemen painted images on rock walls to communicate their ideas. More recently, the “slice of life” TV commercial—which Hogan calls the “most enduring” TV technique among an array of options—is essentially storytelling at its basic level. “It begins with the situation/protagonist setup, introduces conflict (often a problem), introduces the product as hero to solve the problem and winds up with a conflict resolution,” he explained.

The edge that eyecare and other marketers in health care have is that the topic of health lends itself naturally to storytelling because it tracks patients and other stakeholders through a familiar and linear plot: symptoms, diagnosis, treatment and outcome, according to Hogan. The mistake that some marketers make, Hogan said, is that they get impatient to “tell you about the products and don’t spend a lot of time on the story elements, settling for predictable vignettes and trite resolutions.”

Other experts agree that eyecare should be a natural backdrop for storytellers to excel.

“It should be easier for vision specialists to develop stories, since all story elements are there naturally,” content marketing consultant Bethany Johnson told Vision Monday. “However, a few bad experiences can put [customers] on edge, so trust needs to be rebuilt before a brand can swoop in and heroically save the day.”

One marketer in the optical space that has been recognized for its storytelling approach is Warby Parker. The optical retailer has developed storytelling content that is fun while also “painting the brand as trendy and chic yet socially conscious,” according to content marketing firm Oz Content Technologies. In addition to featuring some of its own employees in video spots, the retailer also crowdsources content from its customer base to find real-life examples of customers trying on glasses.

For an ECP who wants to try storytelling, this might mean developing a story around the practice’s long-running effort to address children’s vision issues by providing eye exams in elementary schools. The story would highlight the achievements of some of these “children” after they went on to bigger and better things either in the community or on a larger stage, in part because their vision issues were successfully addressed early in life. This kind of story goes a long way to demonstrate a core belief of the practice and why the ECPs do what they do.

Although there is some doubt about the quantifiable aspect of storytelling on a brand’s sales, Johnson said there are other measures to gauge whether the storytelling approach has achieved success. “One of my clients said it best when she said that the purchase is not the holy grail anymore, it’s the share,” said Johnson, who has worked on campaigns for such brands as Build-a-Bear, Tom’s of Maine and MasterCard.

“It’s the thumbs-up on social media. It’s the ‘so-and-so checked in at this location today.’ It’s the storytelling of friends that a brand should set their sights on. Not a buy. So does storytelling trigger purchase intent? No. But it triggers comments, shares and likes, which are often much more valuable.”

Storytelling, like a lot of good ideas, can be ineffective “when applied too broadly and without thoughtful intent,” the retail technology consulting firm RetailNext noted. This can lead to increasing “the noise of a lot stories being told, but precious few being heard.”

Another challenge for marketers who embrace storytelling is to focus their efforts on the message and not get caught up in the shiny new elements of the medium, according to PR firm Edelman.

“In a race to embrace shiny new platforms—which would supposedly create deeper connections—[marketers have] lost sight of what really matters,” Edelman’s Darragh Rea explained in a blog post. “The results in many cases [are] not deeper connections but instead temporary interactions, fleeting in nature and almost certainly not memorable.”

As a primer for building a strong storytelling approach, Edelman recommends brands “get back to their core story” and focus on three simple questions:

1. Why do you do what you do?
2. How are you different?
3. Why do you matter?

“By answering these questions, brands can begin to refocus on their story and most importantly how it relates to their core audience,” Rea added. “In a world where technology has unlocked so many opportunities, it seems incomprehensible that instead of communicating what really matters, some brands are focusing on bland product messages.”

Another source that leads to genuine stories is the employee base, said Dorothy Wetzel, a former Pfizer marketing director and founder of the New Jersey-based agency Extrovertic. “Companies often overlook this very powerful source of stories. Executives or employees are the most trusted storytellers when it comes to business practices, crisis mitigation or industry issues.”

Read on for a sampling of how some eyewear companies and optical retailers have made “storytelling” a consistent part of their messaging to consumers.