I was reminded today (as if I could forget!) what storytelling was all about. I was visiting one of our clients, Harrods in London, talking to their Director of Design, a guy called Bill Mitchell. One of the old school, Bill has had an incredible life. You can read all about it on his website, but as a taster it encapsulates: painting and decorating, the Royal Navy during the war, travelling the world painting murals on NAAFI canteen walls, flogging insurance, courses at the Southern College of Art and the RCA, and architectural features work for many, many municipal businesses and councils.

Oh and he designed and carved the (English Heritage listed) Egyptian staircase at Harrods, and bits of Sir Frederick Gibberd's Liverpool Metropolitan Cathedral

Bill has a studio high up in the Harrods building. To get to it you go through a little door (the other side of which the temperature noticeably drops) and up a spiral staircase before emerging into Bill’s lair. It’s a studio with huge windows all around, looking out over the Knightsbridge rooftops and, at least when I was there, filled with an invigorating bright natural light. Inside, it's a wonderland of colours and textures, with bits of gold leaf and old rococo picture frames vying with scale models of exotic buildings for space and attention, and Bill sits up there like king of the castle. He’s told that ‘The Chairman’ (Mohamed Al Fayed) is trying to get him on the phone, but he gives us a quick tour around anyway.

Bill’s approach was refreshing: he just wanted to tell stories. According to Bill, marketing materials nowadays are far too clinical – it’s all about the product, the contents, the value. Beautiful product shots are one thing, he tells us, but alone they aren't enough to develop a real longing. He wanted to get back to a feeling, a story. He told us about Harrods’ hamper marketing in the 1920s. Apparently, Harrods used to put a picture on the underside of their hamper lids. One of these, Bill reckoned, was a picture of a lady stepping off a punt onto an island in the Cam or the Isis, where a delightful spread of Harrods goodies was arrayed on a blanket.

Perfect. There’s the story, right there. That’s what a Harrods hamper is all about. Lazy summers spent languidly punting along a slow-moving river through a university town. Dressed up all dapper in a linen suit and a boater. Stopping every now and again for a spot of champagne, a little beluga caviar, a cream tea and perhaps later some vintage port and stilton. Now, the chances of me actually doing that if I was ever sent a Harrods hamper (itself unlikely I know) are virtually nil. Chances are I’d arrive home from the pub one night and decide I was hungry, ‘accidentally’ open the hamper and be dismayed the next morning to have no recollection of stuffing myself with smoked salmon pate and quails eggs the night before. And how the hell did I eat an entire pork pie? I digress. The point is, the story that a single picture managed to get across was enough to make me want a hamper, want a lifestyle, want to be part of an Ian McEwan novel set in the '20's upper classes. Maybe not the last one. But you get my drift.

So I guess that was my lesson. Go back to the old school. Tell stories

Bill obviously saw my eyes glazing over as I began to drool, Homer style, at the thought of the contents of a hamper. ‘I’d better phone the chairman’ he said. ‘I’d better leave’, I said.