How to Write a Brand Story

Nobody outside your business cares what year you were founded.

That is worth getting straight before you start, because most attempts at a brand story are a company history with better adjectives. A history is a list of things that happened to you. A brand story is the reason you exist, told so that somebody else recognises themselves in it.

The second thing worth getting straight is that you will not write it at a desk. I have called this how to write a brand story because that is what people search for, but the writing is the last hour of the job. Everything before it is looking, asking and cutting, and that is the part worth explaining.

I run brand strategy workshops for a living, which means I spend a lot of my time pulling stories out of people who are certain they do not have one. Here is the order I work in, and where it goes wrong.

1. You are finding, not writing

The word "writing" sends people looking for something impressive rather than something true, which is why so many brand stories end up sounding like a mission statement nobody believes.

Start from the assumption that the story already exists and your job is to notice it. I have never met a business without one. I have met plenty who could not see theirs, which is a different problem and a solvable one.

2. Ask the people who are not you

You are too close to your own business to see what is interesting about it, because the things that make you unusual have become normal to you. You have been doing them every day for years.

So do not only ask yourself.

I built a website recently for Lisa Jewel, a piano teacher in Abergavenny. Rather than only asking her what mattered, I asked her pupils and their parents. Two things came back that neither of us would have reached alone. Most of them said they did not want a photograph of her face on the site, which is why it is photographs of the room she teaches in instead. And one parent mentioned she had not realised that term-end meant no lesson, and that having it written down somewhere would have saved her a message.

That second one is now a section on the site. Small on its own, but it told me what the brand was for: taking friction out of a busy parent's week. That is more useful than anything the two of us would have produced in a meeting.

Ask your longest-standing customer why they stayed. The answer is rarely the thing you assumed and it is usually more interesting.

3. Find the sentence you would rather not say

The strongest brand stories contain something slightly inconvenient, and that is the part most businesses edit out first.

Gareth K Thomas came to me for a brand for Clarified, his consultancy. Before we started he filled in a discovery questionnaire, and one question on it looked like filler: is there a unique story behind your business or your business name. His answer was not filler. He wrote that the project was partly about being honest about who he was, and injecting himself into the business more.

That sentence decided everything that came after it. It is why I told him his existing logo had to go, and the reason I gave was not an aesthetic one. His branding showed nothing about him, and the business was him. The thing he had been leaving out was the strength.

When you find your version of that sentence, you will want to soften it. Do not.

4. Explain it to a five-year-old

This is the fastest way to find out whether your team can explain the business, which is worth knowing before you spend money telling the world.

Everyone writes down what the company does as if explaining it to a child. No jargon, no qualifiers.

I ran this with Haydale, who make advanced materials using patented graphene functionalisation. What they had been saying was that they bring together innovative technology and engineering expertise to unlock graphene using patented functionalisation technology, adding compatible chemical groups to the surface for effective dispersion into the chosen intermediary.

An investor who knows nothing about nanomaterials: sorry, what?

Explained to a five-year-old: we make everyday things stronger and longer-lasting with a special recipe of graphene and plasma.

Same science, different sentence, and the second version became an animated explainer that investors could follow.

If your attempt comes out shorter and slightly embarrassing, you have done it right.

5. Write down who you are not for

This will feel like turning away business, and it is the fastest way to sound like yourself.

A story for everyone is a story for nobody, and refusing to name who you are not for is the most common reason positioning stays vague. It is also the moment a workshop goes quiet, because saying it out loud makes it real.

We rebranded Welch Fitness around five words: leave your ego at the door. That line came first and the identity grew out of it, rather than arriving at the end as a tagline. Once it existed, most design decisions answered themselves. What the space should feel like, who the gym is for, and who it is not for, which mattered more, because those five words quietly turn some people away and that is the point.

Narrowing who you serve is commercial infrastructure rather than decoration. The businesses that refuse to do it end up competing on the one thing that is always comparable, which is price.

6. Cut it to something one person can repeat to another

One test catches most people out. Ask two people on your team to describe the business, separately, right now.

Two different answers means you do not have a story. You have a vibe that has held together so far.

Word of mouth is your story being retold without you in the room, so if it cannot survive being repeated by somebody who was not there, it will not travel. In practice that means one sentence, plainly built, with nothing in it that needs explaining. Impressive does not repeat. Plain does.

This is also the point where the work starts paying for itself, and it is worth being specific about how. Sales calls get shorter, because you stop explaining what you do and start working out whether this is a fit. Proposals get easier to write, because the argument has already been made before you open the document. You turn enquiries down earlier, which reads as lost revenue and is recovered margin, since the badly fitting jobs are the ones that overrun. And the homepage more or less writes itself, because you finally know what the first line has to say.

7. Then say it for two years

The unglamorous part, and the one that works.

A brand story is not a launch. Most businesses write one, use it for a quarter, get bored, and change it before anyone outside the building has registered that it exists. You will be sick of your own message roughly two years before your market has noticed it.

Smoke & Slaw are a barbecue business that comes to you. There was no origin film and no campaign. The story lives in the voice: the way the menu reads, the way the website talks, the way an enquiry gets answered. A customer meets that story in fragments over months, and the fragments have to agree with each other. That is consistency doing the work, and it is not exciting to execute.

Most businesses will never make a brand film. Every business writes hundreds of sentences a year. Those sentences are where your story gets told.

The three tests before you commit

Before you build anything on it, put the story through three checks.

True. Would you still say it if it cost you a sale? Most brand messaging fails here immediately, because it was written to appeal rather than to be accurate, which is exactly why so much of it sounds the same.

Specific. Who is it for, and who is it not for? If you can answer the first half and not the second, you have not finished.

Repeatable. Can somebody say it back to you without you in the room? This is the two-people test from step six, and it is the one that catches people out, because a story can be true and specific and still be built out of words nobody can carry.

A story that fails any of the three will not survive contact with your own team, let alone a customer. The same three tests applied to ten brand storytelling examples show what passing looks like in practice.

Where this goes wrong

The founder speaks first. Everyone then agrees with the founder and you have spent a day confirming what one person already thought. Founders go last, every time.

Nobody decides anything. A session that produces good energy and a wall of notes has failed. If you leave without a written sentence, nothing happened.

It gets treated as a creative exercise. It is a decision-making exercise. The creative part comes afterwards and is far easier once the decisions exist.

It stays in the heads of the people who were there. Write it down and send it round. Otherwise you had a nice conversation and nothing came of it.

Start with the question, not the page

Do not open a document and try to write. Open a conversation and try to listen.

Ask your customers why they stayed. Ask two people on your team to explain the business separately. Ask yourself what you have been leaving out because it felt too personal. The story is already in those answers.

If you suspect the argument in the room will be the useful part, or that you are too close to the business to chair it yourself, that is what our Brand Strategy Workshop is for. Four to six hours with your leadership team, in our studio or at your place, and you leave with the sentence written down and an agreed answer on who you are not for. It suits businesses turning over roughly £500k to £15m who have outgrown the way they describe themselves. Book a discovery call and we can work out whether it is the right time.