The 10 Best Brand Storytelling Examples

Most brand storytelling examples you'll find online are the same fifteen companies, described the same way, by people who have never had to build one.

I run brand strategy workshops for a living. The hard part is never finding a story. Every business has one. The hard part is working out which parts of it matter to somebody else, and then saying it the same way twice.

So here are ten brand storytelling examples worth studying, and what each one teaches. Three of them are ours, at a scale you can actually copy. Airbnb's budget is not a useful benchmark for a business turning over two million.

What makes a brand storytelling example worth copying

A brand story is not your history. Nobody outside your building cares what year you were founded.

A brand story is the reason you exist, told in a way a customer recognises themselves in. It answers three things: who this is for, what you stand for, and why anyone should pick you over the next option.

The examples below all pass that test. They also pass a harder one, which I'll come to at the end.

1. Airbnb: sell the experience, not the mechanism

Airbnb is a software company. Filters, algorithms, a payments system. They own none of the properties.

An ad about the software would be unwatchable. So they never made one. Their channels are full of hosts and the places they open up, and the tech never gets a mention.

The lesson: your customers do not buy the mechanism. They buy what the mechanism gets them. Most businesses I meet describe the mechanism.

2. Toms: your origin story can be about an absence

Toms did not start with an idea for a shoe. It started with the absence of one - children walking without them.

That order matters. The product came second, and the story never pretends otherwise. When employees who had been there from the start narrated the origin film, it worked because it was true and they were the ones who could say it.

The lesson: the strongest origin stories start with a problem you saw, not a product you made.

3. Ben & Jerry's: values only count when they cost you something

Every business claims to have values. Almost none publish them anywhere they could be held to.

Ben & Jerry's built a three-part mission covering suppliers, farmers, staff, franchisees and customers, then put it in public where anyone can measure them against it. That is the part most businesses skip, because published values are a liability. That is also exactly why they land.

The lesson: if your values cost you nothing, they are decoration. Write down the ones you would honour when it hurts.

4. Sport England, This Girl Can: cast real people

Sport England could have run ads with elite athletes. Every sports brand does.

They cast ordinary women, sweating, jiggling, out of breath, in real gyms and real parks. It worked because the audience they needed to reach had spent their lives being shown the other kind and concluding that sport was not for them.

The lesson: cast the person you want to reach, not the person you wish you were selling to. Aspiration you cannot picture yourself in is just distance.

5. Visit Wales: show, don't narrate

Visit Wales does not sell directions. It sells a feeling about being somewhere.

The clearest thing about their films is what's missing. No voiceover. No list of landmarks. No persuasive language telling you to book. Just people having a good time in a place, filmed well enough that you fill in the rest.

The lesson: the more you explain, the less the viewer feels. Trust them to arrive at the point on their own.

6. Honda: heritage without a word

Honda made a film about its own history that contains no dialogue. It won an Emmy.

Most heritage marketing is a timeline nobody reads. Honda turned theirs into something you watch to the end, and never once listed a feature of a car.

The lesson: if your history is genuinely interesting, it does not need narrating. If it needs narrating, it is probably not interesting.

7. Renold: B2B stories are buried in the engineering

This one is ours, so treat it accordingly.

Renold make precision-engineered power transmission products. Chains and couplings, for industries from cement mixing to chocolate manufacturing. A detailed account of how a coupling is manufactured would empty a room.

Their marketing team understood that the story was not the product, it was the century of engineering behind it and the people who kept it going. Same components as their competitors, a history none of them have.

The lesson: "we're too boring for storytelling" is almost always a failure to look. B2B stories are there. They are just buried under the specification.

8. Welch Fitness: one sentence can be the whole brand

Also ours. The entire Welch Fitness rebrand came out of five words: leave your ego at the door.

That line was not a tagline we bolted on at the end. It was the strategic idea the identity grew from, and once it existed, most design decisions answered themselves. What the space should feel like. Who the gym is for. Who it is not for, which matters more.

A gym in South Wales, not a global brand. That is the point of including it.

The lesson: when the idea is right, the design almost briefs itself. When you are still arguing about the logo, the idea is not right yet.

9. Smoke & Slaw: your voice is the story, told over and over

Ours as well. 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 site talks to you, the way an enquiry gets answered. A customer meets the story in fragments, and the fragments have to agree with each other.

The lesson: most businesses will never make a brand film. Every business writes hundreds of sentences a year. The voice is where your story actually gets told.

10. Headspace: make the customer the hero

Headspace is a subscription app. An explainer about the science and the billing would be ignored.

Instead the customer is the hero of the story and the product is the thing that helps. They go further and thank real users by name for what they did with it.

The lesson: if your business is the hero of your story, you have written an advert. Put the customer in the lead and your product becomes the useful sidekick, which is what it is.

The three tests a brand story has to pass

Studying examples is the easy part. Here is what I use in workshops to test whether a story will hold up.

True. Would you still say it if it cost you a sale? Most brand messaging fails here immediately. It is written to appeal rather than to be accurate, which is why it sounds like everyone else's. Ben & Jerry's and Toms pass because their stories are inconvenient in places.

Specific. Who is it for, and who is it not for? 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. Welch Fitness works because "leave your ego at the door" quietly turns some people away.

Repeatable. Can someone say it back to you without you in the room? This is the one that catches people out. Ask two people on your team to describe the business separately. Two different answers means you do not have a story, you have a vibe that has held together so far.

True, specific, repeatable. A story that fails any one of the three will not survive contact with your own team, never mind a customer. Passing all three is a structural problem before it is a writing one, and the framework we use to get there compresses a long argument into one idea the whole team can carry.

How to do brand storytelling in your own business

Start with what is already true. You are not inventing a story, you are finding the one you have and deciding which parts are worth telling.

Ask your longest-standing customer why they stayed. The answer is usually more interesting than anything in your marketing, and it is rarely the thing you thought.

Write down who you are not for. This will feel like turning away business. It is the fastest way to sound like yourself.

Then check the repeatable test before you spend anything on design. If your team cannot say the story back, no logo will fix it. A proper discovery workshop is built to get you there faster than guessing will.

The businesses in this article did not get there by copying anyone. They worked out what was true about themselves and then said it consistently for years. The consistency is the boring part, and it is the part that works.

Ready to tell your story?

Every brand story here started with the same question: who are we, really, and why does that matter to the people we are trying to reach.

If you do not have a clean answer, that is the work, and it is what the Brand Strategy Workshop is for. Book a discovery call and we can talk through where you are.