Brand story

In a usable form it runs to three to five sentences and can be said out loud without reading. It covers what was wrong before, what you did about it and who that still applies to. It is usually written from an interview with the founder, because the best lines come out spontaneously and never get written down by the person who said them. A first version takes two hours, then it has to rest, because half of it usually gets cut.

Why it is not decoration: a company with no story describes itself as a list of services and sounds like every other. An engineering firm founded because the owner was sick of week long lead times on spare parts suddenly has a reason why speed is its theme. The same fact then shows up on the website, in quotations and in job interviews, and everything starts to hold together.

How to get there: ask the founder what annoyed them before they started the company. Then ask your three longest standing customers why they stayed. The overlap between those answers is the story. Write it in the first person and read it aloud to a colleague. If they stumble on a sentence or laugh in the wrong place, cut it.

Where it goes wrong: an invented story. A brand that manufactures a touching origin cannot sustain it, because employees cannot tell it and customers sense it. The second mistake is a story about the company instead of the customer. Nobody cares that you have twenty years in the market, they care what that does for them. And if the company started because it was simply a good opportunity, it is more honest not to hide that.

We test a brand story on a new employee. After a week we ask them to say in their own words what the company does and why. What they remembered is the real story, the rest is website copy. Try it today: ask someone who joined a month ago why they think the company was founded.