Brand story

What a brand story is

A brand story is a short written account of why the business exists and what it chose to be, told in a way a customer would repeat to somebody else. The working test is simple: the story must explain a decision the business actually made. A choice that cost something, that a competitor did not make, and that a customer can still see the effect of today.

It is not a company history. Dates, premises and staff counts belong in a company profile. It is not a positioning statement either, though the two usually come from the same decision: the positioning statement is written for your own people, and the story is written for a buyer.

Who this is for

A business whose About page is the worst page on the site, which is most of them. A business where the owner tells one genuinely interesting thing on every sales call and it appears nowhere in writing. A business in a trade where every competitor's story is interchangeable, and where the real difference happened years ago and was never written down.

It is also for a business about to be handed to somebody else to describe: a new salesperson, a designer, a journalist, a buyer doing diligence.

You do not need this if nothing was ever decided. Some businesses were started because somebody needed a job and were run sensibly ever since, and that is honourable and not a story. In that case the money is better spent on a value proposition and a straight rewrite of the About page, and I will say so on the first call rather than manufacture a narrative.

What goes in it, and what I will not write

The story is short. Three hundred to five hundred words in its long form, and it carries four things: the situation the business started in, the decision it made, what that decision cost, and what it means for a customer now. The cost is the part everyone leaves out and the part that makes the rest believable.

What I will not write, under any budget:

• The garage. Or the kitchen table, or the basement. Where the business started is a detail, and it is only worth a line if something about the place explains the decision.
• “There had to be a better way.” Nobody has ever said this sentence out loud. Neither has “frustrated by the industry, our founder set out to”.
• A passion. Passion, dedication and commitment are claimed by every business in every trade and therefore carry no information at all.
• An invented moment. No composite customer, no dramatised conversation, no scene that did not happen. If the recorded interview does not contain it, it does not go in.
• A hero founder. Where a decision was made by three people arguing for a fortnight, the story says three people argued for a fortnight.

The raw material comes from a recorded interview of an hour or two with whoever was there, plus anything written at the time: old quotes, early invoices, a letter, a photograph with a date on the back.

What you get

The long version. Three hundred to five hundred words, ready to be the body of an About page or the opening of a company document.

The short version. Eighty to a hundred words for a proposal, a partner page or an award entry, carrying the decision and nothing else.

The spoken version. Four or five sentences that survive being told out loud on a sales call, which is where the story will be used most and tested hardest.

The interview transcript, edited. Yours to keep. Most owners find two or three other usable pieces in it, and it is the source anyone can check the story against later.

A worked example

An illustration, not a client. A machine shop of twenty-two people has an About page of nine hundred words that opens with the founder's father buying a lathe in 1978 and closes on quality and integrity. Nothing in it explains anything. In a recorded hour the current owner mentions, almost in passing, that in 2011 the shop turned down a standing automotive contract that would have doubled its revenue, because taking it meant letting the food-grade stainless certification lapse.

That is the story, and it had never been written down. The rewritten page runs to four hundred words: the contract, what turning it down cost in the two lean years that followed, why the certification was kept, and what it means for a dairy processor choosing a shop today, which is that a general jobbing shop cannot get that capability back quickly once it is given up. The lathe and the year survive as one line near the end. Quality and integrity do not survive at all. The same decision then gets a paragraph in the front of every quote.

How it runs

1. A half-hour call. What the business does, who was there at the start, and whether there is a decision worth telling. If there is not, I say so here. No charge.
2. A fixed price in writing. Scope, number of people to interview, and the price agreed before anything starts.
3. The interview. One or two recorded hours with whoever was present for the decision, plus any documents from the time. Sometimes a second, shorter call with a long-standing employee or customer.
4. Drafting. Two versions of the long form, taking different decisions as the centre where there is more than one candidate. You choose on a call. About a week.
5. Delivery. The three versions and the edited transcript, with a half-hour handover. Five working days after the draft is chosen.

Two to three weeks from first call to final versions is typical.

What it costs

Quoted as a fixed price in CAD after the half-hour call, agreed in writing, and not changed without your agreement. The price depends on how many people need interviewing and whether the About page is being rewritten at the same time. The pricing page explains how fixed pricing works and what the published bands cover.

What happens next

The story almost always goes first into a rewritten About page, because that is the page buyers check before they decide to trust you. Owners who enjoy the interview often keep going into founder thought leadership, where the same voice is used at article length. And where the story has settled what the business is for, mission and vision becomes answerable, assuming you need them at all. This piece of work is complete on its own, and nothing further is assumed.