How to write a brand story: a step-by-step process

To write a brand story, talk first and write second. Record yourself or the founder answering a handful of plain questions, pull out the moments that are specific and true, put them in order, and then edit hard until it sounds like a person speaking. The best brand copy starts as speech, because that's where the honest detail lives.

This post is the writing process, step by step: how to gather the raw material, draft, find the voice, edit, and test the result, for a page on your site or the script for a film. What to put in it is covered in what a brand story should include, the order is in how a brand story should be structured, and the length question has its own post: how long a brand story should be.

Where do you start writing a brand story?

Not at a blank page. Writing a brand story from nothing is how you end up with "founded with a passion for excellence". Start by collecting what's already there, spoken out loud.

Sit down with whoever knows the business best and ask these, recording the answers on a phone:

• What did you do before this, and what made you stop?
• What was the first job, the first customer or the first thing you made?
• What went wrong in the first year, and what did you do about it?
• What do customers thank you for that you never advertised?
• What would you refuse to do, even if it cost you the work?
• Why does this matter to you more than it should?

Transcribe it, or use the phone's transcript. You're not writing yet. You're getting twenty minutes of material you'd never have produced by sitting and thinking.

How do you pick what goes in?

Read the transcript with a highlighter and mark everything that is specific, surprising or slightly awkward. Ignore anything abstract. "We always put the customer first" is out. "I drove to Kent at midnight because I'd promised her on the phone" is in.

Then choose a spine. Most brand stories have one thread running through them: a founder who left a job to do it properly, a craft that takes longer than anyone would choose, a mistake that shaped the business. Pick the thread with the most feeling and the most evidence behind it. The rest of the highlighted material either supports it or waits for another day.

How do you draft it?

Write the rough version quickly, in the order things happened, in short sentences. Don't worry about elegance. A workable first draft has four parts:

• A person, doing something. One or two sentences, in a real place.
• The reason. Why they started or why they work this way.
• The difficulty. What got in the way, and what they did.
• What it means now. What changed, and what the reader gets from it.

If the structure feels wooden, you can reorder it later, using the options in the structure post. At this stage just get the pieces onto the page using your own words and the actual quotes from the recording. Quotes are gold. A good line from a transcript is better than anything you'd come up with.

Should it be in first person or third?

First person usually wins for a small business. "I started this in a garden shed" has more weight than "the founder started the business in a garden shed". If there are several founders or the story is about the team, "we" can work, but make sure a particular person is still visible. Third person suits a larger organisation, or a story about someone else, such as a customer.

How do you make it sound like a person?

This is where most brand copy falls over, so it's worth spending time on. The test I use is simple. Read it aloud. If you'd feel silly saying a sentence to a friend in a pub, change it.

Some specific habits help:

• Use contractions. "We're", "it's" and "didn't" are how people talk.
• Short sentences, then a longer one. Mix them. A run of the same length reads like a machine.
• Plain words. "Use" not "utilise". "Help" not "facilitate". "Start" not "commence".
• Name things. The shop's real name, the real street, the real material.
• Say it once. If the point has landed, move on.
• Cut the adjectives. Most of them can go. Keep the ones that tell you something.

Spoken language is also what makes a script work on camera. A line written for the eye, such as "we strive for excellence in all that we do", sounds odd in a person's mouth. Lines drawn from the transcript sound like them, because they are.

If you wouldn't say it out loud to a customer, don't write it in their story.

What should you cut?

More than feels comfortable. Here's a quick edit list:

• The opening sentence, if it's a general statement about the industry.
• Any line that begins "At [company name], we..."
• Every use of passionate, innovative, bespoke (unless you really are, and say how), cutting-edge, leading, solutions, journey, or world-class.
• Dates that don't change anything about the story.
• A second example when the first already did the job.
• The final paragraph, if it only repeats what you've already said.

Read what's left. If something is missing, put it back, but in the plain version. A story that's half as long and twice as specific almost always improves.

How do you write it for a film rather than a page?

Differently, because you're writing for ears and for pictures. The words on a page are for reading. The words for a film are mostly the person's own, so what you write is the structure and the questions, not the lines.

For a documentary brand film, I wouldn't script the interview. I'd write a short outline of the beats, the questions that draw each one out, and a list of what the camera needs to see while they talk. Then I'd record the person and build the final story from what they say. It means the words are theirs, and it avoids the stiff, recited feel of a script.

If you're writing a voiceover instead, keep it short, leave plenty of gaps for the pictures, and never describe what the viewer can already see. For a worked version of this in practice, our Nimrod Road film is the couple's own account of the renovation. It wasn't scripted and it reads better for it. For help turning a story into a brief a production company can work from, see how to write a video brief.

What does a rewrite look like?

Here's an invented before and after, to show the moves. The business is a small joinery firm.

Before: "Established in 2009, Hartley Joinery is a passionate team of craftspeople dedicated to delivering bespoke solutions of the highest quality to clients across the region."

After: "I left a site manager job in 2009 with a van, a bandsaw and a customer who wanted a staircase that didn't creak. It took three attempts to get right. She still sends a Christmas card."

The second version has a person, a place in time, a difficulty and a result, and it's shorter. Nothing in it is clever. Every detail came from a conversation, which is why it works. The first was written. The second was said.

Notice what the rewrite leaves out as well: the word quality, the region, the team and the mission. They're not wrong, they're just not the story. They can sit lower on the page, or in a different piece.

Is there a template you can copy?

A skeleton is useful as long as you treat it as scaffolding rather than a form to fill in. This one has served me well on both pages and film outlines:

• One line that puts us somewhere. A person, a place, a moment.
• One line on why it matters to them. The real reason.
• Two or three lines on the hard part. What happened and what they did.
• One line on what changed. For them or for the customer.
• One line on what that means for you. What the reader can expect.

Keep the whole thing to a few short paragraphs for a page. If you want to know what else a fuller story might hold, look at the checklist in what should a brand story include.

What mistakes do people make when writing one?

• Writing before listening. Without the transcript you get slogans.
• Writing for the boss. The reader is a stranger with a problem. Write for them.
• Packing in every achievement. Awards and accreditations belong in a list, not in the story.
• Using the same words as everyone else. If it appears on a competitor's site, change it.
• Over-editing the life out. After the third round of changes, check whether the odd, human detail is still there. If not, put it back.
• Leaving it unfinished. A story half written sits on the site for years. Set a date, finish it, then improve it.

How do you check that it works?

Run three checks before you call it done.

• The read-aloud test. Does every sentence sound like something a person would say?
• The retell test. Ask someone to read it once, then tell you what it said. What they remember is what's working.
• The swap test. Replace your company name with a competitor's. If the story still makes sense, it's too vague.

For a deeper set of tests, see what makes a good brand story.

How long does it take to write one?

Less than you'd think, once you've got the raw material. An hour of recorded conversation, an hour or two to transcribe and highlight, and a couple of hours to draft and edit. Most of the delay is waiting for people's time and for approvals. If a story has to pass through five reviewers, it will lose most of its character on the way, so I'd keep sign-off to the person whose story it is plus one other.

What if you're not a writer?

You don't need to be. This approach suits people who aren't, because the work is listening and cutting, not composing. If you can hold a conversation and tell which bits are interesting, you can write a brand story. And if the thought of it still makes you freeze, talk to someone who'll ask the questions for you.

Once you have the story, how to tell a brand story covers what to do with it: who tells it, in what format and where it goes. The whole series sits together in the complete guide to brand storytelling. And if you'd like help drawing your story out, on the page or on camera, get in touch.