Brand Storytelling: Why the Best Brand Stories Are Earned

I love stories. I love books because I love stories. I love movies for the same reason, though I admit some movies seem to have lost their story somewhere between the explosions and the third sequel. I’m an actor, a director, and a writer, and when you get right down to it, all three professions involve doing essentially the same thing: telling stories. Finding something worth saying and figuring out how to say it so somebody else will want to listen.

A couple of Saturdays ago, I found myself at a farmers’ market, clutching a cup of hot coffee, pulling my hat down over my ears, and contemplating the wisdom of standing outside in weather that seemed personally offended by my presence. I’d bought a pastry, which helped considerably, and was looking for someplace to sit when I noticed a man in a stovepipe hat setting up a microphone and a chair. A small crowd drifted toward him, mostly children and their parents, and I gathered he was about to tell some stories.

Now, I like a good story, but I wasn’t particularly interested in sitting through a morning of children’s entertainment. I had coffee to drink, a pastry to eat, and a perfectly respectable amount of nothing to accomplish. Still, something about this fellow caught my attention. And he was a fellow. Not a dude, not a guy. With that hat and that long, well-kept beard, he was unmistakably a fellow.

He wasn’t advertising himself. He wasn’t standing in the middle of the market hollering for people to come hear his wonderful stories. He was simply getting ready. He adjusted his microphone, arranged his chair, looked out at the little gathering, and smiled. An ease about him captivated me. He knew we were waiting, but he didn’t seem especially concerned about making us wait. He had his own pace, and he intended to keep it. There was no arrogance in this, no suggestion that his time was more valuable than ours. He just seemed to know that whatever he was about to offer would be worth waiting for.

So I sat down.

And when he began to speak, something remarkable happened. Although he was telling stories primarily to children, I felt as though he was speaking directly to me. His stories were familiar, the sort of tales children have been hearing for generations, but there was something in the telling that made them feel fresh. He did voices. His eyes sparkled. He knew when to pause and when to let a moment breathe. And like those old Warner Bros. cartoons from the 1940s, there was something in the performance for the adults, too. The children were delighted, the parents could enjoy their coffee in relative peace, and I found myself sitting there with a half-eaten pastry, completely absorbed in a story I probably already knew.

The following Saturday, I went back. Not because I was desperate to hear another story. I went back because I wanted to hear him tell one.

And I’ve been thinking about that ever since.

The Difference Is in the Telling

I’ve spent a good portion of my life onstage telling stories that have been told thousands of times before. Shakespeare, for example, has been dead for more than four hundred years, and we’re still dragging his characters out of their graves, dressing them in everything from Elizabethan finery to leather jackets, and asking audiences to pay good money to watch people make the same terrible decisions they’ve been making since the 1590s. And audiences do. Happily. Sometimes they even come back for a second performance.

The words haven’t changed much, although there are directors determined to improve upon Shakespeare, which strikes me as an ambitious undertaking for someone who can’t get through the second act of Hamlet without checking their phone. But the people speaking those words change. Their experiences, their understanding of the world, the things they’ve loved and lost: all of that finds its way into the performance. Two actors can stand on the same stage, speak the same lines, and tell two entirely different stories. Neither is necessarily better than the other, but each brings something to the telling that the other simply cannot.

That’s what I recognized in the fellow at the farmers’ market. He wasn’t offering a new story. He was offering his particular way of telling one. Somewhere in his life, he’d learned how to hold an audience, how to make a child lean forward, and how to slip something into the telling that would make the adults smile. I don’t know where he learned those things, and I don’t need to. What mattered was that they were there, woven into the experience so naturally that I wasn’t thinking about technique. I was just listening.

That’s the great pleasure of a storyteller who knows what he’s doing. You stop noticing the machinery. You aren’t counting the pauses or admiring the cleverness of a particular voice. You’re no longer watching someone work at telling a story. You’re inside it, and for a little while, the rest of the world has the good manners to leave you alone.

I think that’s what we sometimes forget when we talk about originality. We become so concerned with finding something nobody has ever said before that we overlook the extraordinary possibilities in saying something familiar in a way nobody else can. The story doesn’t have to be new. The person telling it has to bring something of themselves to it, something earned through experience, curiosity, and an understanding of what matters.

And if that sounds suspiciously like the beginning of a conversation about branding, well, you’ve been reading my work long enough to know I was bound to get there eventually.

Before You Tell the Story, You Have to Know It

I spend much of my working life writing about brands, which may seem like an odd occupation for someone who’s spent so much time pretending to be other people onstage. But I’ve come to believe the two pursuits have far more in common than you might imagine. Both require an understanding of character, an appreciation for the circumstances that shaped that character, and a willingness to look beneath the surface to discover what makes someone behave the way they do.

At ThoughtLab, we call our approach Depth-Before-Design & Development, and I believe in it wholeheartedly. Before anyone starts choosing colors, arguing about fonts, or deciding whether a website needs a photograph of three suspiciously happy people gathered around a laptop, we need to understand the business we’re working with. And I don’t mean reading the About Us page and memorizing the mission statement. I mean getting to know the people who built the company, understanding what they believe, and discovering why they decided to do this particular thing with their lives instead of something else.

That last question matters most. Why?

Not the polished why that appears in a presentation alongside an inspirational photograph of a mountain at sunrise. The real why. The one that might be a little embarrassing, or complicated, or difficult to explain without telling a story that goes back twenty years. Maybe somebody saw a problem nobody else seemed interested in solving. Maybe they grew up watching a parent struggle with something and decided there had to be a better way. Or maybe they loved doing something so much they couldn’t imagine spending their lives doing anything else.

Whatever the reason, that’s where we begin to find a brand’s character. And character, as any actor worth his salt will tell you, isn’t something you establish by announcing it to the audience. It’s revealed through behavior, through choices, and through the things a person does when nobody is watching. You can put a crown on an actor’s head and call him a king, but if he doesn’t understand what it means to carry the weight of that crown, you’ve just got a dude in an expensive hat.

Which brings me back to our storyteller. I don’t know his history, and I don’t know what led him to that chair on a cold Saturday morning. But I do know that what he offered matched the promise he made simply by being there. His ease, his attention to his audience, and the pleasure he took in the telling all belonged to the same person. Nothing felt borrowed or manufactured.

That’s what Depth-Before-Design is meant to uncover. Not a clever way to make a business appear interesting, but the genuine qualities that make it interesting in the first place. Once you understand those qualities, the design has somewhere to come from. The language has something to say. And the story has a foundation strong enough to support everything built upon it.

The Story Has to Survive the Meeting

There’s an old saying that you should never meet your heroes. I’ve always thought that was a rather depressing piece of advice. Imagine spending your entire life admiring someone, finding inspiration in their work, believing they possess some extraordinary quality that sets them apart from the rest of humanity, only to discover they’re an insufferable bore who treats the waiter like something unpleasant they’ve found on the bottom of their shoe. Suddenly, all those years of admiration seem like a terrible investment.

Brands can do exactly the same thing to us.

We fall in love with their stories. We admire what they claim to believe, the values they say guide their decisions, and the wonderful things they promise to bring into our lives. We see their commercials, read their beautifully written websites, and begin to feel we’ve found a company that understands something important about the world. Perhaps even something important about us. And then one day, we actually have to do business with them. That’s when things get interesting, and not necessarily in a good way.

The company that tells us we’re family treats its employees like disposable office supplies. The business that proudly announces its commitment to personal service makes it virtually impossible to reach an actual person. The brand that assures us it cares deeply about our happiness seems far less interested in that happiness once we’ve handed over our credit card. That’s the danger of building a brand around a story that hasn’t been earned.

At ThoughtLab, digging deep isn’t about finding something interesting to put on a website. It’s about discovering what’s genuinely true about the business, what its people believe, and whether those beliefs show up in the way the company actually operates. Sometimes that process uncovers remarkable things nobody inside the organization has thought to talk about. Other times, it reveals a distance between what the business wants to be and what it currently is. Both discoveries are valuable, although I suspect one makes for a considerably more comfortable meeting.

Because a brand’s story doesn’t end when the advertising stops. It continues in every interaction, every decision, and every promise kept or broken. The people answering the phones are telling it. So are the people making the products and the people deciding what happens when something goes wrong. They may never have read the brand guidelines, but they’re contributing to the story all the same.

This is why I take such pleasure in writing about businesses that have done the difficult work of understanding themselves. There’s something liberating about telling a story you don’t have to defend against the evidence. You can explore its peculiarities, celebrate its convictions, and find the language that makes its character recognizable, without worrying that somebody is going to walk through the door tomorrow and discover you’ve been describing an entirely different company.

A good brand story shouldn’t require its audience to suspend disbelief once the commercial is over. It should become more convincing the closer people get to the business itself.

After all, the finest stories don’t fall apart when you step inside them. That’s when they truly come alive.

A Category of One Isn’t a Costume

One idea we return to often at ThoughtLab is becoming a category of one. Not simply being different from your competitors, but understanding what makes your business so distinctly itself that comparing it to another becomes a pointless exercise. And that matters, because there’s a world of difference between being different and being distinctive.

Anybody can be different. You can paint your building purple, dress your employees in medieval costumes, and replace the customary bowl of mints at the reception desk with a live ferret. People will certainly remember you, although I suspect the ferret may present some difficulties with your insurance company. But none of that tells us anything meaningful about who you are or why we should do business with you.

Distinctiveness has to come from somewhere deeper. It grows out of the beliefs, experiences, and decisions that have shaped a business over time. It’s found in the things a company does naturally, the choices it makes without consulting a marketing committee, and the qualities that would remain recognizable even if somebody took away its logo and repainted the building. Those are the things worth discovering, because a competitor can’t borrow them by hiring a different designer.

Think about our storyteller at the farmers’ market. Anyone could buy a stovepipe hat, set up a microphone, and start telling familiar stories to children. They might even do a perfectly respectable job of it. But they wouldn’t necessarily create the experience that brought me back the following Saturday. That experience belonged to this particular man: his ease with an audience, his understanding of the material, and whatever combination of talent and experience lets him make a familiar story feel worth hearing again.

The hat made him recognizable. The storytelling made him memorable. The experience made me return. That’s the difference between designing something to attract attention and building something that deserves it.

It’s also why discovering a brand’s depth can be far more demanding than making it look interesting. It’s relatively easy to invent a business personality. Give it a clever voice, an unexpected visual identity, and a few opinions that make it seem delightfully rebellious. But if that personality has no connection to the people running the company or how they conduct business, it’s a costume. Eventually, somebody has to take it off, and the person underneath may bear very little resemblance to the character we’ve been watching.

A category of one isn’t created by dressing a business up as something extraordinary. You discover it by finding what’s already extraordinary about it, understanding why it matters, and giving it a form other people can recognize.

When that happens, the story becomes more than a marketing campaign. It becomes an expression of character, one that can be told in different ways, by different people, without losing the truth at its center.

The Takeaway

I said at the beginning that I love stories, and I do. But I love finding a story worth telling even more. Something with enough truth, character, and humanity behind it that I can sit down and write without feeling as though I’m trying to sell somebody a perfectly ordinary horse by convincing them it’s a unicorn. I’ve done enough acting to know the difference between inhabiting a character and pretending to be one, and I have no desire to spend my working days putting horns on horses.

That’s one reason I believe so strongly in what we do at ThoughtLab. Depth-Before-Design isn’t a clever philosophy we adopted to stand out from other agencies. It’s a commitment to finding out who a business really is before we start telling the world who it claims to be. Sometimes that means asking uncomfortable questions, challenging assumptions, and discovering that the story everybody wants to tell isn’t quite the story they’ve earned the right to tell. That’s not a failure of the process. That’s the process doing its job.

And when we get it right, something wonderful happens. The story doesn’t belong exclusively to the agency that wrote it or the designers who gave it a visual identity. It belongs to the people who built the business, the people who work there, and eventually the customers who experience it for themselves. They begin telling it in their own words, not because somebody handed them a script, but because they’ve found something worth talking about. That’s when a brand becomes a category of one: not because it has declared itself different, but because people have experienced the difference and recognized it as real.

I don’t know whether the fellow in the stovepipe hat thinks about any of this. I rather hope he doesn’t. I like imagining that he simply gets up on Saturday mornings, gathers his stories, puts on his hat, and heads down to the farmers’ market because he loves what he does. He settles into his chair, takes his time, and gives a little gathering of children and their parents something worth listening to. And occasionally, he catches the attention of a grown man who should probably be doing something more productive with his Saturday morning.

That grown man came back the following week. That’s what a good story, told by someone who believes in it, can do.