012 min
How Chouinard Equipment told its Brand Story
In 1957 a young climber named Yvon Chouinard bought a used forge and taught himself to make steel pitons. A piton is a metal spike that a climber hammers into a crack in the rock to hold a rope. His pitons could be used more than once, word spread, and by 1970 Chouinard Equipment was the largest supplier of climbing hardware in the United States.
Then the company saw a problem its own product was causing. Climbers used the same popular routes again and again, and the repeated hammering wore the cracks down. The company acted on this, and in 1972 it explained its decision in its catalog.
The catalog opened with a statement about the mountains, not with a product. It said: "Mountains are finite, and despite their massive appearance, they are fragile." A few pages later it gave the new way of climbing a name. The catalog named the practice clean climbing: protecting a climb with only nuts and runners. A nut is a small metal wedge, also called a chock, that a climber sets in a crack by hand. A runner is a loop of strong tape or rope that connects the climber's rope to a placement. Nothing is hammered, so everything comes out again and the rock stays as it was.
The rest of this article follows this catalog, because each part of a brand story can be found in it.
021 min
Why readers believed the Chouinard Equipment Brand Story
A story that asks readers to change how they climb needs a reason to be believed, and the company had one. Chouinard and his partner Tom Frost decided to stop selling pitons, even though pitons made up 70% of the company's business. That figure comes from Matt Linderman's 2011 account of the catalog on Basecamp's Signal v. Noise blog.
In the same account, the new gear sold quickly. The piton business faded within a few months, and chocks sold faster than the company could make them.
The order matters. The decision came first and the story explained it. Anyone can doubt a sentence about values, but it is harder to doubt a company that has already given up most of its sales. A brand story that promises behavior the company has not yet shown is less believable.
031 min
What a Brand Story contains
Writers do not agree on one list of parts, but a common version has five: why the company exists, a hero, a conflict, a plan and a resolution. The why is the belief behind the company. The hero is the person the story is about. The conflict is the problem in that person's way. The plan is what the person is shown to do, and the resolution is how things end if they do it. HubSpot's guide names four parts instead: people, places, purpose and plot.
The 1972 catalog has all five. The belief is that the mountains are fragile, and the hero is the climber. The conflict is that climbers' own hardware was scarring the routes they love. The plan is to climb with nuts and runners, and the resolution is a rock left unchanged for the next climber.
Notice who the hero is. It is the climber, not the company. A 2017 book by Donald Miller, Building a StoryBrand, adapts classic story structure for marketing. Its model casts the customer as the hero and the brand as a guide. The company's own role is smaller and more useful: it shows that it understands the problem and it gives a clear plan, here by selling the gear that makes the plan possible.
041 min
Brand Story versus nearby ideas
Brand story is often mixed up with six nearby terms. Most of the difference is in what each one does with the story.
| Term | What it is | How it differs from a brand story |
|---|---|---|
| Brand storytelling | Telling the story in ads, videos, posts and talks | The story is the content; storytelling is the delivery |
| Brand narrative | The version told in one campaign or year | It changes often, while the brand story stays steady |
| Origin story | How the company began | One chapter of the brand story, and it is about the founder unless it shows the customer's problem |
| Mission statement | One sentence about purpose | It has no hero, conflict or plan |
| About page | A web page that describes the company | One place the story can appear, but often a description with no plot |
Two more neighbours describe how a company looks and sounds. Brand identity is the set of visual, verbal and behavioral signs that make a company recognizable. Tone of voice is how the words are chosen. Both shape how a brand story reads, but neither supplies one.
051 min
Types of Brand Story and ready-made templates
Harvard Business School Online describes brand storytelling as a way for a company to tell customers who it is, what it values and what it wants to say, through narrative. The same page sorts brand stories into five types. A functional story argues that the product is better for a job, as Mavi did when its story came to focus on a perfect fit, backed by a wider range of jean sizes and lengths. An underdog story admits that the company is small and shows its determination, as Nantucket Nectars did by printing its founding on each bottle. A lifestyle story offers a way of living, and Mavi's Maviterranean clothing line did that. A celebrity or influencer story uses the trust people already give to a person, as Gymshark's athlete partners do. A social mission story ties the company to a cause. The Chouinard Equipment catalog is closest to this last type.
Writers also borrow ready-made templates. A three-act structure has a setup, a confrontation and a resolution. The Before-After-Bridge formula describes the customer's situation before, the situation after, and the product as the link between them. Problem-Agitate-Solve names a problem, shows what it costs, then offers a fix. Simon Sinek's Golden Circle starts with why the company exists before it says how or what.
062 min
Narrative transportation and Brand Story
Why does a story change what people believe more than a list of claims? One explanation comes from the psychologists Melanie Green and Timothy Brock. In 2000 they proposed that readers can be transported into a story. They become so absorbed that they picture the scene, feel what the characters feel and stop attending to what is around them. The effect is called narrative transport.
Green and Brock tested whether this absorption changes beliefs. In the first of Green and Brock's four experiments, readers who were more absorbed in a story held more of the beliefs it implied and judged its main characters more favorably. Two later experiments repeated the effect, and when the researchers lowered absorption on purpose, the beliefs weakened.
Absorbed readers notice fewer errors
In their second experiment, readers who were more absorbed found fewer false notes in the story than readers who were less absorbed. A false note is a detail that does not fit. For a company this has two effects. A well-told story can lead readers to overlook small flaws, and readers will not always notice when a claim is wrong. The writer has to check every fact, because the audience may not.
A label of fiction changes little
Green and Brock also found that telling readers a story was true or invented made little difference to how absorbed they were or what they came to believe. The study used short stories and essays, not advertising, so treat this as a reason for care and not as proof about brands. Knowing that a story is marketing does not by itself protect the audience, so the facts inside it have to be right.
071 min
Brand Story and self-brand connection
The marketing researcher Jennifer Edson Escalas studied a different step: what a story does to the way a person relates to a brand. Her idea was that people make sense of their lives by fitting events into stories. A story told by a brand invites them to compare it with the stories they already hold. When the two match, the brand starts to feel like part of who they are. She called this a self-brand connection, meaning how far a person has built the brand into their sense of self.
In Escalas's 2004 experiment, people who followed a narrative ad closely reported stronger self-brand connections, and these connections went with warmer attitudes to the brand and stronger intentions to act. The result is a link between measures, not proof that the ad caused the attitude, and it comes from one experiment with narrative ads rather than a whole brand story. A climber who already worried about scarred routes is the kind of reader this process would fit.
082 min
Brand Story and memory
A brand story also has to be remembered, because people repeat only what they can recall. Two pieces of evidence are often given for this, and they are not equally good.
A classroom test of stories and statistics
Chip Heath teaches at Stanford University, and he and his brother Dan describe a classroom exercise in their book Made to Stick (2007). Students gave one-minute speeches arguing that non-violent crime is, or is not, a serious problem. The typical speech used 2.5 statistics, and only one student in ten told a story. Ten minutes later the students wrote down what they remembered, and 63% recalled the stories while only 5% recalled any single statistic. This was a classroom exercise reported in a book, not a published trial, but it shows the direction of the effect. The pattern is sometimes called the storytelling effect.
The 22 times figure
A popular figure holds that people recall a story as much as 22 times better than a plain fact. A Stanford leadership lab page about Jennifer Aaker's teaching says people remember stories as much as 22 times better than bare facts and figures. A writer on learning research who looked for the study behind the figure found it credited to the psychologist Jerome Bruner but never tied to a scholarly reference. Do not treat the number as a measurement. The Heath exercise is better evidence for the direction of the effect, and even that is a single classroom test.
092 min
How to write a Brand Story
The steps below depend on each other, so the order matters.
Learn who the story is for.
Talk to customers and read what they say about the problem. This comes first because every later step uses what you find here.
Find the conflict.
Name the problem in the customer's life that the company exists to solve. Choose the one that causes the most tension and that the company can truly relieve.
Cast the customer as the hero and the company as the guide.
This only works once step 2 has named a problem that belongs to the customer. If the problem is the company's, the company ends up as the hero by mistake.
State the plan and the ending.
Name the few steps the customer takes and what the situation looks like afterwards. Only promise what the company can deliver.
Add proof from the company's own actions.
A decision, a cost paid or a result gives evidence that the plan works. This needs step 4 first, because proof has to attach to a specific promise.
Cut it to one or two paragraphs that a person could repeat.
A story that staff cannot retell will change as many people retell it.
Test it.
Tell it to five or ten people from the audience and ask them to say it back. If they describe something else, revise the conflict or the casting before touching the wording.
101 min
Using a Brand Story consistently
Once the short version exists, it goes where customers and staff meet the company: the home page and About page, product pages, packaging, sales conversations, press material and the onboarding of new employees. Each place tells a different amount. Packaging may carry one sentence and a sales document a full page.
What must stay the same everywhere is the hero, the conflict and the belief. Campaigns can change every season, but the story changes only when the company's purpose, customer or product changes, for example when it enters a new market. Written guidelines help, because a story changes as many people retell it. They also cover the wording rules in the company's tone of voice and the signs in its brand identity, so the story reads in one voice.
111 min
When a company's conduct contradicts its Brand Story
A strong story has one more consequence: customers act on it, and they can later point to it. Volkswagen promoted its diesel cars in the United States as clean diesel. The US Federal Trade Commission charged Volkswagen's American arm with deceiving buyers through the advertising for its clean diesel cars, which contained software built to defeat emissions tests. The charge was announced in March 2016.
According to the FTC, the campaign ran through Super Bowl ads, social media and print advertising, and often aimed at environmentally conscious buyers. This is a limit of the concept. The same story that persuades buyers becomes evidence against the company when its conduct differs from it. A brand story is a set of promises, and conduct is the test of them.
121 min
How to measure a Brand Story
No single number measures a brand story. Use measures that match the three jobs it should do: be remembered, be believed and bring people back.
- Retelling test. Ask ten people from the audience to say, in their own words, what the company is for. Count how many name the belief and the customer's problem. You can run this today.
- Recall. Brand recall is the share of a target audience that thinks of the company without a prompt, or recognizes it from a list of names, measured by survey. Compare before and after the story is introduced.
- Sentiment. Read a sample of reviews, comments and survey answers and record the share that is positive and the share that is negative.
- Lifetime value and referral rate. Customer lifetime value is the total profit a customer brings over time, and the referral rate is the share who recommend the company. Both move slowly, so compare people who met the story with people who did not, over several months. A difference does not prove the story caused it.
131 min
Common Brand Story mistakes
- Teams assume the story is the company's history. The founding is the founder's story, and a reader has no reason to care until it shows the reader's own problem. The Chouinard Equipment catalog began with the rock, not with the founder.
- Teams assume a list of features is a plot. A feature list has no conflict, so nothing is at stake and nobody has a reason to read on.
- Teams assume a mission statement can serve as the story. A mission statement is one sentence of purpose with no hero and no plan.
- Teams assume values are enough. A story that promises more than the company does gives the audience something to check, and the company may fail the check.
142 min
Where the evidence on Brand Story is contested
Most guides say a brand story builds loyalty and distinguishes a company from its competitors. Part of that claim is disputed. Marketing Week columnist Mark Ritson wrote in 2022 that differentiation plays a smaller part in brand growth than older theory held, but that it still plays one. The view he describes comes from the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute for Marketing Science, whose research is associated with Byron Sharp, author of How Brands Grow. It points to a different driver of growth: being easy to think of and easy to buy, which it calls mental availability and physical availability.
Felipe Thomaz, a marketing professor at Oxford University's Said Business School, disagrees. In the same column he is reported as arguing that dropping differentiation from the theory damages the study of branding. Ritson's own conclusion is that both sides are partly right: differentiation plays a smaller role than older theory said, but it still plays one, and being easy to recall matters too.
This matters here because a brand story is mostly used to distinguish a company from competitors and to build an emotional tie. Until the dispute settles, treat the story first as a way to be remembered and second as a way to be admired. Choose a story simple enough to recall, and attach it to something recognizable, such as a name. Clean climbing did this: it was a short phrase that readers could repeat.
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Questions people ask
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How long should a brand story be?
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Should a brand story change when the company changes?
§10 sources
Sources
Harvard Business School Online, "What Is a Brand Story?", with comments from Professor Jill Avery.
Storyflow, "What Is a Brand Story? The Complete Guide".
Matt Linderman, "On Writing: The 1972 Chouinard Catalog that changed a business and climbing forever", Signal v. Noise, 2011.
Melanie C. Green and Timothy C. Brock, "The role of transportation in the persuasiveness of public narratives", Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 2000 (abstract at the University at Buffalo).
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Jennifer Edson Escalas, "Narrative Processing: Building Consumer Connections to Brands", Journal of Consumer Psychology, 2004.
Manner of Speaking, "Making it Stick: Tell stories", 2009, quoting Chip and Dan Heath's Made to Stick.
Stanford women's leadership lab, "Harnessing the Power of Stories".
Intela, "Storytelling Works. Doesn't It?", 2020.
US Federal Trade Commission, "FTC Charges Volkswagen Deceived Consumers with Its Clean Diesel Campaign", press release of March 2016, as distributed by PR Newswire.
Mark Ritson, "In the battle between salience and differentiation, Bothism wins", Marketing Week, October 2022.
