Ask a company for their strategy and they’ll probably have a slide. Ask for their brand story and you’ll get a mix of slogans, origin stories, and values posters. All of them useful; but neither together nor individually do they do the same job as a brand story.

A brand story is the connective tissue between your culture and your commercial ambition. It’s the narrative that says: here’s who we are, what we believe, where we’re going, and how we behave, and it needs to resonate inside and out.

It connects the business strategy with the cultural DNA. It tells people what to expect from you and what you expect of them. It’s the glue that holds a pitch deck, a purpose statement, or poster together and makes them human.

So why does it matter? Because scale brings noise. As companies grow across products, geographies, and markets, the risk is fragmentation. Everyone starts telling their own version of the story. And when that happens, audiences, whether they be employees, investors, brokers, or clients, start to disengage. The business could become harder to follow and harder to believe.

Most people think of brand stories as tools for marketing or investor relations - outward-facing assets. But the best brand stories start inside, reflecting the lived experience of the people delivering it. Get that right, and you have something that functions as both mirror and megaphone: it rallies your team and signals your direction externally. If both those things aren't aligned, you risk sounding hollow, or simply confusing.

A strong brand story solves that. It gives people a shared language and a consistent direction. It sharpens your positioning, energises your culture, and strengthens your reputation.

So how do you create one? Here are 4 steps towards a brand story:

1. Review what already exists. Interview key voices. Spot tensions between what’s said and what’s believed.

2. Bring together internal cohorts from across the business. Layer in selected external voices, such as clients, customers or partners, to test the story’s resonance. Listen for patterns, contradictions, and sparks of energy across both groups.

3. Craft a tight, ownable story: one that reflects the business as it is, not just how it wants to be seen.

4. Test it with stakeholders. Pressure-test it in market. Refine the tone, tighten the structure, and land it.

A good brand story is clear, credible, and compelling, and most importantly relatable and shareable. It’s about finding your business’s truth, saying it well, and using that to help every part of the business grow, and all in the same direction.

Next up (tomorrow) - why your brand story should start from the inside.