Once upon a time, in a shophouse office off Geylang Road, a man called Rahman was told he needed a brand story.
He is invented, so don’t go looking for him. But you have met him. His grandmother began blending spices in 1971, he now supplies restaurants and a few supermarkets, and an agency he paid has just handed him a page that opens: Founded with a passion for quality. Rahman read it twice, felt nothing, and put it in a drawer.
That page is not a story. It is a claim in fancy dress. Brand storytelling is the craft of expressing what a brand stands for through narrative: a character who wants something, a tension that stands in the way, a choice made under pressure, and a change that people remember and repeat. Remove any one of those and you are left with a brochure.
What follows is how Rahman learned the difference, with a few real brands turning up along the way, as strangers do in any decent tale.
Chapter one: in which nothing happens
Rahman’s first draft had everything except an event. Heritage, passion, quality, family. Nouns doing the work that verbs should do.
Stories run on trouble. Somebody wants something and cannot easily get it, and we lean in to see what they will do. Corporate copy scrubs the problem out because problems feel off-brand. Out goes the one thing an audience was ever going to notice.
Consider what John Lewis did with “The Long Wait”, its Christmas advert of 2011. A small boy drags himself through December, willing the days to pass. We think we know why.
On Christmas morning he ignores his own presents, fetches a parcel he has wrapped himself and carries it to his parents. The impatience was never greed. It was the ache of wanting to give.
Tension, choice, change. The advert sells nothing in particular, yet everyone watching understands what kind of shop John Lewis wants to be. The retailer had been making Christmas films since 2007; this was the one that set the template for a decade of festive tearjerkers, its own and everyone else’s.
John Lewis’s "The Long Wait": tension, choice and change in ninety seconds.
Chapter two: a parable from Bangkok
Weeks later, at a cousin’s wedding (in stories, wisdom tends to arrive at weddings), Rahman sat beside a creative director. Hearing his problem, she asked whether he had seen a Thai insurance advert. He had not. She found it on her phone.
“Unsung Hero”, made for Thai Life Insurance by Ogilvy & Mather Bangkok in 2014, follows a man through his ordinary days.
He moves a pot plant so the water can reach it. He helps a street vendor heave her cart onto the pavement. He feeds a stray dog, leaves bananas for an elderly neighbour and gives money to a homeless mother and her daughter.
Onlookers shake their heads. He gains nothing he could put in a bank. The film closes by asking viewers what, in their own lives, they want most.
Nothing is sold. Yet the insurer’s position is unmistakable: the returns that matter most cannot be counted, and a life insurer exists to protect exactly those. Within a fortnight the film had travelled far beyond Thailand. It was built as a parable, not a pitch.
Thai Life Insurance’s "Unsung Hero" is a parable, not a pitch.
“So the story isn’t about the product,” Rahman said.
“It’s about what the product believes,” she replied. “After that, the product has to live up to it.”
Isn’t storytelling just a posh word for making things up?
Rahman’s accountant thought so, and he has company. Among engineers and founders especially, “storytelling” smells of spin, as if clever phrasing were taking credit owed to a good product, a friend’s recommendation or plain luck. Telling stories, after all, has always meant inventing things.
The best reply comes from brands that backed their narrative with something solid. On Black Friday 2011, Patagonia took a full-page advertisement in The New York Times under the headline “Don’t Buy This Jacket”. It set out what its R2 fleece cost the planet to make, down to the water used in production, and asked readers to think twice before buying.
A cynic might call that reverse psychology. But the advert was tied to the Common Threads Initiative, which committed the company to repairing gear, helping customers resell it and taking back worn-out kit for recycling.
The story had receipts.
Now set it beside Dove’s “Real Beauty Sketches” of 2013. An FBI-trained forensic artist, Gil Zamora, drew women from behind a curtain, first from their own descriptions and then from a stranger’s. The strangers’ versions were kinder and more accurate.
The film won the Titanium Grand Prix at Cannes and spread across the world. It was also taken apart: only a handful of the women filmed made the final cut, and critics argued that a film about self-image still judged women by their looks. Same craft, same reach, and a reminder that audiences will audit any story that claims to be true.
Rahman wrote the lesson on a napkin. A brand story can be dramatised and lit beautifully. It cannot be invented.
Who should be the hero, the founder or the customer?
His second draft starred himself: the struggling grandson, the dying trade, the late nights at the grinder. It was better, because something was finally at stake. It was also, his wife observed, rather a lot of Rahman.
Every brand reaches this fork, and both paths can work. Founder myths succeed when the founder’s struggle stands in for something the listener cares about.
Airbnb’s founders, deep in credit-card debt in 2008, designed and sold boxes of election-themed cereal, “Obama O’s” and “Cap’n McCain’s”, to keep the company alive. No guest books a flat because of that cereal. Investors and journalists retell it anyway, because it shows a specific, slightly mad stubbornness that a values page could only assert.
Warby Parker’s origin works for another reason. One co-founder, Dave Gilboa, lost his glasses on a backpacking trip and was stunned by what replacements cost; the company launched selling frames for about US$95. His irritation is the customer’s irritation. The founder stands in for the buyer, which makes the founder story a customer story in disguise.
Heritage is a founder myth mellowed by age. Old Chang Kee began as a curry puff stall in 1956, and its puffs came to be named after the nearby Rex cinema. Han Keen Juan bought the business in 1986 and built the chain of kiosks found across the island today.
In 2018 the company opened a flagship coffee house on Mackenzie Road, near where the Rex puffs made their name. No manifesto required.
Chapter three: the brand as the guide
There is a third path, and it is the hardest to take, because it asks the brand to step out of the spotlight.
Google’s “Reunion”, released in India in November 2013, follows Baldev, an elderly man in Delhi who was separated from his boyhood friend Yusuf, in Lahore, at Partition in 1947. Baldev’s granddaughter uses search to trace the sweet shop Yusuf’s family ran, contacts his grandson and arranges for the two old men to meet.
The granddaughter is the hero. The friendship is the prize. Google is the instrument in her hand, demonstrated in nearly every scene and celebrated in none. The film moved audiences on both sides of the border, and nobody came away unsure what the product does.
In Google’s "Reunion", the brand is the guide, not the hero.
A working rule emerged for Rahman. Let the founder take the lead only when the founder’s problem is the customer’s problem. Otherwise, give the lead role to the customer and cast the brand as the guide who knows the way, like the old mentor in every quest who hands over the map and then steps aside.
Can a good story rescue a bad product?
No. The most celebrated story in the toy industry proves it, the long way round.
In 2003 Lego suffered what it called the most serious financial crisis in its history, after years of drifting away from its core. The recovery that began in 2004 was unglamorous: cut the sprawl, go back to the brick. Only once that was working did the story arrive.
The Lego Movie, released by Warner Bros. in February 2014, took around US$470 million worldwide, and its plot is Lego arguing with itself. A tyrant called Lord Business plans to freeze his world in place with a tube of glue.
In the final act the film cuts to the real world, where a father is gluing his sets together so his son cannot rebuild them. Instructions versus imagination: the company’s own dilemma, recast as a family comedy.
The order matters. Fix the product, then tell the story. A story told before the product has earned it is a promise that will break in public.
Chapter four: the rewrite
Rahman opened the drawer and began again, with a method this time rather than a mood.
He found the villain. Not a competitor; a problem. For his restaurant clients it was the cook who leaves and takes the recipe with him, so the rendang tastes different on Tuesday from how it tasted on Monday. Rahman’s blends exist so that the dish tastes the same whoever is on shift.
He chose the hero. The second-generation hawker, quietly terrified of being the one who lost her mother’s recipe.
He found the choice that cost something. In 1998 his grandmother turned down a supermarket contract that would have required her to cut the share of freshly ground spice in her blends. She lost the account. She kept every restaurant that bought from her. That decision, not the word “quality”, is the brand.
He told it at three lengths. One sentence for the label. Thirty seconds for a trade fair. Three minutes for a film or an About page. Same bones each time, more flesh as the room allows.
He committed to repeating it. For years. A story improves with each telling, as you notice where listeners drift and quietly drop those lines.
Beneath the method sits some consumer psychology Rahman never needed to read to use. People store and recall information as stories, and they cast brands as props or characters in the stories they tell about themselves.
A narrative invites the listener inside it, and the brands present in that imagined scene are the ones they come to feel close to. The hawker who buys Rahman’s blend is not buying turmeric. She is buying the right to say her mother’s recipe outlived her.
How do you know if your brand story is working?
You listen for it coming back. A story that works gets retold by people you did not pay, in words you did not write: the sales rep recounting the 1998 decision to a new client, the customer explaining to a friend why she switched.
The quicker checks take minutes.
Can a new hire tell it after a week? Does it contain a decision, or only adjectives? Could a competitor tell it with their name swapped in? Would it survive a fact-check?
Rahman’s new About page opens with his grandmother turning down the supermarket. It is shorter than the agency’s draft and, being true, slightly less flattering.
Orders have not doubled. But last month a chef in Jurong rang to ask whether the story was real. That is usually how a brand story starts to work: someone cares enough to ask.
Questions from the back of the room
What is the difference between a brand story and a brand narrative?
A brand story is a specific account with characters, tension and a resolution, such as a founding decision or a customer’s experience. A brand narrative is the larger, ongoing idea that many such stories express over time.
Does a B2B company need brand storytelling?
Yes, because business buyers are people weighing risk, and a concrete story about a problem solved is easier to remember and repeat inside their organisation than a specification sheet. The client’s team is usually the hero, with the supplier as the guide.
How long should a brand story be?
Keep it ready at several lengths: one sentence, roughly thirty seconds spoken, and a fuller version of two or three minutes. The structure stays the same at every length; only the detail changes.
Every hero needs a guide, and if your own story is still sitting in a drawer, Firefish’s brand strategy team can help you find the chapter worth telling.
