Copywriting · 21 September 2026
The story is already in the business
Most brands do not need a narrative invented for them. They need someone to notice the one they have.
Adapted from a longer piece in the archive.
Brand storytelling has a reputation problem, and it earned it. Too much of it is fiction bolted onto a company that was doing something perfectly interesting already.
The better version is not invention, it is attention. The engineer who spent four years solving a problem nobody else thought was a problem. The decision to keep a factory open in a place where the economics said close it. The product name that comes from the founder's grandmother. These are not marketing assets when you find them — they are just facts about a business — and that is exactly why they work.
The job of the writer is to go looking, ask better questions than the brief contains, and come back with the thing nobody inside the company thought was worth mentioning because it is Tuesday and it is simply how they do things.
If a story has to be invented, that is worth knowing too. It usually means the interesting thing is somewhere else in the business and nobody has been down there to look.