Storytelling is really big in branding. Everything has a story, an arc, a main character, and on and on. Brands don’t say to customers, “Here’s a story, buy this product or service, or you’ll get your ass kicked.” Why? Two reasons. One, that’s not something you say to a customer. Threatening has never been a good sales technique. Two, because it’s not really a story.
My father had this little quirk. Whenever we kids did something wrong, he would pull us aside and say, “Let me tell you a story.” Then he’d basically say, if you do that again, I’m gonna kick your ass. Simple, clear, to the point. However, as I got older, I began to realize he wasn’t really telling us a story. A story has a hero, a journey, guides, and lessons. My father’s stories had him kicking our asses.
Did we go on a journey? Nope. Did we have guides in these stories? No. It was Dad kicking the asses of his kids. Not a story, well certainly not a good story. There were never any surprises. A mean character never had a change of heart. A main character never discovered their purpose. His stories could be boiled down to seven words: “Do it again, I’ll kick your ass.” But no matter what happened, Dad would always start with, “Let me tell you a story.”
Storytelling is really big in branding. Everything has a story, an arc, a main character, and on and on. Brands don’t say to customers, “Here’s a story, buy this product or service, or you’ll get your ass kicked.” Why? Two reasons. One, that’s not something you say to a customer. Threatening has never been a good sales technique. Two, because it’s not really a story. “Once upon a time, I got my ass kicked, so I bought a jet ski” is not a good story.
As a copywriter, I find story important. Finding a brand’s story, the story of a logo, and all sorts of storytelling go into branding and marketing. But from time to time, I have to wonder whether storytelling is really the be-all and end-all I was taught to believe. Does everything need a story, or have we started calling everything a story because it makes the work sound deeper than it is?
Not Everything Is a Story
That’s the thing about the word story. It can make almost anything sound more important than it is. A company history becomes a story. A mission statement becomes a story. A homepage becomes a story. Suddenly, every piece of brand communication is being treated as if it needs a main character, an emotional arc, and a little music swelling beneath it.
But sometimes a thing is just a thing. A product description is there to describe the product. An About page is there to tell people who you are, what you do, and why you exist. A service page needs to explain the service before it takes anyone on a journey. There’s nothing wrong with that. In fact, there’s something kind of refreshing about it.
The problem is not storytelling. The problem is calling everything storytelling because the word makes the work feel deeper. Story sounds warm, human, and meaningful, so we keep reaching for it, even when what we actually have is a message, a claim, a promise, an explanation, or a perfectly useful bit of information.
And those things matter too. A message can be powerful. A promise can mean something. An explanation can be generous. Information can be exactly what someone needs. Not every sentence has to carry the burden of myth.
A real story has movement. Something changes. Someone wants something. Something gets in the way. There’s pressure, consequence, discovery, or at least some kind of shift from where we began. Without that, you may have good copy. You may have smart positioning. You may have a clean paragraph that does its job beautifully. But you probably don’t have a story.
Why Brands Love the Word So Much
There’s a reason storytelling became such a big word in branding. It sounds warmer than strategy, deeper than messaging, and more human than content. Nobody wants to sit in a room and say, “Let’s organize some useful information in a way people can understand.” That may be the right thing to do, but it doesn’t exactly make the lights flicker.
Story gives the work a little glow. A product can start to feel like part of something bigger. A company history can become more than a timeline. An About page can carry emotional weight rather than just listing names, dates, values, and a polished team photo.
And honestly, some of that is good. Story helps people care. It gives a brand shape. A founder’s frustration becomes a reason for being. A customer senses there’s a human mind behind the business, not just a group of people trapped forever inside a slide deck.
The trouble starts when the word becomes automatic. Suddenly, brand exercises have to uncover the story, copy has to tell the story, and presentations promise a narrative arc even when the real job is much simpler than that. At a certain point, story stops being a useful tool and becomes a fancy label we slap on anything that has more than two paragraphs.
That’s when the word begins to blur. Story starts to mean message, positioning, brand platform, or whatever happens to be on the screen when someone says, “What’s the story here?”
And maybe that’s the real problem. Not that brands care about story too much, but that we’ve made the word so large it can barely do its job anymore.
A Real Story Needs Tension
A real story needs something to push against. It doesn’t have to be dramatic in the movie trailer sense. Nobody needs to be running through an airport, chasing a stolen briefcase, or standing in the rain realizing they’ve misunderstood love for the last twenty years. But something has to be unsettled. Someone has to want something, and it has to be difficult enough to make us care what happens next. This is also where my father’s stories fell a little short. There was tension, technically. I’ll give him that. But tension is more than when, where, and how I might get my ass kicked if I did the thing again. That was more of a warning with stage direction. It had stakes, sure, but not much discovery. There was no mystery, no turn, no deeper meaning hiding under the threat. The whole thing started with “let me tell you a story” and ended exactly where you knew it would end.
That’s where a lot of brand storytelling gets thin. The language says story, but the actual material says summary. A company was founded. A product was created. A team believed in quality. A service was built to help people. All of that may be true, and some of it may even be useful, but it doesn’t become a story just because we put it in chronological order and add a few warm adjectives.
The tension is usually hiding somewhere else. It’s in the thing the founder couldn’t stop noticing. It’s in the problem everyone else had learned to tolerate. It’s in the frustration that kept showing up until someone finally said, there has to be a better way to do this. That’s where the story begins to breathe a little. Not in the date the company opened its doors, but in the reason those doors needed to open in the first place.
This matters because people can feel the difference. They may not sit there analyzing structure or asking where the inciting incident is, because thankfully, most people have better things to do. But they can tell when something has weight. They can tell when a brand is circling something real instead of decorating a timeline. They can tell when the words are pointing to actual human pressure, not just arranging facts into a prettier shape.
That’s why tension matters. Without it, you may have a nice origin paragraph. You may have a polished About page. You may have a neat little sequence of events that moves from “we saw a need” to “we built a solution” to “now we’re passionate about helping customers.” But story needs more than movement from one sentence to the next. It needs a reason to keep listening.
Sometimes Clarity Beats Storytelling
This is where brands can get themselves into trouble. They take something that needs to be clear and try to make it feel profound. A simple point gets wrapped in a journey. A useful answer gets buried under so much atmosphere that the customer has to dig through the story just to figure out what’s being offered. Not every brand moment needs that. A product page may just need to explain the product. A service page may need to say what the service is, who it helps, and why it matters. A pricing page may need to be a pricing page, where the real hero isn’t the founder or the bold new future of the industry. It’s the price being easy to find. There’s nothing small about clarity. In fact, clarity can be one of the most generous things a brand offers. It respects the person on the other side. It says, " We know you’re busy. We know you came here for a reason. We’re not going to make you wander through our emotional landscape before we tell you what we do.”
That doesn’t mean the writing has to be dry. It doesn’t mean the brand has to become a vending machine with a logo. Clear doesn’t have to mean flat. It can still have voice, warmth, and a point of view. It can still feel human. It just doesn’t have to pretend every sentence is part of some grand narrative arc.
Sometimes the strongest copy is not the copy that tells the biggest story. It’s the copy that knows exactly what job it has, does that job well, and gets out of the way before it starts wearing a cape.
The Danger of Story-Shaped Fog
When brands force story where it doesn’t belong, the writing starts to get foggy. Simple ideas stretch into big emotional claims. Clear points become soft and rounded. Everything starts to sound important, but not always useful. You can feel the copy trying very hard to mean something, even when the thing underneath it might have been stronger if someone had just said it plainly.
That’s how you end up with brand language that sounds good until you ask what it actually means. “Our journey began with a simple belief.” “We’re redefining what’s possible.” “We exist to empower people to live better.” None of these are automatically bad, but they become a problem when they float above the real thing. What belief? What possibility? Better how? For whom? In what actual way?
Story-shaped fog happens when brands confuse emotional language with emotional truth. Instead of making the idea more specific, they make the language bigger. The message gets dressed up, but it doesn’t get clearer.
And people feel that too. Maybe they don’t stop and think, this brand has confused narrative framing with strategic clarity. That would be a strange thing to think while shopping for socks or looking for a dentist. But they can feel when the words are doing too much. They can feel when a brand is asking for emotional investment it hasn’t earned yet.
A real story reveals something. Fog hides something. And if the audience has to keep pushing through all that mood just to understand what the brand actually does, the story is not helping. It’s getting in the way.
The Better Question
Maybe the better question is not always, “What’s the story?” Maybe the better question is, “What is this really?”
Because once you ask that, the work gets more honest. Maybe there really is a story. Maybe there’s a real tension, a meaningful shift, and a reason to care. But at least now the story has to prove it belongs there.
But maybe it’s not a story. Maybe it’s just a message, a promise, or one clean sentence that tells people what they need to know.
That doesn’t make it less valuable. It might make it more valuable. The job is not to turn everything into a story. The job is to understand what each piece of communication needs to do, then let it do that thing as clearly and honestly as possible.
The answer might be story, strategy, or plain language with a little life in it. The real skill is knowing the difference.
The Takeaway
Storytelling still matters. I believe that. This isn’t an argument against story, and I don’t want it to be. Stories help people understand. They help people remember. They give shape to things that might otherwise feel scattered or flat. A good brand story can carry belief, tension, purpose, personality, and a reason to care all at once.
But not everything is a story. Some things are messages, promises, or useful pieces of information standing there, doing honest work, asking not to be dragged into a hero’s journey against their will.
That’s where brands need to be more careful. When story is real, use it. When the tension is there, shape it. When there’s a human reason behind the brand, bring it forward and let people feel it. But when clarity would serve the audience better, don’t bury it under narrative just because “storytelling” sounds more important in the meeting.
At ThoughtLab, we spend a lot of time helping brands find the difference. Sometimes there’s a story worth uncovering. Other times, the better work is sharpening the message and stripping away the fog until the idea is clear enough to use.
Because the goal is not to call everything a story. The goal is to say the thing in the way it deserves to be said.
