A Brand Is the Story They Tell About You

Ask a dentist what her brand is. Chances are you'll get a logo, two colors, and a line about gentle care, and the practice across the street uses the same line. Ask her patients and you'll get something else. The office that found the cracked molar two other dentists missed. The dentist who calls you herself the night after a root canal. That second answer is the brand, and it's the only one that survives the drive home. Read on for how to find yours and tell it the same way on the site, the truck, and the reply to a one-star review.

Nobody Retells a Logo

A brand is what a customer can say about you a week later, to somebody who was never on your site. Nobody walks in from a service call and says, "Honey, they were licensed, bonded, and insured." People retell stories. We're wired that way. A story needs a character who wants something badly, something in the way, and the moment where it finally gives.

Think back to the Budweiser puppy. A golden retriever at an adoption farm keeps sneaking over to the Clydesdale barn next door. Then he gets adopted and driven off down the road, until the horses trot out and block the car. The morning after that Super Bowl, people called it "the one with the puppy and the horse," and we all knew which one. Want, obstacle, release, retold in one breath. That's the test your brand has to pass.

Find What You're Fighting For

I've said before that a brand is a character with a want. That still holds for a plumber, a med spa, or a law office. The catch is that every competitor in town has the same want, which is to get hired. But the want has to be bigger than the invoice. Liquid Death didn't set out to sell water, it set out to make water as fun to hold as a beer. The obstacle was that water is the dullest thing in the store. The fight is what people retell. At a party, people bring up the tallboy. They quote the line about murdering your thirst.

What's your version of that fight? For a financial advisor it might be getting a schoolteacher to sixty without a second job, with thirty years of unopened statements and a jumpy market in the way. A remodeler's might be a kitchen that's done before Thanksgiving, which means getting past subcontractors, permits, and a backordered range. The want gives your brand a direction. The obstacle gives it tension, and tension is what keeps a stranger reading past the first screen. The release, the retirement party or the first dinner in the new kitchen, is what gets them to call.

Make Them Care

The customer also has to care about who's in the fight. Interest comes first. Stand apart from the other vans on the street with something the rest of them can't say. In Schitt's Creek the Roses lose everything and roll into a motel town still dressed for a gala. You can't look away from them. For you, that's whatever you always do that the competition won't bother with.

Sympathy is the simplest move. Say out loud what's hard about your customer's situation, the leak that only shows up when it rains, the tired face in the bathroom mirror every morning, the custody calendar nobody will commit to. We lean toward anyone who names our problem before we do. Empathy is the hard one. Your brand has to get past the obstacle in a way only you would, and that's where the retellable detail lives. The dentist calls at nine at night. That's what makes her a character.

Tell It the Same Way Everywhere

Branding comes down to picking one of those stories and refusing to change it. When Bill Bernbach's DDB first put the writer and the art director in one room, the point was one idea for the words and the picture. Most small business brands get built the opposite way, with a logo off one website, a tagline somebody's cousin came up with, and a homepage from a freelancer who never heard about the molar. The customer ends up hearing three different stories and retells none of them.

So who's in charge of the story? Both of you. If you're the freelancer, ask the owner what customers tell their friends about them. Then build the logo, the homepage, and the voicemail greeting out of that one answer. If you're the owner, your job is to give the same answer every time anyone asks, including the kid who answers your phone.

Back when I freelanced at 72andSunny, there were orange bikes anyone in the building could grab and ride around Playa Vista. Plenty of agencies had great work on the walls. The bikes are what stuck with me. Chances are you have a detail like that too. You just don't know yet that it's the brand.

Pick the Story

Back to the dentist. Her logo and her colors are fine, but what her patients repeat is the molar story, because it has somebody who wanted an answer, two offices that couldn't find one, and a release when she did. A brand is the story people tell about you. They'll tell one whether you choose it or not, so choose it. Then tell it everywhere.

Steven Townsend is the co-founder of Scowty and a creative consultant living in Los Angeles, with experience at agencies including 72andSunny, Saatchi & Saatchi, and TBWA\Chiat\Day. He's written Super Bowl spots and an Emmy-nominated series, and integrates AI tools like Claude, Midjourney, and Runway into creative workflows for brands including The North Face, Toyota, Genesis, and DoorDash.