Why do you think your customer cares about your story?

There is a slightly inconvenient truth about brand storytelling which, given that I run a business largely built around helping companies tell better stories, I should probably keep to myself: your customer does not care about your story.

At least, not simply because it happened to you.

They do not automatically care that you were founded in 2014, that the idea started around a kitchen table, that two former colleagues decided there had to be a better way, or that your leadership team has 87 years of combined experience, a statistic which is often presented as though the customer might pause, do the maths and feel reassured by the sheer volume of employment involved.

None of those things are necessarily uninteresting. They only become useful when the person hearing them understands why they matter.

This is where a lot of B2B storytelling goes wrong, because companies naturally start with themselves.

We were founded. We grew. We developed. We expanded. We won an award and somebody took a photograph of everyone standing near the logo.

All perfectly legitimate company history, though not necessarily what anyone outside the company cares most about.

The better question is not simply, what happened to us? It is: what does what happened to us help our customer understand about their own problem?

Imagine a cybersecurity business whose story begins with a highly experienced specialist leaving an established company to create a new platform after decades in the industry. There is nothing wrong with that, although there is a good chance your potential customer has just read something very similar on another cybersecurity website.

Start instead with the moment they recognise.

Imagine that same cybersecurity founder had spent years watching businesses buy more tools, add more dashboards and still struggle to understand where their real vulnerabilities were, until eventually they decided the answer probably wasn’t another platform nobody wanted to log into, but a simpler way of seeing what actually needed fixing.

That story matters to the customer because there is a good chance they have noticed exactly the same problem.

Suddenly the founder’s story is not simply, “I left my job and started a cybersecurity company.” It is, “I kept seeing this problem; you may well be experiencing it too, and I built the business to solve it.”

Now the story has somewhere to go.

The founders’ experience can still matter, and the technology can still be explained, but the story starts with a truth the customer understands rather than a biography they have been asked to care about.

You see the same thing in professional services, where businesses often end up describing themselves in language so broad it could belong to almost anyone: “We combine deep sector expertise with innovative thinking to unlock sustainable growth.”

Which sounds so overly polished it ends up telling the customer very little about why you exist.

The more interesting story usually sits underneath it, in the thing you kept seeing go wrong. Perhaps you had spent years watching perfectly good strategies fall apart the moment they reached the people expected to deliver them, so you built a business around closing that gap between the impressive deck and what actually happens on Monday morning.

That is a story a potential customer can recognise, because there is a decent chance they have sat through the impressive deck too.

Case studies are perhaps where this matters most. The standard format gives us a challenge, a solution and a result, while everything awkward, uncertain or human is polished away.

The client wanted growth. We applied our methodology. Growth happened. Everyone was delighted.

What tends to be far more interesting is what came before the neat result. What had they already tried? What were people frustrated by? What did they originally think the problem was? What assumption turned out to be wrong?

A software company telling me it reduced reporting time by 40 per cent gives me a statistic. Telling me the finance team previously spent the first two days of every month manually reconciling six spreadsheets gives me a problem I can actually picture.

The 40 per cent suddenly means something.

The same principle applies to founder stories. “I left my corporate job because I wanted more freedom” may be true, although the more interesting bit is what you had noticed, what kept frustrating you, what customers were struggling with and what you believed could be done differently.

Your experience provides the credibility, but their problem provides the relevance.

There is a very simple question I come back to when looking at any brand story: so what?

“We have worked in this industry for 25 years.”

So what?

“We operate in five markets.”

So what?

“Our founders met while working at one of the world’s biggest agencies.”

Very nice. So what?

The useful part is the answer.

Twenty-five years might mean you have watched technologies, trends and terminology come and go while the underlying customer problem has barely changed. Five markets might mean you understand exactly why a strategy that works beautifully in London falls apart when somebody tries to reproduce it unchanged somewhere else.

The fact stays the same, but the meaning changes, and that distinction matters most.

Facts tell people what happened to you, but stories help people understand why it matters to them.

So, the next time you are writing an About page, a pitch, a case study, a founder post, or the section of the website literally titled “Our Story”, ask yourself what the customer recognises in it, what is at stake for them and what changes because you exist.

Then ask the slightly less comfortable question: why should they care?