Blog · Company Storytelling
The marketing strategy behind a company's story
You don't have a multinational's marketing department, or an agency behind you. You have one thing no competitor can copy and that costs nothing: the story of how you got here. But it has to be built, because a story told badly doesn't spread.
Published 10 June 2021 · revised 16 August 2026
The work
Defining your story
What makes a story powerful is that it can spread without you: if your staff, happy clients and acquaintances also tell it, it reaches where you can't. But for that to happen it has to be built, not improvised.
Start with a few notes on a page, and four questions: what led you to create the business you run? What is your personal story, and how has it shaped the company's? Where is the company today, compared with how you had imagined it? What do you foresee for the coming years?
A story is a journey. It has to be defined with one eye on the past and one on the future, otherwise it stays a description of the present — and descriptions aren't remembered.
The ingredients
Passion. Hearing someone talk who loves their work conveys a trust that no argument can produce.
What the listener wants. People bond with those who can recognise what they want, not with those who list what they offer.
The purpose. Why you do what you do, beyond profit. It's the part people repeat when they talk about you.
One word at a time
"It would spread on its own" is where the story stalls
The 2021 version of this article imagined a story reaching an unlimited number of people. It's the thought every entrepreneur has, and it's also the reason it then almost never happens.
Why it doesn't spread on its own
Because spreading it costs the person telling it something. Whoever speaks well of you in front of a third party puts their own judgement on the line: if you then turn out to be a disappointment, they're the one who looks bad. It's the Sixth Law, and it's the reason word-of-mouth comes in waves instead of running steadily.
And there's a second reason, even more mundane: without a mechanism that establishes who moves first, no one moves (First Law). The best story in the world stays still if no one has a reason to tell it today.
What sets it in motion
In the discipline, the person who decides to tell someone about you is called a Connector, and what they do isn't word-of-mouth: it's a reference — an act with a name, a date and a consequence for their reputation.
Your story exists for exactly this: to give that person the words to put themselves on the line. It's the difference between "I know a guy who does installations" and "I know a guy who got my brother-in-law's warehouse back up and running in three weeks after two others had given up."
Your story isn't for you. It's for whoever tells it when you're not there.
The first step
Where your company stands, as a number
AIRA-SCAN© measures the relational capital your company already has: ten questions, three minutes, no registration. Your browser calculates the score and it shows immediately, with the areas where you lose the most points.
The extended report then arrives by email, and within one working day a person calls you: you look at the result together and assess whether the Stoic Analysis AIRA-DX© makes sense for your company. It is free and limited to twelve a week, so it is not owed to whoever does the check-up: it is decided by both of you.
Prefer just talking about it? The number is 0549 888808.