By Aileen Anthony

You make custard. So what?

It sounds like a rather brutal question to ask a business owner. After all, there is a business to run, products to manufacture, customers to serve and bills to pay. Surely that should be enough. But from a brand and content perspective, “So what?” may be one of the most useful questions we can ask.

This week at WRComms, our writers dug into what initially seemed like a straightforward business story about custard. Yet as they listened, questioned and followed the threads behind the business, something much richer began to emerge. They found a beautiful coming together of three generations, each contributing something different to the enterprise.

Ironically, a toddler inspired the idea of starting the business. That initial spark eventually became an aspiration the son picked up. But when writer Natasha Isabel Saravanan dug further, she discovered that the values underpinning the enterprise had actually been laid much earlier by the father.  This was no longer simply a story about custard. It was a story about family, values, continuity, aspiration and enterprise.

The Difference Between a Product Story and a Brand Story

Technically, brand equity refers to the additional value a brand creates beyond the functional value of the product or service itself. Brand strategist David Aaker’s influential work on brand equity identified dimensions such as brand awareness, perceived quality, brand associations and brand loyalty. These matter because customers do not experience brands only through products. They accumulate impressions, experiences, memories and associations around them.

Two businesses may sell remarkably similar products, but people may perceive one very differently from the other. One may represent reliability. Another may represent craftsmanship. Another may evoke family, ingenuity, rebellion, heritage or trust. Those associations gradually become part of the value attached to the name.

Storytelling therefore isn’t merely about making marketing more interesting. Done consistently and credibly, storytelling can help create the associations through which people understand and remember a brand.

Why a Wooden Duck Still Matters to LEGO

One of the best examples comes from LEGO. Today, the company is synonymous with its plastic bricks, but its beginnings were in wooden toys. Founder Ole Kirk Kristiansen started making them in Denmark in 1932, and the business would eventually pass through successive generations of the family.

There is a wonderful story from LEGO’s history involving Ole and his son, Godtfred. Godtfred proudly told his father that he had saved the company money by giving a shipment of wooden ducks two coats of varnish rather than the usual three. Ole was not impressed. Godtfred had to retrieve the shipment and complete the job properly. The incident sounds insignificant. It is, after all, just varnish on a wooden duck. Yet it has endured because it makes something intangible very tangible: the company’s attitude towards quality.

A company could write, “We are committed to uncompromising quality.” Thousands of companies do. But a father sending his son back to put the third coat of varnish onto wooden ducks gives the idea a human action, a consequence and a memory. That is the power of narrative.

Businesses Have Narrative Assets Too

We are accustomed to thinking about business assets in financial or operational terms. Companies have machinery, intellectual property, databases, distribution networks, customer relationships, property and human capital. But businesses accumulate another category of assets as they grow: stories.

The first sale is an asset. The founder’s turning point is an asset. A failure that changed how the company operates is an asset. The employee who stayed when things became difficult is an asset. A father’s principle that became embedded in the organisation is an asset. Even the toddler who inadvertently sparked the idea for a custard business can become an asset.

Of course, not every anecdote automatically has strategic value. This is where the technical discipline of brand storytelling matters. A useful story must connect to something larger. It should reveal a value, explain a behaviour, demonstrate a capability, illuminate a purpose or create an association that the organisation wants to own. Otherwise, it remains merely an interesting anecdote.

This is why uncovering a brand story involves more than interviewing someone and asking for the company’s history. We must keep drilling down. If someone tells us, “My father taught me everything about business,” the statement itself tells us very little. The writer’s job is to ask what exactly the father taught. When did he teach it? What happened? What did he say? Was there a moment when that lesson changed a decision? Is that principle still visible in the company today? That is where the story begins to reveal itself.

From Fact to Equity

I see this process as a progression. A business begins with facts. Through interrogation and context, those facts acquire meaning. Meaning creates associations. When those associations are communicated consistently and supported by the actual behaviour of the business, they become stronger. Over time, those accumulated associations can contribute to brand equity.

In other words, the journey moves from fact to meaning, meaning to association, association to memory, and memory to equity. Take the custard business. “We make custard” is a fact. Three generations of involvement provide context. Understanding what each generation contributed creates meaning. Connecting those contributions to values such as continuity, aspiration and family enterprise creates associations. Telling those stories consistently allows those associations to become part of how people remember the business. The product has not changed. The meaning surrounding it has.

Businesses often approach content from the opposite direction. They ask, “What should we post this week?” or “What should we put on LinkedIn?” or “What should our next article be about?” Those are distribution questions. They are not necessarily brand questions. A better question is: What do we want people to remember about us? Once that becomes clear, content stops being an endless search for things to say. Instead, every piece of content becomes an opportunity to reinforce the associations the business wants to build.

The Writer’s Job Is to Keep Asking “So What?”

This is where the writer’s role becomes important. At WRComms, writing is only part of what we do when developing a story. Much of the work happens before the first sentence is written. It happens through listening, questioning, connecting seemingly unrelated details and recognising when something that appears insignificant may actually contain the heart of the story.

Someone says a toddler inspired the idea. We ask, “How?” Someone mentions the son took up the aspiration. We ask, “Why?” Someone talks about the father. We ask, “What did he leave behind?” And then we ask the most uncomfortable but useful question of all: “So what?” Not because the information is unimportant, but because we want to understand why it matters. The first answer is rarely the deepest answer.

A founder may initially tell us that the company was established because there was an opportunity in the market. Keep asking and you may discover that the opportunity came from a personal frustration. Go further and perhaps that frustration connects to a childhood experience, a parent’s philosophy, a customer’s problem or a moment when the founder decided something needed to change.

That is the excavation process. And it requires more than good writing. It requires curiosity, empathy, commercial understanding and the ability to recognise connections between people, events and ideas.

Inspiration Really Is Everywhere

This week’s custard story reminded our team why we do this work. You don’t have to be building rockets, developing artificial intelligence, or inventing the next revolutionary technology to have a compelling business story. You could manufacture screws. You could operate a logistics company. You could run a family restaurant. You could distribute industrial equipment. You could make custard.

What matters is what sits behind it. So keep asking; I guarantee that somewhere inside the answer is the story that explains not simply what your business does, but why your business matters.

Guide below on how you can build your founding story or let us if you need some self-introspection.