So, you fell into the trap of thinking that “brand identity” means “describing your product feature really really well.”
Unfortunately, no one cares what your product is.
(Unless you’re Apple. Maybe. And even then, it’s just the same camera, but new?)
This is tough, because as the internal team, you obviously care about your product. You spend your days testing, troubleshooting, and iterating. An improved workflow or a beautiful design feature can be genuine sources of pride — or at least genuine sources of what gets measured at your performance review.
But your external audience is not interested in sitting in on your performance review. And they have different priorities than “the product should be cool.”
Customers, investors, and journalists want to know you do the work you do, and how it benefits them.
When you sit down to really define your brand identity, those are the higher-order questions you’re answering. Not “what does this button do.” (Even if the button is sweet.)
To help your brand connect to those external audiences, we have a framework for nailing down how you talk about the fundamentals of your brand story — your company, your customer, your market, and your founders.
Brand Story Questionnaire Template
Align your team on the story behind your company with our guided brand, customer, market, and founder questionnaire.
Get the template
It’s a great resource for anyone trying to:
Articulate your brand story + value proposition Grow a small company Clarify a brand pivot Get earned media attention Connect content strategy to company vision (Side note: In my VC era, we used a similar framework to help early-stage portfolio companies define their brand identity and content strategy, often in the context of trying to get them early media coverage. So this is an extra useful framework if you’re a young company gearing up to announce a fundraise.)
These questions help you arrive at the ultimate story you’re trying to tell.
Key takeaways:
Brand identity isn't your product spec sheet. It's the answer to why you exist and how you make your customer's life better. This should be a live exercise, not a solo one. Block a couple hours, get your founders, brand/marketing lead, and PR in a room, and talk through these questions out loud. Disagreement is data about where your brand is murky. The payoff of a brand sheet like this is consistency: every piece of marketing, exec interview, event panel, web page, PR pitch, and more can speak to your one central brand story. How to conduct a brand story session This questionnaire isn’t a fill out by yourself between meetings kind of doc. Ideally, it’s a hefty live session where the people who play the biggest roles in defining your brand can brainstorm together about what makes your company unique.
We recommend going through all of these questions in a 2–hour brand session that includes:
Your founder(s) Your head of Brand or Marketing Your PR team, if you have one Use the meeting time to talk out loud through the questionnaire. Disagreements are important data! They help you see where your brand story might look muddy to outsiders, because it’s not clear internally.
Take copious notes. Then identify one person (ideally your brand/marketing lead) to condense the conversation into its simplest version.
Ultimately, you should have two versions of the questionnaire document: a messy, dense, 20-page brain dump by the end of the session, and then the refined version that gives a crisp 1-sentence answer to every question.
Part 1: Your company This is the foundational stuff: the questions that define the DNA of your unique company, plus why it matters that you exist at all.
The questions:
Summarize your company and what your product or service is/does in 1–2 sentences. Now explain why you are solving this problem in 1–2 sentences. What is your customer’s biggest pain point, and how do you solve it? Describe how big the problem is that you are solving and what is causing it. If your company didn’t exist, what would be the negative impact to the rest of the world? What is interesting about your company from a news perspective? Why should people care right now? Who is the founding team? How do their backgrounds uniquely position this team to be building this company? Are there any press risks or ways you don't want people to talk about the company? Any misconceptions you want to pre-empt?
Part 2: Your customer We saw this 3-question framework from Goldcast Sr Director of Product Marketing Anand Patel and liked it so much we baked it into our own questionnaire.
Anand posits that to write great copy you need to be able to answer three questions about your ICP. It’s such a simple, elegant way to think about what feelings and actions you want to inspire in your ideal buyer.
The questions:
What do you want your ICP to know? What do you want them to feel? What do you want them to do?
Part 3: Your market No company exists in a vacuum. Before a customer, investor, or reporter decides you matter, they want to place you in the market — who's already paying you, how big the space is, and why you're different from everyone else chasing it.
This section is where you collect the proof points that make your story credible to outsiders.
The questions:
Who is your audience? Who is your customer? Are there any customers we can name publicly? Any who would provide a quote? (Media are interested in who and how many are paying to use your product or service. It is a major proof point for your company/story. If metrics are not ready to be shared, a quote from a happy customer is a good alternative.) What is your market size? Who is your target audience for the next two quarters? What hard numbers can you share about the problem being solved, the space you are in, the company, the product, or the customer? Who would you consider your competitors? Who is doing something similar/better/worse? Who is doing something similar in a different industry? (e.g., “we’re doing for our industry what Instacart did for groceries”)
Part 4: Your founders A company’s founders are a crucial part of its story. Especially early on, they're a huge part of the pitch — investors and reporters are betting on the people well before there's a product track record to point to. This is where you make the case that this team, specifically, is the one to build this thing: the track record, the unfair advantages, and the why-you-why-now.
The questions:
Who is the founding team? How do their backgrounds uniquely position them to be building this company? Have they been founders before? In what industry? What was the outcome of those companies? Has your executive team worked together before? Announcing a fundraise? Our full template includes what talking points to prep ahead of a fundraising announcement.
Brand Story Questionnaire Template
Align your team on the story behind your company with our guided brand, customer, market, and founder questionnaire.
Get the template
How to use this brand strategy resource across teams Once you’ve pinned down tight, specific answers to each of the above questions, there are a few ways you’ll want to share this information across teams.
Full team: Review the highlights of this document in a team all-hands to get everyone on the same page about your purpose, history, and brand story. Even if you don’t go into full detail, at least review your 1–2 sentences about what your product/service is, and why you’re solving the problem you’re solving.
Sales: Refer to this document as a way to speak to specific ICP pain points (e.g., “the average person in your role spends X hours on Y task; we build our company to reduce that time…”).
Marketing: Use this document to identify the key messages to include across your homepage, ad creative, content, and more.
PR: PR should use this document to craft pitches about why your company matters and what’s interesting about it right now.
Executive team: Review this doc prior to any media conversations; this will help you identify key talking points to hit and help everyone stay consistent across how they present the brand.
Your ultimate goal is to walk away with one brand story , told the same way whether it's coming from your founder on a podcast, your homepage, or a rep's cold email.
Pin these answers down once, and your whole team stops guessing what the company stands for — because now it's written down. That's when a brand starts to sound like it actually knows who it is.
