The hero of the story is the company itself
Every story has a hero. The question is who the brand casts in the role: itself, the customer or someone else entirely. We read the own texts of 297 Danish brands and the answer is unambiguous: Danish business prefers to tell the story of itself. Twice as many brands make the company the hero as the customer.
The casting list
We classified who acts, succeeds and stands at the centre in the brands' own front-page and about-us texts. The result: a little over half of the brands cast the company itself as the hero ("we are leading, we develop, we deliver"). One in four makes the customer the hero and itself the helper. A small group gives the lead role to a third party (the planet, the local community, the employees), and at just under one brand in eight no carrying story can be read at all.
Why the casting decides everything
Story theory is in no doubt, and sales experience backs it up: the customer reads to find themselves in the story. A text in which the company plays the lead asks the customer to be an audience for someone else's success. A text in which the customer is the hero, and the brand is the experienced helper, gives the customer a role. And people choose the stories in which they have a role themselves.
This does not mean the brand should be invisible. The helper is a strong role: it is the one with the map, the tools and the experience. But the helper points forward to the customer's goal, not inward to its own achievements.
And the casting can be measured in the story
There is also something to be gained in the figures. The brands that cast the customer as the hero score markedly higher on our measure of story strength than those that cast themselves, and the difference holds even when we account for the company's size, segment, industry and purpose. We cannot tell from the figures whether the casting creates the story, or whether a strong story makes it natural to cast the customer. But the two go together.
The gravity of the we-language
Why, then, does half end up in the lead role themselves? Probably because self-narration is the easiest to write. The company knows its own history, its awards and its machines; the customer's reality requires that you have listened. The measurement in the article “Brands know who they are. But forget who they are for” points the same way: the identity disciplines are the field's strongest, the relationship the weakest. The casting choice is the same imbalance, seen through the story.
And note the minority with a third hero: the few brands that give the lead role to the planet, the local community or the employees have chosen a rare and therefore visible storytelling position, with the same obligation as all rare positions: it has to be backed up.
What this means for your brand
Take your front page and mark every sentence: is it about us or about the customer? Count. If "us" is in the majority, you have cast yourself in a role the customers cannot play along with. The exercise afterwards is just as concrete: rewrite the three most important sentences so that the customer is the subject and your role is to make the customer's success possible. That is not modesty. It is dramaturgy that sells.
How we measured (method)
The figures are based on 351 brands analysed in brandvju as of October 2026, all measured with the same method; the story could be classified for 297 of them. The lead role of the story was classified automatically from the brands' own publicly available front-page and about-us texts, and each classification is tied to verbatim quotes from the text. Brands with very little text available are left out.