Boilerplate

Text that presents the brand, over & over again

Boilerplate is the most-read text no one ever thinks about.

Boilerplate is the short, repeatable text that describes what a brand is and does, used in press releases, speaker bios, app store listings, LinkedIn profiles, pitch decks, and email footers. It has to work in 50 words and in 200 words, in formal contexts and in casual ones. Because it gets used so often, it has outsized influence on how the brand is perceived by people encountering it for the first time.

Most boilerplate is written once, forgotten, and slowly becomes outdated as the company evolves. It ends up being too long, too vague, or full of jargon. The best boilerplate is clear, specific, and sounds like the brand, not like a press release template.

How strong brands handle it

The same building block, handled well. These are approaches and illustrations from how brands tend to work, not rules, and never a ranking of companies.

Version-controlled

Strong brands keep a small set of approved boilerplate versions (short, medium, long) that are centrally maintained and easy for anyone in the team to find and use correctly.

Plain and specific

Brands like Stripe write about themselves in plain language with specific claims ('Stripe is a payments infrastructure for the internet') rather than vague ambition ('transforming the way businesses grow').

Audience-aware

Effective boilerplate is sometimes slightly adjusted for context (investor version, press version, consumer version) while keeping the core claim and tone consistent.

Questions to explore

Use these on your own or in a group. There are no right answers, only better conversations.

If someone reads our two-sentence description, do they know exactly what we do and who we do it for?
Does our boilerplate sound like us, or like it could be any company in our industry?
When did we last update our boilerplate, and does it still reflect what we actually do?
Do all team members use the same text when describing the company, or does it vary person to person?
What is the single most important thing we want someone to understand from a brief description of our brand?

Things to notice

Boilerplate written during a founding phase often carries outdated positioning or terminology that no longer fits.
Having many unofficial versions in circulation (each slightly different) fragments brand perception over time.
Trying to include everything the brand does in one block of text usually results in text that communicates nothing clearly.