How a Strategic Narrative Helps You Channel Every Story You Tell
Back before I spent all day behind a computer for work, I was a big PC and Xbox gamer. Over the years, I’ve dialed it back to just a few mobile games (Command & Conquer Rivals is my current vice). Still, there’s one thing about games that fascinate me as a storyteller: Much like a game, marketing a product can and should be an interactive story-making experience.
As someone immersed in narrative design, I’ve realized that buying and applying technologies is more like a game than watching a movie. Brands create experiences for customers designed through story, which result in experiences that customers want to tell stories about, thus promoting your brand for you.
In gaming, narrative design considers several potential paths for the hero(es). This is also a best practice when designing a corporate narrative. It forces you to think about the different types of audience scenarios. This is what we mean when we talk about “outside-in” thinking — putting yourself in the customer's shoes to better understand who they are and what they’re experiencing, particularly related to your product or service.
The general architecture of storytelling as it’s used in movies or novels is still useful in business, especially when creating discrete pieces of content such as a pitch or a video (and when you have good, simple, business-friendly frameworks like our TRIPS StorytellingTM method — more on that later). But as soon as you get into complex marketing campaigns, the design is more than just story. It needs to have a cohesive narrative across many potential stories.
This act of creating a strategic narrative is essential for marketers. By doing so, you are creating the conditions for all the stories made and told about your business.
Story vs. narrative
As humans, we use stories as a way of making sense of and understanding the world. We are continually putting ourselves in the center of our own stories as the hero, and your customers are doing the same in their own lives.
Creating a brand narrative helps your company identify what aspects of their own story can be leveraged as currency in engagement with customers and ultimately strengthen the mutual understanding that a company and its customers have with each other.
While a narrative and its structure share a lot in common with the structure of story, there are some fundamental differences.
At Go Narrative, we like to describe stories as “event units.” Narratives are more extensive, and multiple stories can be woven into one narrative (like a single TV show episode containing multiple stories about individual characters).
Throughout human history, narratives have come about naturally through the stories we hear. When there are similarities among stories (i.e., those stories relate to a singular subject), they accrue to a narrative. As author Jordan writes in this Now Novel blog on narrative, “when we tell a story, we shape the narrative — the connection between events.”
When you understand how to structure your strategic narrative, you can take ownership of it. You can craft a narrative intentionally and ensure all the stories you tell align to that narrative with a golden thread. If you don’t take this step, you may lose control of your narrative by leaving it up to your prospective customers’ interpretation.
The TRIPS StorytellingTM framework: Laying the foundation for your narrative
In a movie, the narrator has a “bird’s eye” view of the events throughout the film. This “character” is an omnipotent, all-knowing force that reveals the story to the audience piece by piece — similar to how a strategic narrative is built out of TRIPS elements.
What exactly are these TRIPS elements?
Transformation – What transformation is happening in the world that is forcing your customers to act? By extension, what shifts and changes are happening in the broader markets that connect back to your product or service? Change and transformation give people a reason to care about you and your business. So, why should anyone care? What transformation will someone undergo by using your product or service?
Reasons (to believe) – What are the specific reasons for a customer to believe in your product or service? What’s the “science” or data behind it that will prove your claims?
Innovation – What unique thing does your brand have that helps people navigate the intended transformation? It can be a unique product benefit, or it could be your company culture. This is your lightning rod — sharpen it with a story! Remember, without a narrative-driven story that people care about, and you’ll always be fighting market noise.
Problems – Problems relate deeply to transformation and change. Nothing worth anything in life is easy. Problems trigger empathy and caring matters when you’re trying to get someone engaged with your brand. There are problems at the start, problems as you get going, and problems that crop up along the buyer journey. It’s your job as a brand to present a solution.
Stories – This is where the magic happens. Prioritize customer stories, but stories about the transformation itself can also be compelling. Think about the metaphors or tales that exist in the market that relate to your offering. Identify stories you can tell that help illustrate the above elements (transformation, reasons, innovation, and problems).
To capture the elements of the TRIPS StorytellingTM framework (which are, in turn, needed to develop your brand narrative), you'll need to dig into the minds and hearts of the people who are driving your business and your product to market. That might be you, or it might be your CEO, the founders, board members, inventors, or anyone else who is setting your company's tone direction and strategy. No matter who those individuals are, it's essential that they help you reveal your "brand DNA," as Shift Thinking CEO Mark Bonchek describes it.
Bonchek says finding your brand DNA is about going back to the founders' ethos and original vision. This shared purpose connects them to their customers and stakeholders. To do this, we recommend getting under the surface of why the people driving your business do how they do what they do. Ask these people directly about how the product came to be, and more importantly, why. Why did they invent it? Why did the company bet on this strategy? Why is this something they believe in?
The best way to get these answers is to ask open-ended questions. Understand the inception, the inciting incidents that led to this product being brought into existence. If it inspired the founding team (or whomever you're interviewing), it would likely inspire others. Remember, you need to connect with both the individuals creating content in the marketing campaigns that you're going to craft and, ultimately, your customers.
4 steps to crafting your brand narrative
When we work with clients to develop a brand narrative, we follow this four-step process with our clients and their internal teams:
Step 1: Hypothesis
Like the scientific method, creating a brand narrative begins with developing a hypothesis. In this phase, we’ll facilitate team workshopping, customer conversations, and environmental trend scanning to pinpoint the things that will resonate most with your customers.
Step 2: Understanding
Once you have your hypothesis in place, we then seek understanding by probing for your audience’s needs, expectations, and challenges related to the narrative and their buying journey. We explore six distinct stages of the buyer’s journey, including what they think, feel, and do at each point:
· Awareness of a problem
· Realization that they must do something about the problem
· Internalizing information about the problem they’ve gathered through research
· Visualizing their future-state when the problem is solved
· Deciding which solution (brand) is the right one for their problem
· Evangelizing the solution (brand) that improved their life
Step 3: Alignment
After you’ve explored your narrative hypothesis through the lens of the buyer’s journey, it’s time to get your internal stakeholders aligned with this storytelling mission. This is where you present your ideas and involve your extended team on the narrative development journey, thus ensuring buy-in and a shared commitment to telling the right customer stories. This builds on the workshopping we conduct with your leadership team to deepen it and ensure your team stays on the journey.
Step 4: Production
During the production phase, we identify the other narrative forces that exist in the world that can support your own and how you talk about your brand. This is where we weave in the “golden narrative thread” in a way that connects to the hearts and minds of your customers in a clearly understood and easily relatable manner.
Using your narrative hypothesis as your compass, we seek a larger “metanarrative” — a commonly understood narrative of the culture and world that we live in — that makes sense for your company or product to align with. There are metanarratives shaped around success and failure, cultural and technological shifts, individuals, and communities. These metanarratives always have a moral lesson associated with them: What's right or wrong about the world?
You can look to history, culture, pop culture, and art as sources of inspiration for your chosen metanarrative. When you have selected an appropriate metanarrative, it can be used to enhance your brand narrative and connect it up to a theme and lesson that people will instantly identify, understand, and easily associate with.
An excellent example of this is the "parenting" metanarrative used by Bounty to sell its paper towels. In an interview with Forbes, business professor, and 20-year marketing veteran Kimberly A. Whitler says the "quicker picker-upper" brand is adept at making the mundane memorable and relatable.
"Bounty ... has consistently told stories about how a better paper towel enables [people] to be better parents," Whitler explained. "The stories show a mom unafraid to let her kids be kids because she knows she can save the day should spills or surprises occur."
Ultimately, this integration of stories allows you to provide inspiration and clarity of your narrative to your entire team.
How does narrative fit into the bigger marketing picture?
When you craft a narrative, you're thinking in a downward and upward direction. You're spelling out how your brand resonates with customers within the context of your specific product or service, as well as how it resonates with the larger culture your customers belong to.
Your job in writing this narrative is to connect the dots for customers and make it relevant to them. Show them how they relate to your brand or company, and by extension, associated with the larger moral or lesson of your chosen metanarrative.
But narratives aren't just for your customers. You will use this asset to bring alignment across your company and ultimately shape organizational behavior. These narratives can be used by the executive and leadership team to create a sense of unity of purpose, direction, intent.
This is why developing a highly relevant and consistent strategic narrative is such an essential exercise. Although you may not have a direct one-to-one connection with every employee and customer you work with, you can offer them a brand touchpoint that captures their attention and helps them feel that connection, deeply and intrinsically.
When you use your brand narrative in combination with facts from your value proposition and positioning and messaging framework, you'll start bringing out the heart and soul of your business, which is ultimately how you engage people. Arguments and rationality alone aren't enough. You need to figure out how to bring that narrative to life for your target market so that when you get down to writing a case study or ad campaign, those individual stories will all accrue up to your brand.
If you want to explore our TRIPS StorytellingTM method to begin building a brand narrative that works, let's chat.
Go Narrative is a Seattle Based firm that helps business leaders challenge the status quo to find a better way to clarity through storytelling. Get attention. Be heard. Sell more.
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