Thought leadership should be fun, fast, and fearless. You tap into excitement about new ideas and advocate for something better. That’s the mindset behind The Idea Sled. Projects glide forward gracefully. It’s the momentum of commitment. This newsletter shows you how.
B2B companies often twist themselves into a vapid vortex of narrative, regardless of whether they have a story to tell. In most cases, the drive to narrative is a drive to nowhere. The effort takes the place of developing a coherent reason why decision makers should put some part of their business at stake by selecting a product or service to support it. A Chief Operating Officer can’t explain to their board that they began a major transformation because they heard a good story.
Instead of a story, what providers need is a coherent way to make a case for change.
Clarity About Story
Let’s take a moment to break down a meaningful definition of story and clarify what doesn’t meet the criteria. I’m glossing over many versions of narrative theory to make a relatively simple statement about what a narrative does.
A narrative provides a trajectory from a starting point to an ending point, almost always with at least one element of friction, resistance, or diversion along the way. A narrative also has characters—anything from fictional characters to historical figures to groups. But happening to someone is another bare minimum criterion for what counts as legitimate narrative.
[In a story], a speaker tells a listener what someone did to get what he wanted and why. —John Truby, The Anatomy of Story
Oddly disconnected claims about a company or its solutions that offer no before and after, that include no resistance, and that don’t happen to anyone can’t be considered a narrative in any coherent sense. At best, they represent a half-assed attempt to create a sense of tangibility for something that is conceptual by its very nature.
How We Got Here
Brand narratives or brand stories seemed to take off in the early 2000s. The rise of “content marketing” helped exaggerate it from a passing comment or concept to a perceived requirement for good marketing. It’s now a nearly ubiquitous element of the marketing conversation. Sadly, it also makes no sense and has nothing to do with stories.
The core principle of so-called narrative in marketing is that you have to create an overarching, cohesive narrative that communicates the brand’s values, purpose, and mission as a way to engage audiences. In a way that, as far as I know, none of its proponents has ever explained with any rigor, it’s supposed to spawn (or mimic) authenticity, build brand relationships driven by loyalty, and create an additional layer of meaning by connecting with audiences.
I can deflate that balloon with one simple question. How many stories do you remember that center on “values, purpose, and mission”? Didactic twaddle sucks the life out of a story. Try to make your way through Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress, and you’ll see what I mean. Somehow, a few writers pull it off. Tolstoy, for example, weaves social and historical theories into unputdownable, engrossing stories with inordinate grace. But, my marketing peers, none of us are Tolstoys.
What Your Clients Already Know
Another trend I have seen in companies’ attempts to establish a brand narrative is to provide a recycled, warmed-over point of view of industry trends. You use those trends as your story, but the reality is that your clients already know and have lived those trends for years. They’ve talked about them in the C-suite and the boardroom since long before they ever heard your name.
While this kind of “story” may seem to show that you understand clients’ long-term challenges and trajectory, it inadvertently reveals your fundamental anxiety about knowing your industry’s strategic context. Don’t start by trying to prove credibility by superficially explaining industry forces and shoehorning them into a kind of story. When you do, you’re just airing reruns.
At best, you should acknowledge conventional wisdom as quickly as possible and then move on to making a case for change. That’s the pivot from so-called narrative that has nothing to do with real narrative to something else—thought leadership. Instead of confecting a story without an arc or any compelling characters, you focus on leading your clients forward with thinking that inspires change.
A case for change doesn’t tell a story. It demonstrates why your product or service helps clients come out on the other side of change with demonstrable advantages. What thought leadership does is create a space where clients can start to imagine and tell stories about themselves. They see and recontextualize where they are and what they can do. Then they come back to you and take more steps towards a buying decision.
When and Where to Use Stories
I am not in any way opposed to storytelling per se. I’ve just alluded to one scenario where you communicate ideas that foster stories that clients tell themselves about themselves and then come to you as a resource for overcoming the points of friction, resistance, or diversion they see in their narrative arc.
There are also many ways in which storytelling helps people form relationships and resolve differences. Stories provide information density. Some neuroscientists even believe that stories trigger mirror neuron effects where resonance happens in the teller and listener’s brain together.
The topics of when and why narrative works are long and complex, as well as entirely separate from the main point I want to make here, which is that the imagined “narrative” approach to branding is both empty and futile, even if it does happen to sound good.
Escaping the Content Trap
One of my running themes in The Idea Sled is that the content industry and self-declared content specialists have evacuated meaning from what should be something much simpler (even if the words are longer). The goal is intersubjective communication. Meanwhile, thinking of communication in any medium as content destroys meaning.
Brand narratives are simply one more case in point of the emptiness of content. But with the dominance of the content mentality in marketing, why do I bother? Because under the sadness I feel when I see crass tactics—whether in marketing or electoral politics—I also hope for better. When we evacuate stories, what we get is chaotic and grotesque.
I hope for better, even when the most vulgar option seems to be winning. It won’t win forever. There are ways out. Here’s one—refusing empty pseudonarrativity gives companies one more foothold to climb out of the pit and escape the content trap.
Three Grace Notes
“Mindless valorization of storytelling speaks to crucial facts in contemporary culture that need more analysis. Why is it that other forms of presentation and understanding have been largely abandoned in favor of telling stories?” —Peter Brooks, Seduced by Story: The Use and Abuse of Narrative
“There is something assumed in Homer but never mentioned, something that lies behind both silences and eloquence. It is the idea of perfection. What is perfect is its own origin and does not wish to dwell on how it came into being. What is perfect severs all ties with its surroundings because sufficient unto itself. Perfection doesn’t explain its own history but offers its completion.” —Roberto Calasso, The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony (By the way, this book is one of my favorite, favorite, favorite books EVER)
“When everything becomes contingent, fleeting and accidental, and all that is binding and unifying dissolves – that is, in the current storm of contingency – there is a clamour for storytelling. The inflation of narrative betrays a need to be able to cope with contingency. But storytelling is unable to transform the information society, which is devoid of orientation and meaning, back into a stable narrative community. Rather, storytelling is a pathological phenomenon of our era.” —Byung-Chul Han, The Crisis of Narration
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