Let's start with marketing. It's the most visible medium for narrative strategy — that amorphous, curious, invisible energy that causes companies to rise and fall.
Most marketing is bad. Or if not bad, mediocre and unoffensive. Because what happens in today's Capital America is a brand strikes gold with a campaign and then instead of one-upping them, competitors retrofit their own versions of the creative flavor of the moment that's found scalable success. (This is why Instagram and subway ads look the same now.)
Because narrative strategy — articulating it, executing it — is hard. Yet this is the thrilling, messy process that anchors my work, which today's market structure categorizes across the brand, content, marketing, and strategy disciplines.
Indie consultant Tom Critchlow calls this (which I've lightly edited for flow): "Advisory" work — that done well is about helping the client shape narratives about who they are, narratives about how their markets function and narratives around the strategies they’re creating.
Narrative strategy is rooted in human behavior. It's tracing and shaping the contours of ourselves in real time as we navigate this strange era of crashing capitalism and post modernism and futuristic gen z-ism. At its core, it tells stories that move people to act. At its best, it restores the business-customer-society relationship when other functions go awry (e.g. when the algorithms be optimizing, when injustice runs rampant). It's key to sustainability, whether you're in B2B or B2C or B2G or web2 or web3 or web6. It might live in marketing and communications but demands to be deeply embedded with design, research, and product.
Today I unpack — why does narrative strategy matter? And then outline 4 tenets to a successful approach:
- It starts with ethnography
- It designs for both existing and emerging behavior
- It resists virality
- It remembers the joy and fights the urgency
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Narrative edge is the secret to competitive edge
In 2021, 5.4 million new business applications were filed according to the U.S. Census Bureau. That's 14,794 per day. (And I was one of them!)
I'm glad that the barriers to entrepreneurship are lowering. That also means that building the next big thing doesn't auto generate success. Disrupting an industry is the easy part; the hard part is sustaining the innovation.
Look at it from everyone's favorite business example: Apple didn't just launch the best product on the market. They didn't just enable a more fluid tech ecosystem. They showed you why you needed them spiritually — not just functionally.
Let's talk about my work with B2B research company NewtonX. We provide market research that enables our clients — like Microsoft, Pinterest, and Tableau — to make better decisions in high stakes business scenarios. We have a fantastic offering: the best data you've ever seen. Last year, 96% of clients started a second project with us after the first. But there are other options, other research providers for clients to go to, even if they don't measure up.
What this means for NewtonX's narrative strategy: it's not enough to market how we empower clients to retain their competitive edge. What's key is to help our clients and prospects see: we make you a hero. We restore trust in your data, in an industry context where 30-40% of data sourced from traditional providers and methods is trashed. We reinvigorate your organization's research practice, through partnering with you — the research buyer — to change the culture and expectations of insights in your company. We equip you with insights that don't just validate hypotheses or serve premeditated internal agendas, but rather, bring truth, no matter how hard to stomach. Yes, this is all thanks to our search technology and automation and AI, but that's just the background enabler.
Narrative strategy asks: how do we translate the complexity of our tech - to the simplicity of the impact?
It's the same in B2C world. One of my favorite success stories is Chinese tea brand HEYTEA. I live 7,364 miles from the nearest one yet I'll scroll through their immersive comics on WeChat. In a country where food delivery giant Meituan delivered over 210 million milk tea orders in 2018 — somehow, HEYTEA has made bubble tea an out-of-body $5 experience worth waiting hours for, through none other than stories.
Because technology doesn't move people; poetry does. The most effective narratives paint a portrait of who your customer or reader or viewer could be, infusing hope. I call this editorial marketing. It's storytelling the way journalism does it: not to overtly sell, but to pitch in ways so truthful and compelling that you can't help but want more. The NYT has over 10 million subs not because they sell subscriptions; they tell stories that sell subscriptions.
Whispers: Wanna make millions? Answer: Listen to the murmurs of the culture.
With that, the four tenets of effective narrative strategy below.
It starts with ethnography
Good narrative strategy gathers all data points available. It begins in deep research, a fascination with anthropology.
Friend and indie consultant Behzod Sirjani puts it well: it's about bringing rigor to your curiosity.
Coming back to the case of NewtonX: I'm not a senior decision maker tasked with sourcing B2B research, yet these are the buyers I speak to. So what does it take to know one? Conducting customer interviews, auditing and tracking metrics, doing competitive analyses and desk research, reading industry trade publications, attending conferences and crafting our CEO Sascha Eder's talk track, observing the audience reactions afterwards. And of course, just doing the work, repetitively, earnestly.
It also takes creativity. At NewtonX, I spent a few months working directly with our c-suite and soaking in their language. This sparked a new idea: surveying our own team on internal brand perception to understand how our strategic narrative trickled down to employees across functions and seniority — to uncover the opportunities in bridging and strengthening brand. What I call "voice of the employee" research, to complement "voice of the customer" takeaways.
In the B2C realm, there's even more. You get direct channels to your community through social media platforms and mass media publications. In the vast ocean of millennial content - the waves of culture are endless. There's literature! Film!
I contend that there's no such thing as a B2B audience; we're all B2C by virtue of being human. Some of us just happen to represent businesses. And all of us are moved by blood, love, sex, war. These are the impulses that drive our living and being. And so the best business writers read literature.
Brilliant friends Eugene Kan and Charis Poon do this well with their culture podcast Making It Up.
Above: A quick example of sensemaking the narrative landscape of athletic culture, in a brand strategy sprint I did with creative agency Another.
It designs for both existing and emerging behavior
I'm talking about SEO behavior here, zeroing in on content. Successful companies solve for what people are searching for — and introduce novel searches in the process. (15% of Google searches every day are new!)
So how do you make what you do sound new? While hinging on existing language as a directional signal for what people want?
At NewtonX, we're all about "custom recruiting," the research methodology that enables the high caliber of data we deliver. We infuse it everywhere. But we also frame our messaging with the familiar, making sure to contrast our approach with "expert panels," the method that B2B research is historically built on.
Because sustainable content strategy isn't just about cultivating trust with readers. It also requires building credibility with machines. It's a dance between charming humans with poetry and appeasing machines with code. Code in this case being the structured, formulaic language of SEO.
Nailing human-machine trust releases potential to do the fun stuff like "demand generation." This is marketing speak for "education," the space to play with what you're passionate about but isn't yet mainstream interest.
Content technologist Deborah Carver explores this well: Currently, in both publishing and content marketing, success is most often tied with easily gamed short-term metrics like leads/subscriptions generated, search ranking, or pageviews (yuck). In an ideal execution, [content] pillars connect the actual content — ideas, world-views, leading thoughts, humor, personality — to brand performance over time.
Let's take it from the experimental end — say, with my food media collective Currant. Our biggest passive traffic generators come from our pieces on respected food figures Jonathan Nunn and Lucas Sin, who routinely garner press. Definitely not with our newest feature series on climate change through the lens of jam producers? Nobody's searching 'how does climate change affect my jam and what can we do about it???'
But because we publish pieces that are new, different, probing — Harvard's Nieman Journalism Lab added us to their public reading list. CreativeMornings promo'd us in their newsletter. (Thanks, Emerline!) Mailchimp featured my story on "creating content users want to consume." But because we skew on the emerging side, growth is slow and steady. (Here, it's about the community, but that's another piece.)
Another example, somewhere in the middle: Metalabel. They're dubbing terminology for things like Currant: "release clubs where groups of people who share the same interests collaboratively make, support, and release projects." They're betting on the current desire and future potential of creativity in multiplayer mode, and wondering how emerging technology might support it.
It resists virality
If you've worked in marketing, you've likely been asked how to go viral (or, meh, tasked with it).
No one gets to the big leagues because they're trying to go viral; they win because they're waking up earlier and sleeping later than everyone else to practice.
Sounds simple. But when I managed brand marketing at consumer product company W&P, our top Instagram posts came after endless rounds of iteration. It took months of daily workshopping with our creative team to hit our production stride. Fumbling and missing deadlines. Leading 10+ brand giveaways, cultivating relationships with 200+ influencers, and getting to know our community well enough until I intuited their hopes and needs. Their Instagram following has grown 235% (43k to 144k) since my time there, wherein our team put in the effort to build the foundation for economies of scale.
Because at the beginning, you don't have space to obsess over creating cool content. We were focused on aligning business priorities, creative capabilities, and editorial timing to produce magic.
Listen, if influencing was easy then we'd all be influencers by now. Trust the process.
(First iteration of this section was written for Julia Lipton's Awesome People newsletter.)
It remembers the joy and fights the urgency
That feels like a good transition to say: social media platforms are not the primary avenue to narrative success. As a recovering accidental marketer who's worked intimately with social media — it's hard to feel the love for what you do when there are so many warped incentives built into it. (Don't ask me how I feel about FB ads manager.) The platforms are like a strange relationship you have with someone who concurrently attracts and repulses you.
There are good humans working in tech, but they lack the vantage point of having to wrestle with the algorithm to pay rent, because they have the luxury of developing and designing it.
When you're brand-side, it's easier to see how sinister social media can be, more than the majority of humanity who use it on a personal level. You're professionally trained to manipulate human behavior, designing for desire and pulling the levers of words that convert.
Back to what I said up top: At its best, narrative strategy restores the business-customer-society relationship when other functions go awry. Done well, it redirects social behavior through thoughtful words and imagery, shared over deliberate timelines. It undos toxic feedback mechanisms pre-designed into platforms. There's no need to post 3x a week because it's 'industry standard.' That's why the industry has garbage engagement and open rates.
Applied to email as well: sender reputation works best when you're not inundating people. Even if they love your shit, they're not going to consume it as often as you hope. (Leave that to the actual media! e.g. the NYT Daily)
Of course, resisting our reactionary era requires taking unconventional stances. It takes a stomach for uncertainty. I like how strategy consultant Vaughn Tan framed it in a recent conversation we had: "Uncertainty is not the same as risk."
It sounds risky — to not play the game that everyone else is occupied with. But when you eschew biased rules, you enter new modes of operating. You and your organization enable redemptive strategy. And how much more fun would that be? What realms of possibility might we unlock as result?
"A show has a soul, which is very much made up by the people who create the thing. That's what makes it stand the test of time." —Quinta Bronson on creating Abbott Elementary
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