The stories we share
Everything in life is a story as narrative is how we pass information from one person to another. Through the lens of brand, this means every brand is a form of story; ultimately they allow us to sell through the narrative of something that adds value. Coca Cola is sugary water made for pennies, but Coke, as a story of freedom and joy that has been attached through repetition, sells for 2000% more. Macquarie is a bank, but has associated itself with progress and Australian masstige to outpace the growth of its peers. Qantas spent decades building the association between itself and the values of the lucky country only to come unstuck by breaking the biggest value at the heart of the Australian story: a fair go.
Australia offering a fair go is a subjective truth we all broadly believe even though our own income inequality here rises year on year. Objectively most Australians do not get a fair go, but equally, most don’t fly that much either. For Qantas as a brand this means it won’t take long for them to reestablish their association with other more appealing stories we hold dear as Australians, including our love of travel and our pride in our ‘small’ country having its own airline. They have already built this connection in the mind of most travellers. Now their focus is solely on reminding us of something we already feel we know with a brand association they have already created.
A story well told is the thing that separates a great brand from an also-ran. Thematic consistency. This is often what is missed within our wider community where brand is something we do and we then leave rather than something we articulate well, position clearly and constantly communicate. Every good brand holds and tells an origin myth at its heart. It is where I disagree most with the Ehrenberg-Bass doctrine as brands, to create distinct symbols that are their own, need to come from a place of their own back story. Jesus would not be Jesus without his distinctive assets of sandals and a beard that are recognisable (mentally available) and physically available (see churches and motel drawers). But he would not be Jesus without his own creation myth that inspired the symbols now associated with the myth.
Outside of church you see great origin stories like this in every category. Very few are true. Louis Vuitton didn’t walk all the way to Paris, Cadbury wasn’t quite a glass and a half, and Nike doesn’t always win, but these myths are the origin stories of their brand. The brand succeeds because the origin story is linked to a key driver of the category. In luxury it's scarcity, in chocolate it's satiety and in sport apparel it's performance. Louis walked through the mud so you could be one of the select few who glide through the streets of any metropolis. Founding myth meets category driver meets massive margins.
As we look back on the US election you see the same thing played out. A story of America told through loss, versus the story of America told through optimism for its future. Neither is exactly true but truth never gets in the way of a great story. As Yuval Noah Harari eloquently puts in his recent book Nexus, 'Truth is not really what human stories have ever been designed to deliver'. They were designed to structure the way we view the world and not provide truthful information but to put things in. for. mation.
It is what he calls a subjective reality. A reality that is created through how we structure information to deliver it. If you have spent more than ten minutes in any big American city you have some experience in the rise of disorder; if you've toured suburbia, you've seen the price of groceries jump 25% since the pandemic; and if you've visited a rural hamlet, you've seen the inequality of people living on less than they had in 2006. It has gone beyond decline of local industry and we forget this is now intergenerational for most. This means the drop in living standards is now being passed on to its third generation. It is easy to blame ‘these’ people for being duped by a subjective reality but it is one that fits their lived experience. The truth is Americans still have the cheapest food and cheapest fuel in the Western world, but that doesn’t matter much when the subjective reality is that it used to be even cheaper, better and easier before ‘their’ choices changed it.
We all have an obsession with America globally because we see in them an ideal we have been taught to believe. Leaders of the free world, guardians of freedom, the land of opportunity, go west young man. Maybe this was true of other empires from Persians to the Poms...that they contained a story full of our best ideals. In the case of America the facts do not match the myth. God, I love the myth though.
In the world of brand consultancy this is also what we do. Broadly our profession is about creating an ordered narrative that helps our clients create advantage through structuring information in a way that is distinctive. We write the distinctive story that sits at the heart of a subjective reality. These stories are best when they are not seeking to be fully objective but are seeking to be fully memorable.
The best brands actively avoid building their points of differentiation anywhere near an objective truth. It is impossible to be the best beer, the best airline or the best makeup brand. For example, 'Did you deliver quickly or not?' is a subjective question, 'two hours or less' is an objective promise I can fully measure.
We have seen this play out more and more as intangible or image based competitive advantage becomes a bigger and bigger feature of winning in certain sectors of the market. As the quality of every product or service in any sector rises so does the importance of winning on brand.
Creating difference is the aim of our game
I find that our profession has become more and more confused between the changing distribution and communication channels associated with a digital age and the centrality of our role. Our world became digital-first fully during Covid. Our historians or whatever comes after humanity will look back on this event as the time when we hit a Gladwellian tipping point where one way of organising the world fully replaced the other in primacy. DTC became omnichannel, meetings became hybrid, the cloud topped the computer. This transition is profound and it muddies the thinking as we rapidly try to keep pace with more and more sand that constantly shifts.
I thought the information age would bring us closer to a shared objective truth whereas it has broken society into more, multiple subjective realities. Maybe you feel the same. In my work I experience this every day where the job I do never changes but the opinion on how to do it, what form the team takes to address it, and the skill set required, moves more and more rapidly. Good brand strategy is ultimately putting information in a formation that creates a competitive advantage. The advantage comes from how simple you can make it so that it forms the basis of enduring differentiation. Like a movie pitch, if you can’t explain the plot in a sentence you haven’t really explained a brand, you have just structured some information.
The change is in how our stories get told not in how they are formed. The way we distribute information to put it in formation has changed vastly in the last fifteen years. We now structure our world through equations rather than through institutions. That is the most important thing to remember as we all navigate what is all about to change again.
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Be better to each other.
