A Guiding Narrative® is the internal story each person tells themself—usually unconsciously—about how the world works and the role we play in it. It explains cause and effect, shapes our values, and serves as an ever-running instruction manual for how to make meaning of, and repond to life’s events.
Understand someone’s Guiding Narrative®, and you understand why they value what they do, why they behave as they do in the context of daily life. Every message we hear, every action we take, is filtered through this internal storyline, a blueprint for how to engage and communicate with us, as well as how to identify what we need.
This is why we say: the Guiding Narrative® is the only story that matters®.
Over 25 years, we have refined a proprietary technique for surfacing, reconstructing, and integrating Guiding Narrative® insight into the fabric of client’s thinking and market strategy.
The Guiding Narrative® plays an important role in helping brands to become and remain relevant and ultimately valuable to the marketplace. Here’s why and how:
In a population culture, say, as large as American consumers, or as focused as GenZ anime artists, brands pass through stages in what we call a Brand life continuum™. Below are the four main phases that determine if and how a brand becomes relevant and potentially valuable to an audience. Brands are cultural symbols in that the market invests meaning in them. As such, brands become ultimately valuable when the audience leverages them to validate and amplify its own values:
Inspiration: | The brand is conceived and introduced to market |
Interpretation: | The market attempts to understand the brand and define it in the context of other brands |
Integration: | The brand has a largely agreed upon definition and position in the market |
Utilization: | The brand is used as way to validate and amplify values |
We immerse you and your team into Guiding Narrative® insight, so it becomes your guide to framing the world as your customers and other stakeholders do. Your competitive advantage improves dramatically when you shift to this paradigm.
Our ethnographers in the field discover the dominant Guiding Narratives® your customers use to make meaning of, and value, your brand and products. Your team easily integrates this insight into brand storytelling, product innovation, go-to-market strategy, marketplace trust, and thought leadership.
We offer two subscription-based tools that enable your brand storytelling and product innovation teams to ensure that AI accurately understands the nuance of your customers’ lived experience and Guiding Narrative® as it makes critical decisions.
