Robert Rose, chief strategy advisor at CMI, advises content creators to look at how Hollywood develops an episodic TV show season. The showrunner and writing team conceive main storyline, subplots, and how to break it all down into smaller stories or episodes.

A similar approach is to look at how producers develop digital games — intentionally building relatable sequences that gamers can replay and post themselves.

We love this idea.

(For more on that, executive producer Derral Eves explains the content strategy behind promoting his hit streaming series “The Chosen” in his book “The YouTube Formula” (detailed in Chapter 18). His approach resulted in the largest media crowdfund raise in history — over $10 million. And an audience of over 500 million.)

However. No simple rerouting of content will achieve true Brand value without your larger brand story at play. The key is to embed Primal Code® in your Brand narrative — your creation story, creed, icons, rituals, lexicon, nonbelievers and leader.

In other words, where you’re from or how you got here (your creation story), your purpose or intention (creed), rituals (your purpose or beliefs in action), the words that differentiate your group (lexicon), acknowledge the people who don’t “get” you (nonbelievers) and identify your leaders.

Example.

Let’s take the first piece of Primal Code, the creation story. Your creation story can be on the back of your package, posted in your descriptor on Amazon.com or on LinkedIn and Wikipedia — or you can turn your backstory into a film, like Facebook did with The Social Network. The Defiant Ones outlined the origin story behind Beats By Dre and USC’s Iovine And Young Academy. Ford v. Ferrari was not sponsored by either Ford or Ferrari (as far as we know), but certainly supplied a lively introduction to both. In other words, your creation story can run anywhere your audience is on social, digital or traditional media.

Some people yawn and allege that no one cares about history, much less how your company came to be. They couldn’t be more wrong.

The creation story is your front door. One of the first things people ask when they see something they like is, “Where’d that come from?” “Where’d you find that?” If your front door is open, people walk right in.

History is boring only when the storytelling is boring. The responsibility of every narrator is to make this challenging part of the hero’s journey exciting and worth retelling.

Think of it this way: your creation myth sets up your reason for being. It’s your legacy. Without the challenge presented in your creation myth, the subsequent quest that follows has no reason for being.

Here are some creation stories that we have encountered in working with Brands:

• Extra fine Merino wool is literally the Golden Fleece that gave us the mythical Jason and the Argonauts
• The Maxwell House theme line Good to the last drop was written by a President of the United States
• Keurig (allegedly) was cofounded by the guy who once owned ZigZag rolling papers (ZigZag performed at Woodstock)

The amount of content that can be created from just this single piece of Primal Code — the creation story — is unending. Spread your mythos wherever your audience happens to be: on your website, YouTube, Facebook, TikTok, Instagram, LinkedIn, X, press releases, The New York Times, Hollywood Reporter, Discord, whatever media seem relevant to your audiences across social, digital and traditional channels.

Primal Branding becomes a strategic, structured process for content creation. It begins with creating content around the Creation Story, then leads into the six other pieces of Primal Code: Creed, Icons, Rituals, Lexicon, Nonbelievers and Leader.

Happy news. If audiences are surrounded with the seven pieces of Primal Code embedded across your communications, your Brand story will be transmitted into the world authentically and organically. Best customers will fit your content into their own story arc, building a self-propelled story circle.

After all, you’re not really in command of your story; people are.

Using Primal Code strategically as outlined above, helps align content to a central vision. Your content becomes intentionally Brand-building.

“Seeing your big picture in a timeline provides a good framework for content planning. Set monthly themes to make sure you are paying attention to seasonal customer needs while covering all the different areas of your organization and facets of your brand,” suggests Patty Radford Henderson, Annum founder and CEO. Annum’s marketing planning software not only consolidates disconnected marketing plans within a single strategic lens, but Annum provides a fuller perspective on which content fits where.

Integrating your marketing calendars with software like Annum pays for itself not only by paying attention to seasonal customer needs, but by building Brand value, which has a direct impact on capital.

Based on key messages, data-driven insights, peer-to-peer feedback, User-generated content, AI-assisted content and other stories, using Primal Branding and Primal Code helps structure content strategy and production that turns meaningless products into meaningful brands.

Try it for a quarter. Before and after test metrics will help solidify your creators’ reason for being and substantiate your goals.

What could be better than that?

Contributed to Branding Strategy Insider by Patrick Hanlon, Author of Primal Branding

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The story you tell–and how you tell it–is critical to building a winning team.

While interviewing former Amazon executives for my new book, The Bezos Blueprint, I learned that Jeff Bezos was a captivating storyteller, a skill that he learned as a young boy who devoured science fiction novels. Bezos continued to sharpen his storytelling skills as he grew older.

When he tells the founding story of how Amazon started, Bezos uses an advanced storytelling tactic familiar to Hollywood screenwriters: Beats. A ‘beat’ is a scene that keeps the action moving and the audience engaged.

While a two-hour movie might contain fifteen or more major story beats, there are three essential ones that you should weave into a business pitch or presentation.

1. The Catalyst

This is the inciting incident, the scene that triggers the adventure. It’s the scene in Notting Hill when Hugh Grant walks around a corner and bumps into Julia Roberts, spilling orange juice on her blouse. There’s no movie without the incident.

For Jeff Bezos, the inciting incident occurred while he was working for a hedge fund in New York City. He learned that the Internet was growing at 2300 percent a year. If he hadn’t stumbled upon that statistic, he would not have pursued the idea of selling products online.

Ask yourself, “What inspired my idea?” It might have been a book, an event, a problem in need of a solution. Once you’ve identified the incident that started the adventure, share it with your audience.

2. All Is Lost

This is one of my favorite scenes in any good movie. It’s pretty easy to spot once you know what to look for.

The ‘all is lost’ moment is when it appears the hero will never reach their goal. George Lucas, a student of storytelling, created an iconic ‘all is lost’ moment in the original Stars Wars when the central characters are nearly crushed in a trash compactor. The experience changes them and strengthens their determination.

These scenes are so critical that mythologist Joseph Campbell traced them back to some of the earliest narratives in recorded history. He called them the “dark night of the soul.”

Bezos’ dark night occurred after Amazon’s share price collapsed by 90 percent after the dot-com bust. One popular business publication ran the headline, “Amazon.Bomb.” It’s a headline that Bezos loves to bring up nearly every time he shares the Amazon story. Why? Because the story of how Amazon survived reflects the enduring values of grit, determination, and a commitment to excellence.

Ask yourself the following questions:

“What obstacles nearly derailed my plans?”

“What hurdles did my team overcome and how has it shaped our values?”

“What problems did I face while building my company and what lessons did I learn?

The way you climbed out of the abyss–and what you learned from the experience–will inspire your audience.

3. Fun And Games 

This is the beat or beats when screenwriters create funny, light-hearted moments to break the tension. Harry Potter fans will recognize the scene instantly–it’s literally when the characters have fun playing the game of Quidditch.

Bezos relies on several ‘fun and games’ scenes when he recounts the founding of Amazon. For example, while Bezos was traveling west on the now-famous road trip to Seattle, he called an attorney to file the papers of incorporation. Bezos named the company Cadabra. But the attorney didn’t understand it and repeated, “Cadaver?”

Bezos got the hint and changed the name to Amazon.

The Cadabra scene isn’t necessary to the Amazon story. But Bezos realizes that a good story informs and entertains.

Don’t give your audience a chance to get bored. Use beats to the action moving, and your listeners will be glued to every word.

Contributed to Branding Strategy Insider by: Carmine Gallo, Author, The Bezos Blueprint: Communication Secrets of the World’s Greatest Salesman

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The world waited for more from Psy, but it never came. Instead, Psy (real name Jae-sang Park) enjoyed his fifteen seconds of fame then faded to black. You can watch Psy’s retrospective here.

True, Psy followed up with a second video but that video wasn’t as good, and it didn’t click. Without a more complete narrative or meaning, the first person to introduce K-Pop to the world went from rabid fandom to one hit wonder.

It could have been so different.

How? Imagine if Psy had been an Olympic athlete. We would have seen interviews with his mother, his first-grade teacher, his high school coach, his best friend. His classmates. His ex-girlfriend. In other words, we would have been given Psy’s backstory. Is he a good guy or a bad guy? Is he a serious musician and entertainer, or something else? How does he fit into our world? Psy’s accomplishment would have been given intention, context, purpose and meaning.

Instead of becoming a YouTube statistic, our imaginations would have been folded into Psy’s narrative, we would jointly celebrate his craft, his commitment and his accomplishments. Best of all, we would have been given the handholds of belief and belonging. We might have cared.

Narrative — story — creates believability and meaning. Ultimately, this is how artists take their throne in the culture. The genesis of your progress as an artist from inspiration to hit is fascinating for audiences.

But it’s not just about telling stories. It’s how you build and form the story. Just as you don’t write a song without figuring out what key you’re in, or what the click is, stories using Primal Code® have a framework that makes them more inclusive and powerful than other other narratives.

Just as in playing music, structure can be a pain, but it’s important for those listening to your music. It helps them hear something they haven’t heard before and feel something they haven’t felt before, without being confused. The same goes for building stories.

There is a graveyard filled with musicians, performers and entertainers who thought that talent alone would make audiences stand and roar. Okay, sometimes that happens. But too often, even incredible performances become short term bounces, rather than adding to a longer narrative embedded with the ability to resonate for decades or even generations.

Reasons why this happens are different for every individual. It could be because music artists are so focused on their instruments, performance, on their music, that they push away the larger context. Or they feel that forming a narrative is selling out. Either way, an idea alone is rarely enough to stand on its own merits; most new ideas need a push.

As Derek Thompson writes in his incredible book Hit Makers, “Creations grow most predictably when they tap into a small network of people who do not see themselves as mainstream, but rather bound by an idea or commonality that they consider special…they want to share what makes them weird.”

Even super-talented musicians sell themselves short by failing to design the superstory that carries them from being a talented singer, pianist, guitarist, drummer (or any form of artist) to becoming a magnetic field that attracts.

That becomes a life force across the social, digital and traditional networks. A phenom.

To repeat. Gaining attraction and audiences is determined not only by talent — by your creation — but by designing an attention-driving narrative, a story — that above all else, moves you from a state where you are a meaningless noob and nobody cares, to becoming a meaningful entity whose raging fandom measures from one to billions.

Contributed to Branding Strategy Insider by: Patrick Hanlon, Author of Primal Branding

The Blake Project Can Help You Craft A Brand Advantage In The Strategic Brand Storytelling Workshop

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Broadly speaking, brands tell stories to encourage aspirational spending. Aspirational in the sense of a better quality of life, not spending like a billionaire. Even in everyday purchases, people are looking to enrich the experience of their lives. Sometimes, better quality; other times, better price. But always something better, and spending to get it.

Narrative is how we make sense of the world, and thus how we make sense of brands. It’s also how we navigate disruptions like inflation. Former Federal Reserve chair Ben Bernanke’s new book is a history of monetary policy since the 1970s. His main takeaway is the power of what the Fed communicates, the stories it tells. Monetary tools are ever evolving because prior tools tend to be unsuited for new circumstances. Only the words used to communicate intent and commitment have undiminished power over time. When the Fed makes a statement, markets respond, and that has mattered a lot in years past when fighting inflation.

The idea that stories matter in economics is not new, although under-appreciated. Economist Marc Levinson’s global history of inflation and unemployment during the 1970s and 1980s shows this in detail. Nobel Prize-winner Robert Shiller is pioneering an approach to understanding economic events he calls ‘narrative economics.’ As shown in these books and others, controlling inflation is elusive unless and until governments communicate an aggressive posture. That sort of story calms markets.

Brand storytelling and anti-inflation storytelling are inherently in conflict. Governments fighting inflation want people to spend less. Brands tell people to spend more.

Governments fighting inflation want responsible spending. Brands push aspirational spending. But in doing so, brands are working against their own long-term interests because uncontrolled inflation eventually means a recession, during which name brand products lose share and pricing power—i.e., brands lose equity—that is costly to regain.

There’s no ready answer. Brands should calm markets, too. Yet, competitive pressures and growth objectives work against telling a story to slow spending. Perhaps the opportunity today is for brands to leverage this moment of heightened societal consciousness and find ways to build equity by making responsible spending aspirational, too.

Contributed to Branding Strategy Insider By: Walker Smith, Chief Knowledge Officer, Brand & Marketing at Kantar

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The typical problem is that new product developers are not solving a true consumer problem or fulfilling a customer need. Nor have they defined a gap in the marketplace. Instead, they are trying to force cutting edge tech or product line extensions that fulfill their desire to make crap.

Boo.

Yes, those products might fail because of poor strategy, poor quality, the wrong price or lack of demand. But even superior products that truly found a blue ocean outside of the competitive kill zone, have also failed.

Why?

Simple. Because if you never build the narrative that answers the spontaneous questions spewing from our skeptical human brains, people don’t stop to figure your new thing out. They move on.

Your narrative is not, “Why do you exist?” But, “Why should we care?”

But what if your true strategic differentiator was not the product itself, but how people talk about it?

To achieve this, your brand narrative — the story construct packed with product truths — must answer our rational brain’s direct questions while also soothing our skeptical gut response mechanism.

Where are you from? Why am I supposed to like you?

What do you stand for?

How do we know that it’s you?

How do you talk about yourself?

How do you fit into our lives?

What words should we use to describe you?

What are you not? Are you like me? Why not?

Who are you people, anyway? Who is the person or team that set out against all odds to make this great thing happen?

Who’s your leader?

Spread that storyline across social, digital and traditional media not just for awareness and consideration — but so employees, customers and investors can repeat those facts to fans, friends and complete strangers.

Not, Why do you exist? But, Why should we care?

Without this brand narrative (it doesn’t matter if you’re in CPG, DTC, P2P or B2B) it’s hard for early adopters, customers, consumers and the other converted members in your fan community to form the words that shape WOM (Word Of Mouth). The warm plasma of trial and endorsement.

Give us the facts, so that we can share the excitement with others.

And then there’s the opposite. Some enterprises believe that what is left unsaid can be more valuable that what’s revealed. The mission is to gain exclusivity by staying away from the spotlight. By leaving story pieces off the table, music, sneaker, NFT drops, certain fashion and beauty brands, (and…wait for it: Apple) stimulate raving fan chat boards, hyperbole, zealotry, interest and desire.

The product is a success if they’re raving on Twitter and Discord.

Secrecy, or spooning out micro bytes of information to only the few, creates a privileged subgroup within your tribe. Helping these people geek out can become an industry in itself. Cf. Dapper, cos play, Off-White clothing releases, masterpiece Patek Philippe timepieces, special edition Apple Watches, premium reserved AirBnB locations and other. Seek and ye shall find.

With these activations in mind, the quality of your fan community can easily be more important than the quality of your product.

Spread the word.

Contributed to Branding Strategy Insider by: Patrick Hanlon, Author of Primal Branding

The Blake Project Can Help You Craft A Brand Advantage In The Strategic Brand Storytelling Workshop

Branding Strategy Insider is a service of The Blake Project: A strategic brand consultancy specializing in Brand Research, Brand Strategy, Brand Growth and Brand Education

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