A practical workshop for stripping inherited narratives and writing brand stories that actually serve
The first article in this series argued that most brand strategy fails not because of bad execution, but because of accepted framing — the moment a circumstance becomes “a problem,” the solution space quietly collapses. This piece is about what to do instead: a repeatable process you can run in a brief, a strategy session, or a full workshop with a cross-functional team.
The process has five stages. They don’t take equal time. The first two are the hardest and the most important.
Stage 1: The Strip
Time: 30–45 minutes
Before you can rewrite the story, you have to see it for what it is.
Take the existing brief — or the last strategy deck, or the last agency brief, or simply the way the challenge is described in your organization — and read it with one question in mind: what in this document is a fact, and what is an interpretation?
Work through it sentence by sentence. Flag every claim that contains an implicit judgment — words like losing, failing, declining, disconnected, irrelevant, outdated. These aren’t neutral observations. They are narratives embedded in language. A brand is not “losing relevance.” That is a story. What is actually observable might be: unaided awareness among 25–34s has declined 8 points over 24 months. That is a fact.
Your goal in Stage 1 is to produce what we call the Circumstance Sheet — a cleaned version of the brief in which every claim is grounded in a direct observation. No adjectives. No diagnoses. No “because.” Just what can actually be seen, measured, or verified.
This document will feel strange and incomplete. That discomfort is the point. You have just removed the inherited story. What remains is the raw material you are actually working with.
Stage 2: The Trace
Time: 20–30 minutes
Once the circumstances are stripped clean, the next question is: where did the original story come from?
This matters because inherited narratives carry authority. They feel objective because they’ve been repeated. They feel obvious because no one has questioned them. But every problem frame has an author — a moment when someone first named it that way. Tracing the story back to its origin often reveals the assumptions baked into it.
Ask the group:
- Who first described this as a problem? When?
- What data were they looking at when they named it?
- What were the circumstances at that time, and how have they changed?
- Who benefits from this frame — internally, politically, commercially?
- What does this frame make difficult or impossible to consider?
This isn’t about assigning blame. It’s about establishing that the frame is a choice, not a given. The moment a team understands that someone, at some point, decided to tell the story this way — that it isn’t the only story in the data — the room changes. Permission enters.
Stage 3: The Write
Time: 45–60 minutes
Now you write new stories.
Return to the Circumstance Sheet. Look at the raw facts — the numbers, the behavioral data, the market signals, the cultural context. And write at least three alternative narratives that are equally defensible given those same circumstances.
A few rules:
Each narrative must be genuinely true. No wishful thinking, no spin. If the data doesn’t support it, it doesn’t qualify. The goal isn’t to find a narrative that feels better — it’s to find one that opens more strategic room while remaining honest.
Each narrative must reframe rather than reverse. You are not looking for the opposite of the problem. You are looking for a fundamentally different way to see the same landscape. “We’re losing older customers” reversed is “we’re gaining older customers” — still the same territory. Reframed, it might be: “we are being chosen by the generation that will define the category for the next twenty years.”
Each narrative should imply a different strategy. This is the test. If two narratives would produce the same campaign, one of them isn’t actually different. A good reframe changes what you do, not just how you describe it.
Write the narratives out as single, declarative sentences. Present-tense. Confident. Read them aloud. The right ones will feel slightly uncomfortable — not because they’re false, but because they demand something of the brand that the old frame didn’t.
Stage 4: The Test
Time: 30 minutes
Narrow the narratives to the two or three most compelling, then pressure-test each one against three questions:
Is it true? Go back to the Circumstance Sheet. Can you point to specific data that supports this reading? Is there anything in the data that flatly contradicts it? If so, can you address that honestly within the narrative, or does it collapse?
Is it useful? Does this narrative actually open strategic space? Does it suggest a positioning, a creative direction, a product priority, a partnership, a channel approach that the old frame didn’t? Strategy that can’t generate decisions isn’t strategy — it’s poetry.
Is it ownable? Could any competitor tell this story, or is it specific to this brand’s actual history, assets, relationships, and culture? The most powerful narratives are ones that only you can tell honestly.
A narrative that passes all three tests is ready to build on. One that fails the first is a lie. One that fails the second is a repositioning exercise with no downstream consequences. One that fails the third is a trend report, not a brand strategy.
Stage 5: The Commit
Time: Variable — often the longest stage in practice
This is where the work either takes root or quietly dies.
The new narrative needs to be articulated clearly enough that different functions — creative, media, product, communications, customer experience — can use it to make decisions independently and still be pulling in the same direction. That means it needs to be written as something more than a tagline. It needs to state the circumstance it is responding to, the story it is choosing to tell, and the implications of that story for what the brand does and says.
In practice, this document is rarely more than one page. But it is the most important page in the process, because it is the first one written from a place of genuine choice rather than inherited obligation.
The final question for the room: are we willing to act from this story, or are we only willing to say it?
If the answer is the former, you have a brand strategy. If the latter, you have a brief for an ad campaign — which is not the same thing, and which will ultimately revert to the problem it was trying to solve.
Running This as a Workshop
For a working session with a cross-functional team, here is a suggested sequence:
Pre-work (sent 48 hours before): Ask participants to write down — independently — how they would describe the brand’s current challenge in one sentence. Collect these before the session. The variation in those sentences is your most important input.
Opening (15 minutes): Share the collected problem statements without attribution. Name how many different challenges are in the room. This establishes the premise: the problem isn’t obvious, even internally. The narrative is contested.
Stages 1–2 (60–75 minutes): Do the Strip and Trace as a group, working from the brief or most recent strategy document.
Stage 3 (45–60 minutes): Break into small groups of 2–3 to write alternative narratives. Each group presents their strongest one.
Stages 4–5 (60 minutes): Full group pressure-test and commit.
Close: End with a specific decision — which narrative the team is taking forward, and what the first concrete action under that narrative will be. Not next quarter. Next week.
The process is simple. The practice is hard. It requires a particular kind of intellectual courage: the willingness to question a frame that powerful people have already committed to, in an organization that has already organized itself around solving the original problem.
But the brands that do this work — that learn to read circumstances cleanly and write their own stories from that reading — are the ones that seem to move with unusual freedom. Not because their circumstances are better. Because their stories are chosen.
Next in this series: five brands that did exactly this — and what happened when they refused to accept the problem they’d been handed.
