How inherited narratives are limiting your brand thinking — and what to do instead
There is a philosopher and coach named Peter Crone who makes a deceptively simple distinction: the difference between a circumstance and a problem. A circumstance is what’s actually there — observable, measurable, real. A problem is what we decide the circumstance means. And that meaning, Crone argues, is never as objective as it feels. It’s a story. One we’ve been handed, or one we’ve told ourselves so many times it hardened into fact.
I’ve been thinking about what this means for us as brand practitioners. Because if there’s one thing I’ve observed across years of strategy work, it’s this: most marketing doesn’t fail because the circumstances were impossible. It fails because we inherited a problem frame — and then optimized brilliantly inside it.
The Brief as a Box
Consider how most brand problems arrive. A brand team receives data. Net Promoter Scores are down. Market share is eroding among a key demographic. Awareness is high but conversion is low. Someone — an analyst, an executive, a consultant — looks at those numbers and writes a sentence that begins: “The problem is…”
And from that moment forward, the sentence does the thinking.
The brief gets written. The agency is briefed. Research is conducted to understand the problem more deeply. Creative is developed to solve it. Every step of the process is organized around a narrative that was authored upstream, often by someone who isn’t in the room, sometimes years ago.
This is how brands end up spending enormous resources solving problems that were never real — or worse, solving them in ways that make the actual situation harder to see.
Circumstances Are Neutral. Stories Are Not.
Here is what Crone’s framework demands of us: go back to the data and look at it without the sentence.
What would you actually see?
NPS is lower among customers over 45 and higher among customers under 30. That’s a circumstance. “We have a loyalty problem” is a story. So is “we’re losing our core audience.” But so — and this is the creative opportunity — is “we are in the middle of a natural generational transition, and the rising generation already likes us.”
Each of those sentences is equally supportable by the same data. But they produce completely different strategies. The first two generate defensive campaigns, retention programs, win-back offers. The third generates a brand investment in the customers who are already with you, told in a way that signals confidence rather than anxiety.
The circumstances didn’t change. The story did. And that changed everything.
Why We Accept the Frame We’re Given
This isn’t a failure of intelligence. It’s a failure of permission.
Brand managers operate under real organizational pressure. Executives have already named the problem in the all-hands. Boards have approved budgets to address it. Agencies are selected for their track record solving it. By the time a strategist sits down to think, the frame has been load-bearing for months. Challenging it feels like challenging the people who set it — or worse, like denying that anything is wrong.
This is precisely what Crone identifies as the trap: we confuse the story’s persistence with its accuracy. The more often a narrative is repeated, the more institutional weight it carries, the more it feels like the territory rather than the map.
But it is always the map.
The Practice: Reading Circumstances Cleanly
What would it look like to build this reframing practice into actual brand work? Not as a philosophical exercise, but as a professional discipline?
It starts with a simple rule: separate the data from the diagnosis before you do anything else.
Strip the brief down to what is actually observable. Not “we’re losing Gen Z” — that’s a story. “Aided brand awareness among 18–24s is 67% but purchase intent is 12%” — that’s a circumstance. Work to get every claim in the brief to that level of specificity. When you find a sentence that can’t be grounded in a direct observation, you’ve found an inherited narrative. Mark it. Don’t discard it — but hold it loosely.
Then ask the question that most strategy processes skip: what other stories are equally true given these same circumstances?
This isn’t brainstorming and it isn’t spin. It requires rigor. The alternative narrative has to be genuinely defensible — grounded in the same data, coherent, strategic. But the act of generating it does something important: it reminds everyone in the room that a choice is being made. The original frame wasn’t received wisdom. It was one interpretation. And interpretation is where the creative work actually begins.
This Is Not Optimism. It Is Precision.
It’s important to say what this isn’t. It is not toxic positivity. It is not a mandate to reframe every problem as an opportunity in a way that becomes its own kind of denial.
Sometimes the circumstances are genuinely difficult. Sometimes the brand has real structural disadvantages, real competitive threats, real cultural headwinds. The point is not to pretend otherwise. The point is to encounter those circumstances as they actually are — not pre-packaged with a narrative that tells you what they mean and what you’re allowed to do about them.
Crone draws the distinction clearly: you can acknowledge a difficult circumstance fully and still refuse to be imprisoned by a story about it. That refusal is not avoidance. It is the beginning of genuine creative agency.
For brand practitioners, this matters enormously. The moment we accept a problem frame uncritically, we have already narrowed the solution space before we’ve done a single day of strategy work. We have, in effect, answered the brief before we’ve read it.
What Gets Unlocked
When teams actually practice this — when they learn to distinguish circumstance from story and hold the story lightly — something shifts in the quality of thinking.
Strategies stop being defensive. Brands stop trying to “fix” perceptions and start trying to build ones. The brief becomes a starting point rather than a constraint. The question changes from how do we solve this problem to what story serves this brand and its customers right now, given what’s actually true?
That’s a harder question. It requires more intellectual honesty, more creative courage, more willingness to challenge assumptions that powerful people have already committed to. But it’s also the question that produces the kind of brand thinking that genuinely moves people — because it was free to go wherever the circumstances actually led, rather than wherever the problem said it had to go.
The circumstances are what they are. The story is always yours to write.
This is the first in a series exploring how philosophy and cognitive science can expand the way brand practitioners think about strategy, creativity, and the narratives that shape markets.
