Give your brand story a shape
Think of a children's book you loved. Now imagine telling someone about it.
You would not recite it. You would say who was in it, what went wrong, how it got worse, and how it ended. Those four things, in that order, and you can still do it decades later without having opened the book.
The story stuck because it had a shape. A shape is what makes something rememberable, and retellable by somebody else.
The arc, briefly
The structure most business communication can borrow is the narrative arc:
- Plot, the context. Where things stood, and what a reasonable person believed.
- Twist, the tension. What you found, what did not fit, what got worse.
- Climax, the point of most tension, where the old plan will not hold.
- Ending, the resolution. What you are doing about it, and what happens next.
Beginning, middle, end, with the tension deliberately built rather than avoided. Most founders present in the opposite way, front-loading the conclusion and then justifying it, which removes every reason to keep listening.
The worked example: an event
Say you are running your first paid dinner and you need forty of the right people to care.
The flat version, which is what most invitations do:
We are hosting a dinner on 14 November for founders. There will be great conversation and good food. Sign up here.
Nothing to hold on to, no reason to prefer this Thursday over any other.
The same evening with a shape:
The same evening, drawn as a shape
- The plot. Most founder events are built to be attended. You go, you nod, you collect four business cards and you never speak to any of them again.
- The twist. We ran one anyway, and it did the same thing. The room was full and nothing came of it. So we asked everyone afterwards what was missing, and the answer was uncomfortable. Nobody had any idea what anybody else was actually stuck on.
- The climax. Which means the format is the problem. You cannot fix a room of strangers with better catering.
- The ending. So this one is twelve people, one table, and everybody answers the same question before they arrive. Here is the question, and here is the date.
Same event. One of them is worth crossing London for.
The same shape on a campaign
A launch, a landing page and a sequence of posts all want this structure too. The mapping is direct:
| Arc | Campaign |
|---|---|
| Plot | What everyone currently does, stated fairly |
| Twist | The thing you found out that they have not |
| Climax | Why the current approach cannot survive it |
| Ending | What you built, and the first small step |
Most founders skip the twist. It is uncomfortable because it requires having found something out. If you cannot fill it in, the campaign does not have a story yet, and no amount of design will disguise that.
Then bend the shape to the room
A symmetrical arc, with equal time on each part, is the default rather than the rule. Two things should move it.
How much do they already know? An audience with no context needs more plot. An audience that lives in your world every day will get bored while you explain their own situation to them, so cut the beginning hard and get to the twist. Telling people what they already know is the fastest way to lose them.
How much will they resist? If you expect agreement, you can open near peak tension and create urgency immediately. If you expect pushback, do not. Starting at the climax with a sceptical room reads as confrontation. Take longer over the evidence, show what you ruled out, and leave the conclusion slightly open so they arrive at it themselves rather than being handed it.
What to do with this today
Take the thing you are about to send, the invitation or the launch post, and write four lines under four headings: plot, twist, climax, ending.
If the twist line is empty, you have an announcement rather than a story. That is worth knowing before you spend three weeks on the design.