Your Story Must Be Authentically Livable

It’s easy to assume that your brand story is only relevant as far as your communication goes, but the truth is that if you have a Brand Story, then you must be able to LIVE it at every fiber of your brand.

What does that mean in practicality?

It means that if you have a brand story that includes the archetype of the Innovator, for example, you cannot be failing to innovate in every aspect of your business. Are your employee policies evolving to meet the needs or your staff, or are they stuck in prehistoric times?

If your brand is The Amazon (described below) and you don’t offer your female employees leave or flexibility to care for their babies and families then you are failing at what your core archetype is about. Regardless of whether you make the lives of female customers better — you are fundamentally not living up to your archetype because you are failing to live up to your brand story inside your own organization.

Going Beyond Communication

When crafting a brand story, it’s vitally important to craft one that is authentically livable for your company. Otherwise any deviation will be read as a lie, and your audience is very good at sniffing out falsehood.

So first, your story must be rooted in truth about your organization already. While some of the elements can be aspirational, they must be rooted in authenticity and reality. You cannot make The Innovator as part of your archetypes if your organization is still doing things “as they’ve always been done” and is slow to change or modernize anything within the company, for example. You may have to be The Custodian or The Traditionalist instead. This is why we work through your values, mission, and obstacles first, so that everything that we do afterwards is based on those first elements.

As an example from a real past client, we did a project with a brand that sells (among other things) what they call “booty-lift jeans,” and they kept emphasizing how “authentic” they were. Authentic, relatable, genuine. However, every single photo of their catalog featured their clothing on excessively Photoshopped models that barely had human figures. I am not exaggerating when I say that their bottoms and waists were so manipulated in Photoshop that they were laughably fake.

So, when we spoke about their archetypes we addressed this disconnect – that you cannot claim to be an authentic brand when their models are manipulated in post-production to the point of absurdity. They disagreed with our recommendation, and unfortunately their story will ring false to their clients, who all have eyes and can see that no living human looks like their models (not even the models themselves, before Photoshop.)

Live Your Story

And beyond being rooted in truth, your story must also be livable. It may not always be easy, but the elements of your story should guide your communication and direction, inside and outside of the brand.

So when it comes to making a decision of how to treat employees, how to write an internal policy, or hosting a company event, they should align with your brand narrative. Not only does having this parameter make your life easier (which sounds counterintuitive but is true), but when all things in your company “make sense” and embody your story, it will make everyone you come in contact with (audience and staff alike) want to be a part of your story.

As an employee (like your audience), we can smell a lie. Which is why I remember clearly the one laboratory I worked at that claimed to be extremely people-centric and genuinely was, and the one that claimed to be similar but which had a horrendous internal culture that absolutely didn’t live up to the story they claimed. When you live up to what you claim to be, even your employees will be happy to share your story.