What is a Master Narrative?
A master narrative is a structured explanation of your company, product or idea. It forms the basic framework for all organizational communications. A powerful narrative is simple to understand, easy to remember and deeply resonates with people both emotionally and intellectually.
Why does it matter?
Most companies struggle to explain what they do and why they matter. This limits your impact on the market. It makes sales harder. It makes you vulnerable to competition. It limits your ability to raise funds. Perhaps most importantly, it limits the ability of your employees to rally around a set of ideas and their work around it.
How do you build one?
A master narrative has 4 fundamental components. Why, How, What and Proof. Larger, more complex organizations and ideas may have a hierarchy of these. Learn more about the Narrative Hierarchy.
What is the process?
We’ve developed a reliable process for guiding organizations toward a strong master narrative, and then using it to accelerate impact and growth. We’ve worked with organizations of all sizes and dispositions.
We start with workshops and interviews with stakeholders. We synthesize and refine, and go back to the stakeholders for review. Then we start the testing process. A deep, serious narrative takes about 10-12 weeks. Simpler, smaller organizations can often be done in 4.
How can you tell if it works?
You can measure the strength of a narrative. Really. Before you even get all the complex analytics from the web. You can measure your own company narrative by looking at your website. Here’s how.
The narrative hierarchy is a 4-tiered pyramid. It is a simple, structured approach to collecting the ideas and information that explain your idea, connect with hearts and minds, and develop proof. It is the skeleton of an entire communications, strategy, product and service
