Why every brand needs a story before a strategy

Ask most founders what their brand strategy is and they’ll tell you about their target audience, their price point, and their competitive positioning. They’ll have a SWOT analysis and a media plan. What they often won’t have is a story.

This is the most common strategic mistake I see, across sectors and business sizes. Not the absence of data or the wrong channel mix. The absence of a narrative that gives everything else meaning.

What story actually means

Brand story is not your origin myth or your founder’s journey, though those might be part of it. It is the coherent, emotionally resonant account of why your brand exists, what it believes, and why that should matter to the people you serve.

It is the thread that makes all your other strategic decisions feel inevitable rather than arbitrary. Why this price? Because the brand believes in X. Why this channel? Because the people who share that belief are there. Why this tone of voice? Because that is how that belief sounds when it speaks.

Without the story, every strategic decision floats free. With it, every decision has gravity.

The strategy always follows

I have worked with brands that had excellent strategies that performed poorly, and brands with imperfect strategies that performed well. The difference was almost always narrative clarity.

The strategy that follows a story is executable at every level of the organisation. A salesperson knows how to position the product. A designer knows what the brand should feel like. A social media manager knows what not to post. The story does this. The strategy document cannot.

This is not an argument against rigour. Research, data, competitive analysis, channel selection, these matter enormously. But they are inputs into a story, not substitutes for one.

Finding the story

The story is not invented. It is excavated. It exists in the overlap between what you genuinely believe as a brand, what your best customers actually value, and what your category is failing to offer.

Find that overlap and you have a story. Everything else, the visual identity, the campaign strategy, the content programme, is just finding better and better ways to tell it.

Start there. Build everything else from there. The strategy will be better for it.

Martin Alva

Brand & Marketing Strategist

Two decades across brand, marketing and technology, from automotive journalism in Mumbai to marketing leadership across Dubai and Abu Dhabi, and AI-led digital transformation today.