Editor’s note: Gavin Johnston is chief anthropologist for Two West, a Kansas City, Mo., design firm.

A life as led is inseparable from a life as told. It’s not about how it was but how it is interpreted and reinterpreted, told and retold. Narrative, or storytelling, is a mode of thinking that relates to the concrete and particular as opposed to the abstract and general. Stories make brands real.

Stories serve a number of cultural, social and psychological functions that can and should be used in positioning your brand. The choice of words and subjects in a story conveys to the creator and the listener what meaning a brand has beyond the surface. For example, a sporting goods store like Cabela’s may symbolize father-son bonding - a sense of shared identity around which they can distinguish themselves from the rest of the family, a repository for cultural ideals like fair play and what it means to be a man. While none of these directly reflects the products being sold, they are the underlying currents that draw customers in.

From a business perspective, defining what the brand means to the customer allows marketing and creative teams to communicate on a deeper level and therefore increase brand relevance and market share. But loyalty and commitment to a brand come into existence when consumers give meaning to it. They control the brand; we do not. Any time a brand is identified, given a name or designed to represent a known storyline it is separated from the undefined world around it. The sense of brand commitment is enhanced by the stories handed down over time and portrayed as part of the collective myth.

Uncover systems of meaning

Stories are conveyed through language, which is by definition a symbolic system. The key to successful engagement is to uncover systems of meaning that resonate with potential customers and compel them to action. Conceptualizing your brand through narrative ties the signifying components to a powerful symbolic system.

Symbolic dimensions that emerge in the narrative add value to products by fulfilling culturally-constructed concepts (i.e., quality, status, age, belonging, etc.). A brand is a signal that triggers a field of meanings in the consumer’s mind. These meanings are conveyed directly and inferentially through stories. By harnessing the symbolic power behind these meanings, strong brands move beyond the codes governing a product category and enter the personal space of the consumer.

As each narrative unfolds, it is contextualized by the purposes of the interviewer in terms of the research and of the participant in terms of self-presentation. No single story provides a full understanding of the meaning of an event, activity, etc., but it provides pieces for a total concept. Repeated patterns of behavior and repeated storylines are important in uncovering the meaning of a brand.

Building a story-based strategy

The first step in building a story-based strategy is recognizing that descriptive and symbolic systems conveyed through stories serve different but equally important functions in developing a brand identity. Descriptive aspects of a brand come out through stories and provide a narrative frame. The goal in a narrative frame is to provide as much information as possible to a creative or marketing team so they can incorporate subtle triggers into messaging and the overarching brand experience.

The audience is drawn into the story created and is meant to relive the experience - insofar as that is possible - rather than interpret it. The emotional impact of seeing and hearing descriptions provided through storytelling sparks interest and long-term associations with the brand. They do more than remember you, they come to associate your brand with themselves.

Directly invested

Ownership is a key element to a story gaining ground. Feeling directly invested in the story fosters a personal connection. With ownership comes the need to share your experience and the desire for collaboration in the retelling of the story. Shoppers who are encouraged to interact with others in a non-transactional way, creating new configurations of the story, are more inclined to interpret themselves as part of the storyline. This gives us a new tool to understand what matters to people and uncover triggers that have a major, often unconscious, affect on their buying decisions.

The power of the emotionally-influential, culturally-relevant, dramatic story in the beginning of the retail branding process can mean the difference between seeing innovation and failure. The narrative serves as a launching pad for brand devotion. Bore the shopper and there is almost no chance of affecting change and growing revenue.

What they say and how they say it

In Gary Witherspoon’s Language and Art in the Navajo Universe (1977) he writes, “The greatest value of learning the language of another people does not come from being able to interview informants without interpreters or from providing native terms in ethnographic writings; it comes from being able to understand what natives say and how they say it when they are conversing with each other.”

This holds true equally for the people who buy our products or shop our stores. People are often thinking about things other than the goods they need to procure when shopping. They are thinking and living out the experiences of motherhood, play, obligation, etc. Learning the communicative norms and processes of individual groups allows us to better grasp and define our audiences, adapting our methods of presentation to be understandable and meaningful.

A way of life

Take the Sam Adams brand as an example. The authenticity of brand is not a set of traditions in the standard sense. They talk, of course, about the product and the flavor but they reach beyond that to explain the story behind the beer. They humanize and historicize the company and its people, turning beer into a way of life rather than an object. Marketing becomes less about selling a product than it does about ongoing engagement between the people buying the products and the producers themselves. Rather than being a purely transactional engagement, the consumer and the company, the brand, become part of a shared interaction. The company becomes a member of the population rather than an external force with whom people interact only at the cash register.

Not a simple task

Admittedly, selling narrative analysis is not a simple task. Generally speaking, the process is intensive and takes time, which in turn means it is not inexpensive. Furthermore, buy-in is typically found in companies that have very creative and sophisticated marketing departments. But the advantage is an unparalleled understanding of your customers. Narrative analysis digs deeper than the story, uncovering symbolic triggers and stumbling blocks. It isn’t just the tale, it’s in the telling that insight lies.