Brand & Narrative Strategy
The Beginning
Every experience begins with a story. Ours begins with yours.
We find the emotional heart of your brand or subject and build a storytelling framework around it. Themes, key messages, narrative guidelines: everything your experience needs to speak with one clear, compelling voice.
In Our Words
“Telling the story of a centuries-old brand while sensorially stretching the boundaries of what people thought was possible is what gets us out of bed in the morning.”
Bob Rogers – BRC Founder
An Exploration
Most brands already have a great story. They just haven't found it yet.
The most powerful experiences aren’t built around what a brand makes or does. They’re built around what a brand means. To its audience, to its culture, to the world.
Finding that distinction is harder than it sounds. It requires the willingness to look past the familiar and ask a more demanding question: not what do we want people to know, but what do we want people to feel?
That question is where we start.
Finding that distinction is harder than it sounds. It requires the willingness to look past the familiar and ask a more demanding question: not what do we want people to know, but what do we want people to feel?
That question is where we start.
A Foundation
A framework your whole experience can build from.
Working closely with your team, we develop the narrative architecture that sits beneath everything guests will eventually see, touch, and do. This means identifying the core emotional themes that make your story distinctive, establishing the key messages that carry those themes across every moment of the experience, and creating the narrative guidelines that keep every creative decision, spatial, visual and technological, pointing in the same direction.
The result is a storytelling platform that acts as a creative compass for the entire project: clear enough to align a multidisciplinary team, flexible enough to inspire them.
The result is a storytelling platform that acts as a creative compass for the entire project: clear enough to align a multidisciplinary team, flexible enough to inspire them.
In Our Words
“Often the authentic story is sitting there, but often as well, agencies or the marketing team may be afraid to go there — but we push to go. That’s the interesting thing. That’s what’s going to connect the audience because it’s a genuine real conversation.”
Christian Lachel – CCO
The story changes everything that follows.
A Reframing
Guinness
When Guinness asked us to help reimagine the Storehouse experience, the work didn’t begin with design. It began with a question about what Guinness really means to the people who love it and what a visit to its home should feel like. The narrative framework we developed became the strategic foundation for a multi-phase transformation that ultimately saw attendance grow by 80% and net profit increase by 240%.
Johnnie Walker
At Johnnie Walker Princes Street, the storytelling strategy centred on a single liberating idea: that while Johnnie Walker holds fast to its rules for making whisky, there are no rules for drinking it. That reframe, from exclusive heritage brand to an open, and joyful invitation, gave the entire eight-floor experience its character, from the first room to the last glass. The result was recognised as Scotland’s leading visitor experience and awarded the Thea Award for Outstanding Achievement in Brand Experience.
Let’s Begin
The Story Must Exist First
Whether you are launching a new brand home, reimagining a cultural institution, or building an experience from the ground up, the narrative strategy work we do at the start of a project shapes everything that follows. It is the difference between an experience that impresses and one that transforms.
If you have a story worth telling, we’d like to help you find it.