Most organizations think they have a marketing problem.
What they actually have is a language problem.
Not because they can’t write. Not because they lack smart people. But because they don’t have a shared way to explain what they’re doing, why it matters and how decisions should be made when things get messy.
Marketing Has a Language Problem
Over the years, I’ve watched teams struggle to align around “content,” “messaging” or “brand” without realizing what they were really missing: a common narrative everyone could operate from.
When I talk about content, I don’t just mean articles or social posts. I mean every artifact that gives an organization words:
- how you describe your work
- how sales explains value
- how teams talk about outcomes
- how leaders justify priorities
The artifacts marketing produces matters because they give people something to carry into real conversations. Without them, every team improvises. And improvisation doesn’t scale.
I’ve watched this click many times over the years—often suddenly. After months of circling around “content” or “messaging,” someone will finally say, “Oh. You’re talking about giving us a shared language.”
Exactly.
That’s the moment when marketing stops being output and starts becoming infrastructure.
Most companies treat narrative as messaging. High-performing organizations treat it as infrastructure. That distinction is subtle, but it’s the difference between marketing that feels busy and marketing that actually works.
When Narrative Is Treated as an Accessory
There are two especially damaging ways companies tend to think about narrative.
The first is treating marketing as an accessory. Something you add once the product is built, the service is defined or revenue starts to slow. A box to check.
The second is treating marketing as a stopgap—a way to reinvent public opinion or cover up internal inconsistency. The belief that better communication can somehow mask what employees, customers and buyers already feel.
In both cases, narrative becomes “marketing’s responsibility.” And when the story doesn’t land, it’s marketing’s fault.
If you’re a seasoned marketer, you’ve heard this play out in real time:
“I’m not in marketing.”
I’ve heard it from executives. I’ve heard it from delivery teams. I’ve even heard it from senior sales leaders who feel the need to distance themselves from anything labeled marketing.
The frustration runs deeper than irritation. When narrative is treated as marketing’s job alone, its usefulness is fundamentally limited.
Marketing cannot be on every sales call. It cannot be in every client conversation. It cannot influence every touchpoint if the story isn’t something the organization carries collectively.
In that world, marketing’s influence shrinks to what it controls: top-of-funnel content, campaigns, surface-level messaging. Meanwhile, the most important conversations—sales, delivery, retention, leadership decisions—operate on fragmented or outdated understanding.
That’s not a storytelling problem. That’s an operating problem.
What It Means to Treat Narrative as Infrastructure
When I talk about narrative as infrastructure, I often see people pause—even marketers.
It can sound abstract or overly conceptual, especially in organizations accustomed to running on sales metrics, financial plans or operational efficiency. Marketing is almost always the last function to be taken seriously as a long-term investment.
But narrative as infrastructure is actually simple.
It’s the core story that explains who you are, why you exist and who you’re here to serve—and the shared truth everyone in the organization can operate around.
Early-stage companies often develop this naturally. The story lives in the founder’s head. It shows up in product decisions, early hires, culture norms and how the company presents itself to the world.
As organizations grow, pivot or reimagine themselves, that shared truth becomes harder to hold. This is why rebrands—at any size—are so disruptive. They’re not cosmetic exercises. They’re attempts to re-establish a common understanding of reality.
When narrative is functioning as infrastructure, it does three critical things:
- It creates shared truth
- It guides decisions and tradeoffs
- It coordinates teams toward a common destination
This is where narrative stops being expressive and starts being operational.
Narrative as a Decision Filter
At this point, someone usually says: Isn’t that what a business plan is for?
In some ways, yes. Business plans answer important questions about goals, revenue and operations.
But business plans change.
Narrative is what validates them.
Narrative answers questions business plans often don’t:
- Who is this really for?
- What do we believe?
- What are we willing to say no to?
- How do we behave when things get hard?
When narrative is clear, prioritization gets easier:
- Where to spend marketing dollars
- How to structure sales teams
- What standards client service should uphold
- Which opportunities to pursue or decline
A vague story leads to vague decisions. A focused narrative makes tradeoffs explicit.
“We’re a mid-sized creative agency helping small to midsize organizations launch their first formal brand platform” is an operating truth.
“We’re a creative agency helping companies with their brands” is not.
The difference matters when pressure shows up. And pressure always shows up.
Narrative as a Coordination Mechanism
Marketing isn’t just communication. It’s coordination.
This is the fact most organizations miss.
When narrative functions as infrastructure, marketing stops being the sole steward of the message. Sales brings real buyer insight into the story. Client service understands how their work reinforces it. Talent knows how to talk about the work and what standards matter.
People can see themselves in the story—and understand their role in advancing it.
This is how you break the marketing-in-a-silo problem.
When narrative coordinates teams, alignment doesn’t depend on constant oversight. You see this in organizations that value autonomy—development shops, agencies, distributed teams—where people are trusted to prioritize, allocate resources and make decisions without leadership in every room.
Without shared narrative, autonomy becomes chaos. With it, autonomy becomes leverage.
The Cost of Fragmented Understanding
The cost of fragmented understanding is high.
Marketing becomes reactive because the organization can’t articulate what it actually needs. Requests sound like:
- “Sales conversations aren’t going anywhere.”
- “The message isn’t landing.”
- “We can’t keep our clients happy.”
Those problems are solvable—but not every week.
Client service becomes disconnected from the broader story, focused only on delivery. Retention suffers because customers aren’t reminded why they chose you or what else you can do for them.
Internal debates multiply. Decisions get revisited. Direction gets reset. Loud voices win. Institutional memory disappears.
And in founder- or leadership-led organizations, bottlenecks form. If leaders must constantly reiterate values, positioning and priorities, it’s because the narrative hasn’t been institutionalized. It isn’t an operating system yet.
You can’t scale that way.
When Narrative Becomes an Operating System
When narrative is embedded, marketing becomes less reactive. GTM decisions simplify. Funding conversations get clearer. Teams move faster—not because they work harder, but because they agree on what matters.
You see fewer meetings debating direction and more momentum executing against it.
This isn’t theoretical. Look at enduring brands like Coca-Cola, Procter & Gamble or Gucci. Different industries, different eras—but the same discipline: a core story, consistently managed, rigorously expressed and treated as central to success.
A Simple Test—and a Way Forward
If you’re wondering whether narrative is functioning as an operating system in your organization, try this:
Ask a handful of leaders to explain what the company does and why it exists.
If you get materially different answers, the backbone of your narrative is missing—or at least underdeveloped. Sometimes that gap can be closed with shared language and training. Other times, it’s a signal that the company has evolved and the story hasn’t kept up.
This is often where a strategic marketing audit helps—not to add tactics, but to pressure-test whether narrative, systems and decisions are actually aligned. Fractional strategic advisory can surface where clarity is breaking down. And sometimes, it’s time to refresh the brand platform to reflect who you truly are today.
What matters most is not sitting in the mess.
Integrate narrative as an operating system—and let it do the work it was always meant to do.
