From position to story: a subtle strategy in personal branding

We are living through a period of real turbulence. The pace of technological change and the instability of institutions are eroding certainties that previous generations took for granted, and this produces a specific kind of cultural tension. On one side sits the desire for a comfortable, even prosperous life. On the other sits the fear of a future that feels entirely out of control. The gap between the two is real, and it is not going away.

This gap is also a strategic opportunity. Cultural strategies, as Douglas Holt's research on iconic brands has shown, are built on moments like this one. When a significant part of a public is living a tension between what exists and what they wish existed, a brand that can interpret that tension and offer a credible way of living with it becomes a resource for meaning. For personal brands, this possibility is particularly acute: a person can occupy a cultural position with an authenticity that institutional brands can rarely afford.

The story that enacts

The most powerful tool available to a personal brand operating in the space of cultural strategy is myth-making. A myth, in Roland Barthes's sense, is a story that presents an interpretation of reality in a way that feels natural and self-evident to the public receiving it. It shows a strory, and the public recognises itself in what it sees or hears or reads. For personal brands, this is an extraordinary opportunity: the cultural position you occupy, the tension you interpret, the way you propose to help your public live with that tension, can all be transmitted through stories that land with a force that explicit argument rarely matches. For instance, if you post a picture of yourself entering the campus in Harvard, that sole picture will tell a story of knowledgeability and seniority that would take a lot of effort to be credibly told in other ways. You just used Harvard in an exercise of myth making.

Behind every effective myth there is an ideology: the interpretive structure the brand proposes, the specific lens through which it names a cultural tension and gives it direction. It tells the public how to understand a tension and where to look for a way through. It transforms a cultural observation into a brand position. The ideology lives inside the story, carried by every choice the brand makes about what to engage with and how. In the Harvard myth I mentioned above, your ideology would revolve about the idea that knowledge is a platform for success and a guarantee of excellence.

Myth making in cultural strategies come with conditions. You must be entitled to make myths. The credibility of what you tell is a fundamental condition or your story will backfire. I remember that when former Prime Minister of Italy Giuseppe Conte entered the political arena, coming from an academic and practitioner background, the press questioned his curriculum vitae, stating that his claimed Harvard education was no more that a couple of short courses. That questioning did not stop Conte’s political career, but it certainly became a problem to solve.

Choosing your narrative posture

Translating a cultural position into a narrative is constrained by what you have actually lived and what you are equipped to offer. I find it useful to think about this through a matrix that maps narrative posture against experience type, across four quadrants: Rescue, Resolve, Boost and Transform.

Each quadrant corresponds to a different relationship between the brand and its public's experience of a tension. Rescue operates where the public is in acute difficulty and the personal brand intervenes to stabilise. Resolve operates where the public faces complexity and uncertainty, and the personal brand brings clarity and optimisation. Boost operates where the public has capability and ambition but needs elevation: new perspectives and a different way of reading their own situation. Transform operates where the public is ready for a fundamental shift in how they understand their role or their world.

The quadrant a personal brand can credibly occupy is determined by its actual experience base, the depth and nature of what it has lived through and learned. The central question the matrix helps answer is this: how can I best, credibly and authentically, help the public I am addressing with the tension they are living?

Two professionals, two tensions, two stories

Consider a financial adviser who specialises in helping people plan for and navigate retirement. The cultural tension her public lives is the distance between the dream of a deserved and hard-gained fulfilling life after work, and the fear of an uncertain and possibly complicated future. That tension carries anxiety about resources, about identity, about what life looks like when the structure of work no longer organises the days and feeds the finances.

The narrative posture chosen by this adviser may be Resolve. Her public needs clarity, informed judgement and the best possible optimisation of the resources they have accumulated over a working life. The myth she can offer varies with the specific public she addresses. To someone already approaching retirement, the myth might be one of tranquillity: representations of a comfortable, dignified life, of skilful decisions made at the right moment, of a future that is within reach. To someone in their forties, the myth shifts towards wisdom and foresight, of planning intelligently against uncertainty, of protecting the life that a family has built together. The images that carry these myths, a garden on a summer afternoon, a family gathered without urgency, a day on the beach. They evoke the desired reality directly, and the adviser who inhabits that imagery consistently is performing her ideology without stating it. Money does not make happiness, but it helps building the necessary tranquillity.

Now consider a CFO who works with founders and leadership teams of companies in the process of scaling. The tension here is between the dream of extraordinary success, the conviction that what has been built deserves to grow and reach its full potential, and the daily reality of unpredictability, resource constraints, organisational strain and the personal toll that the scaling journey exacts. That tension is acute and often lonely.

The narrative posture that this CFO may chose is Boost. His public has real capability and ambition. What they need is elevation: access to financial thinking and tools that operate at a higher level of sophistication, and a shift in perspective that opens up possibilities they had not seen. The myth the CFO offers is one of mastery recovered: the leader who finds, with the right guidance, that the complexity they are navigating is part of the journey, and that there are ways of reading it that make it navigable. The CFO who tells stories of companies that found their footing at a moment of maximum pressure, without simplifying the difficulty, is enacting that myth consistently. The ideology here revolves around the epic of building something great, maybe around the purpose of making an impact. «Make an impact in the Universe» as Steve Jobs famously said.

The discipline of narrative relevance

Umberto Eco's observation about context constraint is relevant here. A myth only functions within the cultural field that makes it legible. The stories a personal brand tells must remain within the territory that its public can recognise and relate to. A CFO who drifts into stories drawn from territory unfamiliar to his public will find that the frame does not land. The narrative must be innovative enough to give the tension a fresh reading, and anchored enough in the shared world of the public that they can find themselves in it. Douglas Holt talks about “Populist Worlds” to say that the public must effortlessly understand the myth proposed by the personal brand.

Finally it’s worth noting that the narrative is not the strategy. It is where the strategy becomes visible. A personal brand that has found its cultural position and identified the narrative posture that fits it has something that no amount of content production alone can generate: a story that means more the longer it is told. Nevertheless, that story needs to serve a fundamental strategy that meets the needs of the public with a concrete solution.