A Brand Narrative with Dada Charms can prove a brand's right to exist in people's lives — refreshingly, subversively.
“Every statement packed into an easily digestible story, served with linear plot and ready-made frames of meaning — ambiguity eliminated. Not to move, but to persuade. “Storytelling risks degradation by promiscuous overuse in public.”
Peter Brooks — Seduced by Story
He calls it Storification. He speaks of anaesthesia — because nothing in the listening prompts us to stay alert.
I agree, from the bottom of my heart.
What brands call narrative today is mostly a self-absorbed status report, or a claim with a backdrop, or a bluster about an inner attitude that doesn't move and therefore arrives nowhere.
A narrative gets its freshest jolt when Dada is allowed to work. The scalpel cuts in three angles:
I Unruly Subtext — Meanings that live between the lines. The undertones, the surprising double binds, the slips. Small structural stumbles are the real show.
II Untidy Soulweather — Feelings that resist every instruction. A weather system with an escalation tendency — sunny, stormy, often both at once. Contradictions danced with, not tidied up.
III Unsettled Myth — Wisdom that laughs at its own ending. Myths that trip themselves up along the way, fall — and get back up with a grin.
A narrative breaks open — shows a tension, holds it, leaves the outcome unresolved. It needs a wound to breathe.
My Narrative Scalpel cuts where the anaesthesia cannot reach.