Reinventing a narrative

There is a famous saying: You can't teach an old dog new tricks.

Reinvention needs newness, relevance and also reciprocity (by those who are witnessing it). However, for small and upcoming companies, reinventing narratives appear to be much easier and faster. Some say, it is because there are so few decision-makers; others opine, they don't have to make 'big' decisions before they reinvent their narrative. True, and not true always.

To me it appears as a Catch-22 situation. You can't learn a new trick because you are old and fixed, and yet it is imperative to continue learning through your old-age so that you don't feel left out or left behind. For companies that make excuses, I think it is fair to say that most of the time they are willing to experiment and change, but they don't know whom to throw under the bus if the narrative fails. Who will take the risk? Who will trust the person to lead this narrative? Who will NOT prevail upon the one who suggested it if it fails?

Financial might or plenty of marketing dollars or rupees may be equally necessary to reinvent a new narrative. Remember your lesson from the good old advertising days? It is cheaper to launch a new brand - clean slate phenomena - than to rewrite the story of an old brand that just (no matter what) refuses to get reinvented! Literally, reinventing a narrative, personal or professional needs solid intent and commitment to do the labor, double the time and work to execute the narrative, double the money to popularise it, and a completely open and progressive mindset. Again, most companies think they are fair and progressive, but they get jittery even with new brand color palette recommendations. Sounds familiar, right?

I started thinking a lot about this whole 'reinventing the narrative' thing because of two reasons:

1. My own career-life that is poised to change by some degrees based on what I have been working towards and the choices I will make this year, and
2. My unemployed and desperate ex-colleague and friend whom I met recently who doesn't know how to make a CV that would do justice to SEO and other algorithms that recruiter are using these days.

Whether it is a person or a company, I think it is easy and comfortably tempting to get lost in the existing narrative, and miss the whole point of reinventing the narrative. What this kind of reinvention IS NOT: doing the same thing differently.

What is the point of doing the same thing differently? That would mean you are changing the method or a process, hoping to get amazing, life or business changing results while your cosmetic fixes may not be ideal for the new narrative. That is plain dumb in my view, because reinventing anything needs to begin from what I call Deep Demolition.

Deep Demolition demands a complete makeover - like Bariatric surgery which is full of wonder, risk, and results, but it could go anyway, besides giving a lot of pain and resulting in lifestyle changes. For companies, and even individuals, Deep Demolition involves breaking down everything, taking it apart, sifting the old from the new, the non-operational to the operational, the good-to-have to the what-we-can-actually do, and most importantly, the what-we-want-to-be-and-why vs lets-do-something-and-see-what-happens!

Unless we have the stomach, the courage, the brains and the money to TOTALLY give up most of the old ways of working, living, serving or experiencing, including biases and what was and is not working, we can't build a new narrative. We have to even give up our favourite images, colors, words, associations and preferences to reinvent the narrative. Those are in fact, more difficult to throw out than the big things like which service offerings to kill, and which dish not to eat again.

The new narrative can be new only if we can even forget we are reinventing the old one. Pretending we have none, can serve companies and brands, and individuals to start afresh, in the context of the present. What is marketing, if not the present?

My friend who is looking for employment and is in the process of reinventing himself, pretty much like me, so he decided to shift gears. Just as I had started consulting some years ago, and then decided to completely ditch that stream of work and get employed again, he decided to go ahead with a big plan to launch that has been in his head for years. He quit a cushy job because he believed he had to reinvent his own narrative, and he kind of did for a while - about 30 days, and then he failed. His reinventing the narrative didn't work because he changed his process (like discipline, communications, etc.), but he failed to throw out the thing that was destined not to work in the long term - his big plan!

Why is it so important to reinvent the narrative now, more than ever? I think it is mainly because the pandemic has forced us to appreciate ourselves much more than we know. And above all, our clients and vendors, and our employees (who are also human like us, even if we like to forget that sometimes) want a change - anything, big or small - to feel they matter, they belong, they are part of the big commerce. They want to somehow change the world now even if they haven't before, by doing business in a new way and experiencing interactions and engagements in a new way.

So, at the end of the day, everyone is craving for a new brand narrative that resonates with the times, the people who consume it, and the people who are hoping to find it. If a company has to succeed in this marathon of reinventing the narrative, they first must embrace Deep Demolition.

This or That?

You tell me.