gokceozantoptas

I also have suffered from this (and still do, really). I will share some lessons that I have picked along the way, followed by a couple of book recommendations.

The lessons:

• Focus: Most of the time the issue is you are trying to communicate way too many things. Now I try to contain my message to one single point. This helped me immensely.
• Message House: A framework in branding and PR, I advise you to do a quick web search on this. With my previous bullet, I "construct" my message house with these components whenever possible: (1) Anecdote, preferably a personal one. Kicking it with a very short story that is central to your idea

Cool. Sometimes people use "meta-narrative" for that kind of thing if I am understanding your point correctly. Like the overarching message-focused story of an organization. But, sure, use narrative, as long as people understand what you mean, all cool.

Yeah, your observation is on point - most of the time people (audiences) do not actually "track" about an organization. But that doesn't mean it does not matter - on the contrary. The narrative is generally absorbed subconsciously, by being exposed to multiple stories from the organization.

I'd say the mission statement is something else than the narrative and more of a part of the strategic-domain than communications-domain. But definitely, the mission informs communications.

On your... (read more)

I think what you mean when you use PR-narrative is more like projected brand, rather than narrative (in the PR sense). Narrative (to my understanding and how I use it professionally) is generally limited to a topic, a situation or an event, as opposed to the whole of the organisation. Practically, an organisation might have multiple narratives on different topics.

Another important distinction between the strategy and brand, I think, is strategy is more prescriptive and brand is more interactive. Yes, strategy is informed by the environment, players, etc but then describes a situation, includes predictions, identifies challenges and defines actions to overcome those challenges. The brand is more interactive because even though... (read more)