The narrative you don't tell becomes the price you don't charge

There's already a story about your company making the rounds. The question is who wrote it. When the owner doesn't say what the company is and why it exists, the market finishes the sentence with whatever is at hand: the competitor's version, the version of the client who left unhappy, the version the salesperson improvised in the meeting. Narrative tends to be treated as marketing decoration, a bit like treating the rudder as a boat accessory. Yet it's through narrative that people, voters and buyers decide what is true before they check the facts.

The last client who signed with you gave a reason. If that reason was "the price was right," that's the story circulating about you. In a first conversation with someone who comes to me, I usually ask why their customers buy from them. The answer, nine times out of ten, is quality or service. It's exactly what their competitor would say.

Philosophers have been debating the power of narrative for more than 2,000 years, politicians have been applying it for almost as long, and plenty of companies still think it's a job for the social media intern. The idea I repeat most to business owners fits in one line: in any comparison, whoever sets the yardstick gets a head start.

The cave now has a high-resolution screen

In Book VII of The Republic, Plato imagines prisoners chained since childhood, facing a wall. Behind them burns a fire, and all they know of the world are the shadows cast on that wall. To them, truth is nothing more than those shadows, and whoever gets free, sees the light and comes back to tell the others is met with ridicule.

Swap the wall for a screen and the scene looks familiar. Your customer only sees the shadow you cast, made of a website, a comment in a group chat and a post taken out of context. That shadow is what they decide on. And for plenty of companies, that shadow is still a Mission, Vision and Values slide with a stock photo of people smiling at a spreadsheet.

Appearance and myth

Nearly two thousand years after Plato, Machiavelli wrote one of the most candid manuals on power. In Chapter XVIII of The Prince, he reminds us that "men judge generally more by the eye than by the hand." Everyone sees what you appear to be, and few know what you are. Machiavelli was describing how people form opinions, without praising the facade, and warning that ignoring it comes at a high price.

Roland Barthes showed the next step in a 1950s book, Mythologies. There he examined everyday things in French life, such as wrestling and red wine, to show how a story repeated well enough stops looking like a story. Myth, for Barthes, turns something someone built into something that seems natural, as if it had always been that way.

Think of the leader in your industry. It has become "the natural choice," the benchmark, and everyone else has to explain themselves.

The fiction that gets strangers working together

Yuval Noah Harari, best known for Sapiens, explains why this works so well. In his view, inventing stories and believing them together is what allows millions of strangers to cooperate. Nations, human rights and money, which Harari calls probably the most successful fiction in history, exist because a great many people believe the same story at the same time.

A company is one of those stories too. Articles of incorporation don't get up early or take care of customers. What makes fifty people row in the same direction is the story they believe they're building. Without it, everyone rows their own way and the boat goes in circles.

You can see this inside your own company. Ask the salesperson, the operations manager and whoever answers the phone what the company does differently. If the three answers don't sound alike, the customer is hearing three companies too.

Aristotle already wrote the manual

In Rhetoric, Aristotle organized persuasion around three pillars: the character of the speaker, the emotions of the audience and the argument itself. The detail that usually slips by is that, for him, character has to show up in the speech itself.

Most companies use only the third. They list specs and prices and expect the argument to defend itself. Daniel Kahneman, who later won the Nobel in economics, showed with Amos Tversky that the frame changes the choice. The same options, described in terms of lives saved or in terms of deaths, flip the decision most people make. An argument without a frame is food without a plate, and the customer will serve it on whatever dish they have at home.

Pull up the last proposal that went out. The first page probably lays out scope, timeline and price. Most of the ones from midsize companies that have crossed my desk open the same way. The client got the argument without the character or the emotion. They read the numbers, compared them with bids from two other suppliers and did the only math left.

Politics always knew

If there is a laboratory of narrative that never closes, it's politics. Winston Churchill took the floor of the House of Commons in June 1940, right after the Dunkirk evacuation, which rescued more than 338,000 Allied soldiers. He didn't hide the bad news and called the episode a colossal military disaster. But he tied the fact to a story of resistance, repeating "we shall fight" before closing with the promise that the country would never surrender. The narrative turned the defeat into a starting point.

You have your own Dunkirks too: the project that ran late, the big client who walked away, the price increase that has to be announced. The bad news will reach the market sooner or later. What you decide is whether it arrives alone or tied to what the company will do next.

What brands learned from the philosophers

Steve Jobs had been back at Apple for only a few months, and had just taken over as interim CEO, when the company launched the "Think Different" campaign in 1997. Created by the agency TBWA\Chiat\Day, it paired the logo with portraits of Einstein, Gandhi, Thomas Edison, Muhammad Ali and others. By Jobs's own account, told in 2010, Apple was about 90 days from insolvency, and it still chose to sell rebellion instead of RAM. The product moved out of the spotlight, and an identity took its place, that of people who think differently. The campaign became tied to one of the great corporate turnarounds in history.

Nike had taken the same route almost ten years earlier, with the "Just Do It" that Dan Wieden wrote. Three words, none of them about sneakers, spoken to the reader the way a coach gives a push.

Marketing put names to these mechanisms. Al Ries and Jack Trout, in Positioning, showed that the battle takes place in the customer's mind, in front of a skeptical audience bombarded with messages, and that a company's position also depends on its competitors' strengths and weaknesses. And Donald Miller built a method in Building a StoryBrand out of the structure of stories, in which the customer is the hero and the brand is the guide.

Miller turned what Nike had been doing by instinct into a method. By handing the hero's role to the customer, a brand stops competing with them for the stage and gains an ally.

A one-minute test shows which role your home page has chosen. Count how many sentences start with "we," as in "we have," "we do" or "we are industry leaders." Each one pushes the customer out of the center of the story. When the copy starts with the customer's problem and what changes after they hire you, the company becomes the guide.

Two things that people often lump together are worth pulling apart. Narrative is the underlying story the market repeats about your business, and it decides who you get compared with. Storytelling is the craft of telling that story in every piece, from videos to posts. Everyone has seen a gorgeous commercial and walked away without knowing which brand it was for.

Every vacuum has an owner

Narrative isn't optional, because empty space doesn't stay empty. Your competitor will describe you as the expensive option, the outdated one or the one that's too small. The market will slot you into the nearest category and price you at that category's average.

Most of that story is written in rooms you're not in. In the client's meeting, someone sums up your proposal in one sentence for their colleagues. On a sales call, your competitor's rep says you're good, but maybe too small for that project. In a group chat, a former client tells their version. And today there's a new reader in that conversation. Anyone who asks an AI about your sector tends to get a summary built largely from what's already published. If your website and materials don't tell your story clearly, the answer will likely tell someone else's.

What makes it worse even has a name, Brandolini's law: refuting nonsense takes many times more work than making it up. Correcting the wrong version later costs far more than telling the right one first.

That's why the narrative has to get there first. It has to be in what the client finds when they look up the company and in what the salesperson repeats in every meeting. And it needs results your current clients can describe unprompted. Whoever leaves that space empty ends up described by others, in their words.

A mother's praise never closed a deal

Service excellence, superior quality, commitment to the customer. If those phrases are on your website, they're also on the websites of your five competitors, probably in the same order. They sound nice and are worth nothing. It's like a mother's compliment, which doesn't count because nobody expected to hear anything else. Beautiful storytelling on top of an empty narrative turns into a corporate video nobody watches to the end. When everyone says they're the best, "best" becomes noise, and the customer, faced with noise, goes back to comparing prices.

What corporate messaging fails to see is that being compared is already losing. Once you become a row in a spreadsheet next to three other companies, the decision has left your hands and moved to the price column. The game is getting out of it.

A business's value lives in the mind of whoever makes the decision, more than in its operation. You can have the best product in your industry and be remembered as just another supplier. Real value only becomes price after it becomes perception. Every company says it's the best. Only narrative makes anyone believe it.

Forget other people's yardstick, you set the standards

Any comparison needs a yardstick, and whoever picks it already starts out ahead. On price, the companies in a sector almost always lose to whoever has the most scale. When the criterion becomes lead time, specialization or the risk a company takes off the customer's shoulders, the ranking changes. The job of narrative is to teach the customer to compare on the criterion where you are strong, before a competitor teaches them theirs. That's what differentiation is.

For years I've been making this yardstick point to the business owners I talk to, and the first reaction tends to be the same question: "So what would my yardstick be?" The way in starts with another question. If the customer decided on a single criterion, on which one would your company beat any competitor? The answer becomes the yardstick. The proposal opens with that criterion, the website exists to prove it, and the salesperson spends the conversation showing why it matters more than price.

Blue Ocean Strategy, by W. Chan Kim and Renée Mauborgne, takes the idea to its extreme. The authors argue that the path to growth runs through making the competition irrelevant, by creating a space where no yardstick exists yet. Nespresso did this with coffee, one of the most comparable products in the supermarket. It swapped the bag for the capsule, designed a machine around it and opened stores that look like jewelry boutiques. In August 2026, according to Brazil's coffee industry association, a kilo of capsule coffee cost about eight times as much as regular ground coffee in large supermarkets (a year earlier, about six and a half times), and still hardly anyone lines the capsule up against the bag when comparing prices, because Nespresso brought its own yardstick.

To play this game, all you have to do is stop accepting the yardstick the market chose for you.

Make the price tell the story

Rory Sutherland, who built his career in advertising at Ogilvy, likes to point out that Red Bull comes in a small can, costs a lot and has a taste few people would call good. A spreadsheet would reject the whole product, and it sells anyway, because in the buyer's mind, something small, expensive and strange must work.

Pricing is a narrative choice before it's a calculation. A low price tells a story too, and it's almost never the one you want. Charging less to get into the conversation teaches the customer to see the company as the cheap option. After that, there's no use complaining that the market doesn't recognize your value. It's exactly the value you advertised.

Give a 15% discount to close a new client and watch what happens the following year. The full price starts to look like an increase, and that client leaves at the first cheaper offer.

Nobody wins a price war

Fighting on price means accepting a fight in which your opponent picks the weapon. It's the only contest that rewards first place with the thinnest margin in the industry. There will always be someone with more cash, more media, more scale or more willingness to lose money for a while. Whoever enters that fight is, deep down, waiting their turn to be replaced.

And there's a cost that doesn't show up right away, which is inflation. A comparable company can't raise its prices, because any increase sends the customer back to the spreadsheet. With Brazilian inflation running at around 4% to 5% a year, as in 2025, when the IPCA index closed at 4.26% according to IBGE, three years of frozen prices wipe out between 11% and 14% of the purchasing power of what you take in. Standing still means shrinking slowly, without anyone noticing, not even you.

Warren Buffett laid out the criterion in an interview with the commission investigating the financial crisis in the United States: the single most important decision in evaluating a business is pricing power. If you have to have a prayer session before raising the price by a tenth of a cent, he said, then you've got a terrible business. That pricing power comes from positioning far more than from the cost spreadsheet. With a yardstick of its own, a company can raise prices without losing the customer.

Decide what to turn down

Positioning means giving things up. A company that serves everyone is rarely remembered by anyone. Saying clearly who you don't serve does more for the brand's differentiation than any list of strengths, because it shows there's a criterion, and a criterion is what separates a specialist from a vendor.

The idea fits in one sentence by Michael Porter, who has taught strategy at Harvard for decades. The essence of strategy, he wrote, is choosing what not to do. It sounds simple, yet plenty of midsize companies do the opposite. It takes the off-profile customer because the month is slow, bends the service to fit the budget of someone who shouldn't be buying, and grants the discount it swore it would never give. Each of those concessions looks small, but together they rewrite the company's story.

The reason is simple. The customers you serve become cases, and cases tell stories. When an accounting firm stops serving everyone from bakeries to startups and focuses only on medical clinics, it speaks the client's language from the first meeting, charges more for it and gets referrals from other doctors. What changed was a list of refusals.

Whenever I suggest putting in writing what the company will no longer accept, the pushback is immediate. It sounds crazy until the owner runs the numbers on the client who gave them the most trouble last year, counting team hours, rework and discounts given, and compares that with what that client paid.

The list of refusals is worth writing down with the same seriousness as a sales plan: which customers the company doesn't serve, which projects it doesn't take, which discounts it doesn't grant. It is as much a narrative decision as a commercial one. Turning work down costs cash in the short term, which is why the list has to be written before the slow month.

One story, many audiences

In B2B sales, almost nobody buys alone. In a Gartner survey of 632 B2B buyers, conducted in 2024, buying groups ranged from five to 16 people in the decision. And each of them hears the same proposal through a different filter. Finance wants to know what it costs and when it pays back. Operations wants to know whether it means more work or less. IT wants to know whether it will break something. The board wants to know whether it brings them closer to where they want to go or pushes them further away.

In projects I've followed, I've seen good proposals die in finance because they were written for the board. A single version, identical for everyone, leaves half the room without an answer. Changing the substance of the story to please each person is even worse, because in the committee meeting the versions contradict each other and doubt wins. The way through is the orchestra's. Each instrument plays its own part, in the language it understands, but there is only one piece of music.

That takes work before the sale: mapping who decides, what each of them fears and what each one needs to carry back to defend the choice internally. When finance, operations and IT walk into the meeting with different arguments pointing to the same place, the objections fall before anyone raises them. The narrative becomes the argument the customer uses to win over their own colleagues.

Next time you send a proposal to a larger company, ask your contact who else will read it. If a CFO is on the list, the proposal needs a page they can understand in two minutes, with cost, return and timeline.

Repeat until it feels natural

Repetition changes taste, and Robert Zajonc measured it in a late-1960s experiment. He showed volunteers a list of meaningless words, presented as if they were Turkish. Some appeared only once, others as many as 25 times. Afterward, each person had to guess whether a word meant something good or bad. The more often they had seen a word, the more positive they judged its meaning. It's the song that annoyed you the first time and becomes a hit by the tenth. Barthes would call the result a myth: a story turned into nature, repeated until it seems it was always that way.

The enemy of repetition usually lives in-house. Owners grow tired of their own message long before the market hears it for the first time, and that is where the urge to change the campaign every quarter comes from. The person making the buying decision runs into your brand at scattered moments, among dozens of other messages. The line that feels worn out in the meeting room is still news to most customers. The storytelling can vary from one piece to the next, as long as the narrative stays the same.

Repeating also means telling the same story at every touchpoint. The website, the proposal, the salesperson, customer service and even the way you bill need to back each other up. When each one tells its own version, the customer gets several loose stories instead of one repeated story, and none of them sticks. One central line, backed by a few proofs and repeated across every channel for long enough, pays off more than a new campaign every season.

When the story changes the game

Business history is full of companies that changed their place in the market because they told a story no one else was telling, some without touching the product at all.

Beyond rarity, for most of the 20th century the price of diamonds depended on De Beers controlling supply. And the diamond engagement ring was not a universal tradition. The line "A Diamond Is Forever" was written in 1947 by Frances Gerety, who handled the De Beers account at the agency N. W. Ayer. The slogan turned a stone into proof of love, and nobody shops for proof of love by price per carat.

Avis was number two in U.S. car rentals, behind Hertz, and had been piling up losses. The agency DDB turned that weakness into the argument in 1962: "We try harder," because we're number two. Instead of pretending to be the leader, Avis turned second place into a promise of service, and the campaign became a case study. Within a year, the company went from a $3.2 million loss to its first profit in more than a decade.

In Brazil, Havaianas spent decades as the cheap rubber flip-flop, the kind you could pick up at any corner store. Then, in the 1990s, the brand decided to tell a different story: new colors, solid-color designs, carefully staged store displays and the sandals on the feet of trendsetters. Practically unchanged as a product, the flip-flop moved to a new place in people's minds and became a symbol of Brazil sold all over the world.

Salesforce was founded in 1999 to sell sales management software over the internet, in a market dominated by Siebel. Instead of competing feature by feature, it picked a fight with the very idea of installed software. Its launch event, in 2000, was themed "the end of software," and the company even hired actors to stage a fake protest outside the market leader's conference, which earned it its first major story, in the Wall Street Journal. Salesforce went public in 2004, and the subscription model it championed became the industry standard.

In Brazil, RD Station started in 2011, in Florianópolis, selling marketing automation at a time when, according to founder Eric Santos, almost nobody searched for that term on Google. Before it could sell the software, it had to teach the market to want it, with free content and an event that drew more than 12,000 people. In 2021, TOTVS paid 1.86 billion reais for 92% of the company.

In every one of them, the fight was decided by the story, not by the spec sheet.

When the story doesn't save you

None of this works on its own. A strong story without delivery to match only makes the fall happen in front of a bigger audience.

The Segway was unveiled in 2001 with the promise of changing the way people get around cities. Its inventor, Dean Kamen, went as far as saying the company would be the fastest in history to reach a billion dollars in revenue. In almost 20 years it sold about 140,000 units, and production of the original model ended in 2020. The story moved much faster than the product, which cost 5,000 dollars and didn't fit into almost anyone's routine.

Google put Glass on sale in 2013, in an edition for early users, as the computer you wear on your face. It cost 1,500 dollars and bothered the people around it because of the camera. The backlash over price and privacy came fast, and less than two years later consumer sales ended.

Grow, the company behind the Yellow and Grin scooters and bikes, operated in more than ten Brazilian cities. Vandalism, the need to constantly replace and upgrade the fleet and the high cost of the operation outweighed the novelty. In January 2020, before the pandemic, it pulled out of 14 cities and kept essentially São Paulo and Rio. It filed for judicial recovery months later and was declared bankrupt in 2023.

In all three cases, the narrative did its job and created expectation, press coverage and a line of interested buyers. What was missing was a product that delivered, in the customer's hands, what the story promised. The story can arrive before the sale. It can't arrive before the delivery.

The neighborhood bakery plays the same game

Far from the spotlight, differentiation follows the same rule. The neighborhood bakery loses to the supermarket on the price of a bread roll and wins anyway, because the bread comes out of the oven at five in the afternoon, the baker knows you like yours extra crusty and buying there makes you feel at home. At the hardware store on the corner, the clerk understands the leak you described and tells you which part will fix it, and people buying a solution don't compare the price of screws. The small consultancy that says "we only work with clinics" makes the clinic owner feel they've finally found someone who speaks their language.

In every one of these cases, beyond price and specs, the customer bought the story it made the most sense to be part of. You don't control your competitor's size, their media budget or the storefront they can afford. Being the strongest, the richest and the best-looking may be out of reach, but being the smartest is within your control.

Now step to the other side of the counter and go back to the reason your last client gave for signing with you. What makes someone cross town to buy from you when a competitor is two blocks away? That reason is almost never written on your website. Put it into a sentence a client would repeat to someone they know. That's where your narrative starts.

Either you write the script, or you're an extra

Somewhere in your industry there's a company with a worse product than yours that charges more and has a waiting list. You know its name. It's the one your client holds up as the benchmark when asking you for a discount. It didn't win in the factory or in the lab. It won by telling a better story, while you were walking people through the spec sheet when nobody asked.

The customer who switched to them tells their friends they upgraded. That's the competitor's story coming out of the mouth of someone who should be telling yours.

Quality without narrative is a well-kept secret, and a well-kept secret doesn't pay the bills.

The market is going to tell your story no matter what. Either you write the script, or you settle for playing an extra in your competitor's story. And extras, as everyone knows, don't get to negotiate their fee.