Narrative power: Brands, identity and the stories we tell ourselves
Editor's note: This article is an automated speech-to-text transcription, edited lightly for clarity. To view the full session recording click here.
RealityCheck has been working on a new brand equity measure for about 15 years. The company calls it the Narrative Power Index or NPI.
Basically, the NPI is a measure of how a brand makes a consumer feel and the role the brand plays in the consumer's sense of self.
In this session from the 2025 Quirk’s Event – Virtual Global, Jim White, president of RealityCheck, explains the study the organization has been conducting, some of the findings thus far, what this new measure is and why it is useful.
Session transcript
Joe Rydholm
Hi everybody and welcome to our session, “Narrative power: Brands, identity and the stories we tell ourselves.” I'm Quirk’s Editor, Joe Rydholm. Thanks for joining us.
Just a quick reminder that you can use the chat tab if you'd like to interact with other attendees during the discussion. And you can use the Q&A tab to submit questions to the presenter and we'll get to as many as we have time for at the end.
Our session today is presented by RealityCheck. Jim, take it away.
Jim White
Thanks Joe, I appreciate that. Thanks everybody for being here this morning, this afternoon, this evening, wherever you're logging in from.
I want to tell you a story today that's about 15 years in the making. But before I get into that, I wanted to start by sharing a question that I want everyone to think about while I'm going through this presentation.
How many of your consumers feel better about themselves after engaging with your brand?
And the key word there is italicized. It's themselves. I know we all want our consumers to feel better about our brands, but how many do you feel like feel better about who they are, their own self-esteem after engaging with your brand on any level? Seeing your advertising, usage purchase, any interaction they had with your brand.
I bet this is a number that many of us don't know. I certainly didn't know this about our client's brands until we started on this journey of understanding the relationship between identity and brand connection.
But despite that, this is a phenomenon that academic researchers, at least, have been studying for years. And there's a lot of support for the notion that brands that are truly iconic, that have lasting loyalty are connecting with people in a meaningful way, and they become tools for people's identity.
Their consumers are using iconic brands not only to tell other people and express to other people something about who they are and who they aspire to be in the world, but they're doing it to reaffirm to themselves who they are. So, that's what we're going to be talking about today.
The process of developing identity is one that psychologists understand is about telling ourselves stories about who we are. It's something that psychologists call “narrative identity.”
What I'd like to introduce to you today is a concept that we call “narrative power,” which is a measure of a brand's ability to play a role in that self-story.
But before we get into all that, I wanted to give you a little background, a little origin story.
About 15 years ago, one of our CPG clients came to us and wanted us to help them understand what they were referring to as “tensions” in the lives of their consumers for each of their consumer segments.
Basically tensions, the way that they understood it, were kind of deeper pain points, not just the run of the mill everyday frustrations that consumers have, but things that you could build a brand around, motivating tensions in these folks' lives.
We have a team of psychologists at RealityCheck, and we began to work with them on defining “tension” as a concept.
Immediately our psychologist took this to questions of identity. Most of us humans, all of us to some degree I would say in different areas of our lives experience what we now refer to as “identity tension.” Our psychologists sometimes calls it “self-discrepancies.”
These are basically gaps between our actual selves, our ideal selves, who we want to be in the world, our ought selves, which is a version of us that is put upon us by others in our lives, peers, friends, family, the culture at large. So, we began to understand and do some work on these different versions of the self.
Now that led us to the work of a few psychologists. One in particular named Dan McAdams at Northwestern University. He has done a lot of work on what's he calls “narrative identity,” how we shape our sense of self by telling ourselves stories about who we are.
One of the things that McAdams points out is that we don't as humans construct our sense of self, our narrative identity out of a vacuum. We draw from the culture that's around us. So, cultural artifacts, cultural mythologies, these vary by countries and cultures, but we develop ourselves, our stories rooted in the culture in which we're immersed. We use different symbols and artifacts within the culture to help us define that identity.
If you think at all about brands as being symbolic cultural artifacts, then it's not too much of a leap of logic to begin to question, ‘well, how might people use brands, particularly iconic brands to help shape this sense of self?’
So, we began doing about 10 years of research on this subject for a number of different clients and began to develop this idea of narrative power. Albeit in a deep dive sort of clinical psychology qualitative way. And that's important for what I'll talk about here in just a little bit. But we were curious about how consumers were using brands to help tell the stories about who they are now and who they aspire to be, who they want to be in the world. So, applying that notion of narrative identity to brand strategy.
We began doing deep dive psychological interviews with consumers, and we've done these over many, many years now. These are interviews that our psychologists do and they talk to consumers about their lives, about their narrative identity and how that relates to product and service categories as well as specific brands.
There are a few of the brands that we've done this work for. Our psychologists over the years have literally done hundreds of these deep dive consumer interviews to help our clients develop a strategy that connects with narrative identity. And that was great. We've been doing this work for quite some time and it's interesting, but we had a little bit of a breakthrough about eight months ago.
I stumbled upon a body of literature that was not in psychology, it was coming out of business schools. There's a researcher named Derek Rucker at Northwestern University who has been a pioneer in this, Jennifer Escalas at Vanderbilt and many, many others. But there's a large body of literature on consumption and what they call “self-discrepancies,” which is another word for tension.
Basically, how consumers use brands to help compensate for gaps between who they are now and who they want to be and who the society says they should be.
And what was really exciting to us about this literature is not only did it sort of confirm what we had been working on qualitatively and from a clinical psychology perspective for years and years and years, but these researchers had developed ways to quantify this phenomenon. That was really exciting to us because to date we had not been able to explore tension and the connection of brands to identity in a way that allowed us to do a cross-cultural analysis, rigorous analysis across different consumer segments, generations or such.
So, armed with these two bodies of research, the clinical psych work and then the work that was coming out of marketing departments and business schools, we developed a pilot study. That's what I'm going to share with you today. Some of the results of that.
This is very preliminary. We literally just started looking at this data, but it's already interesting to us.
But where the academic literature kind of stops short, first of all is just helping us understand whether self-brand connection and the ability of brands to help people shape identity. Does that matter? Is it something that actually contributes to our understanding of brand equity, brand power, beyond what the traditional measures of equity are? Things like differentiation and uniqueness, value, quality, awareness, those kinds of things that we typically associate with iconic or strong brands.
So, we set out to develop a survey that would draw from the academic literature and take a look at narrative power in the real world and apply it to some different categories and brands.
This was executed as a survey. We had 4,200 U.S. consumers and seven different product categories we looked at. Then we looked at six leading brands per category, and we'll talk about that in just a minute. So, pretty comprehensive analysis.
But we wanted to see how narrative power certainly varied across the brands that we had in our study, but also, we wanted to understand the degree of identity tension across different categories. The gaps between actual and ideal selves across different consumer segments such as generations.
The questionnaire itself measured a series of concepts and that included what we call “Global Identity Tension,” which is an individual's overall feelings of self-esteem or inadequacy, the gap between actual one ideal selves.
We then looked at the degree of identity relevance intentions within specific categories. So, that is if you're thinking about something like financial services, fitness apparel or alcoholic beverages, if we cue those categories in people's minds, is that a domain where there is tension or do they feel pretty good about how they show up in that space?
We included measures of traditional brand equity drivers, things like uniqueness, differentiation, quality and value essentially to control for those things.
Then we built an index of narrative power that included some 13 measures, and I'll show you some of those here in a little bit.
All of that was compared or regressed on brand outcomes. We wanted to see when we talk about those things that we really care about KPIs like likelihood to recommend, repeat purchase, loyalty and favorability, to what extent does narrative power matter in that? And at some point we'll begin looking at some moderating psychological dimension. So that's basically what we measured in this study.
Now the Narrative Power Index (NPI) was built drawing from the academic literature.
We built a series of metrics and scales. I think there were 15 or some odd items in this that were drawn from the academic work and our own sort of 15 years of work, qualitative clinical site work on consumers to develop the NPI.
We put this into the field and what was interesting, and again I'm going to show you a few slides here that are really preliminary analysis, but the initial results are interesting.
So, again, going back to that initial question, does this concept of narrative power matter? The idea that people are using certain brands to tell the stories about who they are in the world, does that contribute to our understanding of key drivers of brand outcomes beyond what we typically measure?
The first thing we did was just look at those traditional brand equity drivers; trust, differentiation, uniqueness, quality and value among others. Basically, those things alone explain about 66% of the variance in our KPIs. Likelihood to recommend is a big one, and routine usage was kind of a higher-level measure of purchase intent overall favorability.
So, right off the bat I would say that our understanding of what drives brand equity is pretty solid to begin with. But we were curious what the contribution of our Narrative Power Index was when we add that into the mix.
What we saw was the explanatory power of the model went up to a little above 80%, which I was pretty excited about because what that suggests is that our traditional understanding of brand equity is solid. It explains about two-thirds of the variance and key brand outcomes. But when we add in this new dimension, narrative power, it adds to our understanding by about 14%.
That's important because it's measuring something different, it's measuring something unique. It did confirm our understanding, and our feeling here is that this could potentially mark the difference between brands that are merely good and brands that become truly iconic. Icon is a symbol, it gets used to express identity not only to other people but to ourselves.
Our mission going forward here, and we'll talk a little bit more about the findings in just a minute, is to explore this idea of narrative power and begin to understand brands that are driving this. What are they doing and how do we build a strategy around this idea?
Some of the top measures that contributed to our narrative power index, I think, we had about 15 total measures in the study, but we took a look at how they clustered and which ones were really sort of driving the results here.
You can see these were just Likert scale measures, but you can see kind of the tenor of these.
“I can identify with this brand.” Not surprising.
“The brand encourages me to feel good about myself in a meaningful way.” The second most powerful indicator in the Narrative Power Index. It's really interesting. I mean that's basically a measure of self-esteem.
So, what people are telling us here is what we've been hearing for years and years from our psychological analysis, which is brands that make people feel good about themselves in a positive constructive way, which psychologists will call a “redemptive way,” have a great deal of power. That is a contributor to equity. And that's why I asked that question at the beginning of our session.
How many of you know your consumers feel good about themselves after engaging with your brand?
I will say there's plenty of academic research out there on the negative effects of marketing and advertising on self-esteem. There's been plenty of work that's been done about how you depict the actual self versus the ideal self in advertising. And whether that creates positive or negative reactions, it depends how it's done.
But the interesting thing about that literature is almost all of it focuses on the negative impacts. And what we're trying to do with this analysis and this pilot study is understand the positive impacts.
Let's look at the brands that are contributing to positive self-esteem and helping people craft those redemptive stories in their lives. What are those brands doing and what is their level of success?
Now moving forward in our analysis, we haven't quite gotten there yet. We want to do a couple of other things that are included in our study. We just haven't built out the full model yet.
We want to look at some mediating psychological variables. Things like regulatory focus, self-compassion, people's ability or desire to go easy on themselves and to be in tune with the fact that they're not always perfect.
Then global tension and category tension activation. I can talk more offline if you're interested in this, about those concepts, but yes.
Yeah, Dan feels better when he shops at Aldi. That's good.
So, let me just move on to a couple of slides just of key insights here just to wet the appetite a little bit.
One of the things we were curious about is when it comes to global tension. So, just overall we wanted to understand is there a difference in generations between or among people that feel a gap between their actual self and their ideal self?
And not surprisingly, yes, there are significant differences here. It's almost a perfect correlation with age.
Now we don't know from this analysis if this is an age effect or a cohort effect, but what we do see here is that our Gen Z respondents were more likely to feel a gap between who they are now and who they want to be or who they feel like they ought to be, the societal pressures, than Millennials or Gen Xers. And regardless of whether this is an age effect or a cohort effect, we'll see over time as we continue to measure this.
What this does suggest is that if you are targeting Gen Z consumers, there's an opportunity here to build a brand that speaks to them in a way that affirms who they are and also helps them achieve who they want to be.
We will talk about this in just a moment, but I think if you're operating in a category where Gen Z is important, it's important to understand where they are on that journey. It's important to understand that desired narrative identity they're shooting for and to begin to think of ways that your brand can play a role in that.
Also, not surprisingly, we saw a difference in what we call “identity relevance,” and “tension activation.”
Basically, across different domains we may feel as humans, a greater sense of tension in our lives. A greater gap between our actual and ideal selves. And those domains are often related to product and service categories.
So, what we were looking for here is of the seven categories that we included in our study, which were the ones where identity played the biggest role and tension activation. When we triggered thoughts of the domain associated with the category, people expressed a higher degree of tension or self-discrepancy there.
And not surprisingly, you see that this exists in financial services probably most prominently. But also things like beauty, personal care, vitamins, minerals and supplements. All of those categories are ones that, again, not wholly surprisingly, are tied to the self in many ways. Self-improvement, appearance, how I show up for other people in my live, and financial achievement, goal orientation. All of these things, I think, speak to opportunities for brands operating in these spaces.
Now we've done quite a bit of this tension work for years in categories like beverages, which fall lower to the list here. And I believe that tension and identity are and can be relevant in any category. So just because we see, relatively speaking, non-alcoholic beverages and alcoholic beverages falling a little farther down the list here doesn't mean that this isn't something that you shouldn't understand and couldn't see as an opportunity to help people. But interesting results there in terms of the category.
Then finally we looked at 42 different brands, six per category. We wanted brands that all have fairly high awareness levels, but we also wanted to include a mix of brands that were sort of big, well-established global brands as well as smaller upstarts or fighter brands in each category. So, we curated this list intentionally. We wanted to see what the variance was across these different brands.
Now I'll show you in a minute, I want you to look at this list and just take in the brands that are here and think about which ones you feel would probably rate the highest in terms of narrative power, that ability to play a role in someone's concept.
I want to show you the 13 brands that kind of fell above the average.
Now, not surprisingly, these are coming from those categories where there's the greatest degree of self-discrepancy and tension. We see financial services here, we see beauty, we see vitamins, minerals and supplements. We see personal care. So perhaps it's not a huge surprise that these were the brands that popped to the top.
But we also see here a healthy mix of more established brands, brands that have been around for a while as well as some new brands on the scene. It's not always the biggest, most iconic brands in the world that are delivering high on this one measure of brand equity NPI.
Now granted, we're not looking at things like awareness here. We're not looking at other important drivers of equity, we're just looking at this narrative power score. But what this does suggest, I think, is that if you are a large legacy brand that has been around for a long, long, long time.
Aaron, I was surprised about Dove as well. I think Dove is in the top 20 but is kind of right at the average, but didn't make it into this top 13 group.
But if you are that brand, and maybe this does speak to Dove's situation, maintaining narrative power and maintaining relevance over time is something that is ongoing. There's no rest for the weary.
I think with each new generation of consumers that comes along. And I know there's a lot of interest these days in Gen Z. It's important to find ways to be relevant and to understand the self-discrepancy of that particular consumer group so that you continue to evolve in ways that play an important role.
I was really surprised by the brand that was number one. And I'm just kind of doing this for fun because a lot of these brands were very close in their narrative power scores. But I'd encourage you guys to just drop into the chat if you want to, of these 13 brands, which brand do you think was number one on narrative power?
If you don't want to drop it into the chat, you can just get a brand in mind and I'll share that with you in just a second here. Anybody have any guesses? Anybody want to take a guess? Nobody wants to take a guess.
Ooh, ooh, yes. Here we go. Estée Lauder. AG1. All great guesses. Yeah, yeah. Anybody guess Gymshark? Haha, looking at the list.
Yeah, this is fascinating. One of the things that I think we'll be doing after this analysis is digging into the case studies of each of these brands to find out more.
We know a little bit about Gymshark. Their presence on social media, their use of influencers, but some of this is really being driven by a super loyal group of fitness enthusiasts who are devotees of this brand.
It's interesting to me that a brand that's essentially a fighter brand against a lot of bigger brands we included in the study, like Nike and Lululemon and Under Armour, are rising to this level of NPI with these folks. So very, very interesting.
But we'll continue to dive into what Gymshark is doing, as well as others on the list to develop a strategy around NPI.
A couple of things just to close with. What do you need to know in order to build narrative power?
Well, I think in terms of insights.
Yeah, David, that's the thing. They're based in England and have grown just massively and rapidly from zero to, I think, they're now valued at over a couple of billion.
But if you're interested in understanding the narrative power of your brand, there's a couple of key insights questions that are worth asking. Certainly, what tensions or discrepancies are your consumers experiencing?
What gaps exist between their actual selves, ideal selves and ought self?
What are those narratives they're constructing?
How do brands in your category currently compensate for that or possibly could?
How does your brand impact self-esteem? I think this is something we really don't measure a whole lot, but we should.
Then finally, what is your brand's narrative power compared to others in your competitors?
I think narrative power is a unique brand equity contributor. A unique measure that we don't measure much. But, based on this analysis and the work that we've been doing for years and years and years, I feel like it's something that is definitely worth looking for.
We're right at the time here. We've got a couple of minutes left, Joe. So, I can answer a question or two before we wrap up.