My daughter is 16 months old. We have these beautiful Swedish picture books, but my Swedish is… let’s just say, fucking terrible. So when she sits one in my lap, I don’t really read it. I just make stuff up.
Fun, inconsequential, aggrandising stuff. The little rabbit doesn’t just find a carrot; he discovers a magical, glowing carrot that lets him fly. The grumpy bear becomes a dancer. It’s a stream of happy, gravity-defying sweet nothings, designed for one purpose: to get a giggle and a clap from an audience of one.
It’s the very idiom of storytelling, isn’t it? We invent a narrative to delight, to simplify, to persuade. And for the last decade, the marketing world has been doing the exact same thing.
We’ve been beaten over the head with a single, unassailable truth: every brand needs a story. We were told to find our “why.” To craft our hero’s journey. To build a narrative arc complete with a protagonist (the customer), a villain (their problem), and a magical guide (our product, of course). We hired chief storytelling officers and spent millions on slickly produced founder myths that made starting a SaaS company sound like climbing Everest in shorts. It was our gospel.
It’s become our crutch.
The truth is, today’s consumers—bombarded by a schizophrenic attention economy and armed with finely-tuned bullshit detectors, are tired of being sold a story. They’ve seen the movie, they know how it ends, and frankly, they’re bored. They are no longer rewarding the best storytellers. They are rewarding the most real.
The paradigm has shifted. We’ve moved from the age of polished brand storytelling to the era of radical authenticity. And if you’re still trying to write the perfect script, you’ve already lost the audience.
The Problem with Cliched Storytelling: The Hollywood Blockbuster
Think of cliched brand storytelling as a Michael Bay blockbuster. It’s got a massive budget, stunning special effects, a heart-swelling orchestral score, and a plot so simple you could explain it to a golden retriever. It’s emotionally not so much.
This is the world of the bad tear-jerking holiday ad that has nothing to do with the insurance it’s selling. It’s the origin story of a sneaker brand that glosses over its labor practices. It’s the founder myth that paints a trust-fund kid as a scrappy, garage-dwelling underdog.
It’s a performance. And the audience knows it.
Remember Pepsi’s infamous 2017 ad with Kendall Jenner? It was the absolute pinnacle—or perhaps the nadir—of this thinking. Here was a brand trying to tell a story about unity, protest, and harmony. It had all the blockbuster elements: a celebrity protagonist, a dramatic conflict (a protest), and a simple resolution (a can of Pepsi!). It was a perfectly crafted story.
And it was a god damn disaster.
Why? Because it was utterly, painfully, laughably inauthentic. It was a multi-billion dollar corporation co-opting a powerful social movement to sell sugar water. The story it told had zero connection to the company’s actual business practices, its products, or the reality of the world it was trying to depict. It was a lie, polished to a high sheen. The backlash wasn’t just about the ad being “tone-deaf”; it was a wholesale rejection of the manufactured narrative itself.
That’s the risk of the blockbuster model. When the story you tell is disconnected from the reality you live, you’re not a storyteller. You’re just a very expensive liar.
The Rise of Radical Authenticity: The Raw Documentary
So, if the Hollywood blockbuster is dead, what’s replacing it? The raw Youtube documentary. Or maybe even the chaotic, unfiltered livestream.
Radical authenticity isn’t a story. It’s evidence.
It’s the choice to be transparent when it’s easier to be opaque. It’s admitting when you fuck up. It’s showcasing the messy, unglamorous, behind-the-scenes reality of running a business. It’s turning the camera around and letting your actual customers, with their unfiltered praise and brutal critiques, become your marketing department.
It’s not about having a perfect narrative. It’s about having a credible presence.
Look at Patagonia. Their “story” isn’t a 60-second spot about the beauty of the outdoors. Their story is suing the government to protect public lands. It’s their “Don’t Buy This Jacket” campaign. It’s the company’s raison d’être baked into every decision, from supply chains to political activism. They don’t need to tell you they care about the environment; they show you, relentlessly. Their marketing is just a record of their actions. It’s the documentary of their mission.
Or take a completely different beast: Liquid Death. Their authenticity isn’t about saving the world; it’s about a brutally honest and self-aware tone. Their tagline is “Murder Your Thirst.” They sell water in a can like it’s beer because plastic is bullshit. They respond to haters on social media with savage wit. They don’t pretend to be some enlightened wellness brand. They’re a heavy metal-inspired water company that thinks corporate marketing is ridiculous. That’s it. There is no manufactured, heart-warming story. There is only a consistent, unfiltered, and hilarious personality. It’s real. It’s funny. And it works (if you don’t ask Mark Ritson)
This isn’t just for the big guys. It’s the small bakery owner on TikTok showing a batch of croissants that got burnt. It’s the indie software developer live-streaming their coding and debugging process.
This is what builds trust. Not a perfect story, but imperfect, verifiable truth.
How to Stop Storytelling and Start Being
So how do you make the shift? It’s not about firing your copywriters and hiring a documentary crew (though, maybe…). It’s about a fundamental change in mindset.
- Stop Scripting, Start Documenting. Instead of a brainstorm on “what story should we tell this quarter?”, have a meeting about “what are the most interesting, true things happening in our business right now?” Your content calendar shouldn’t be a narrative arc; it should be a production schedule for reality. What are you building? Who are you helping? What did you learn? What failed? Document it. Share it.
- Embrace the Ugly Bits. Perfection is a myth, and your customers know it. Your perfectly curated Instagram grid is less trustworthy than a single, honest customer review that mentions a flaw. Admit to mistakes. Talk about your challenges. A brand that is confident enough to be vulnerable is a brand that feels human. And we trust humans more than we trust logos.
- Turn the Camera Around. Your best storytellers are already on your payroll and buying your products. They’re called your employees and your customers. Empower them. Showcase their user-generated content—the good, the bad, the weird. Let your engineers talk about their work, unfiltered. Let your customer service team share what they’re hearing. Your brand isn’t what you say it is; it’s what they say it is. Give them the microphone.
- Live Your Values, Don’t Just List Them. If “innovation” is one of your corporate values, don’t write a blog post about it. Launch a public experiment or a weird side project and let people watch you succeed or fail. If “community” is a value, stop talking about it and start building a Discord server or a forum that provides genuine, tangible value beyond your product. Your actions are your story. The rest is just advertising.
The era of the brand as a polished myth-maker is over. It was a fun ride, but the audience has left the theater. They’re outside, in the real world, looking for something to believe in.
Stop trying to sell them a shitty story.