You did everything right.
You talked to customers. You sat through the interviews. You came back with something real… specific, emotional, true. And then it went into the machine.
Maybe it was a strategy session. Maybe it was a copywriter. Maybe it was an AI tool you fed the research into. And what came out the other side was: “We help leadership teams drive marketing accountability.”
Grammatically correct. Strategically neutered. Unrecognizable.
Curtis calls this signal loss. It’s not that anyone threw the research away. It’s that at every handoff—business owner to brief, brief to copywriter, copywriter to AI—a little more of what made it true gets smoothed away. Polished. Corporatized. Until it sounds professional. Which is another way of saying: it sounds like everyone else.
The Narrative Economy and You
Kristian Alomá came back for Season 3 to answer the harder question: once you have the truth, what do you actually do with it?
If you didn’t catch his Season 2 appearance: Kristian is a behavioral psychologist and brand strategist, founder of Threadline, and author of Start with the Story: Brand-Building in a Narrative Economy. The premise is that people are inherently storytelling creatures—we think in stories, dream in stories, and build our sense of identity through the stories we tell about ourselves. We don’t just buy products. We use brands to help shape that story.
Which means if your brand is the hero of its own story, there’s no room for the customer in the narrative arc. And if there’s no room for the customer, the relationship doesn’t go very far.
Most brands can’t stomach that inversion. It feels unnatural to talk about the customer’s story when you want the customer to know how great you are. But as Kristian put it: you’re either the date who talks about himself all night, or the one who asks questions and actually listens. One of those relationships goes somewhere.
The STORY Framework
Kristian walks through five elements every brand narrative needs:
Struggle. What problem are your customers living with before they ever heard of you?
Tool. Your approach or methodology—how you think about addressing that struggle.
Objective. What your organization is specifically doing to apply that tool to that struggle.
Reward. The measurable benefits they get.
Yearning. The emotional benefit. The glorious future. What life feels like when the problem is gone.
Most brands start at Tool and never make it to Yearning. They skip Struggle because it requires understanding the customer before talking about themselves. And they treat Yearning as soft—hard to put on a slide. But Yearning is where loyalty lives.
Nike doesn’t show you the shoe. It shows you someone who dreams of being great. Just do it. That’s Yearning. That’s why it works.
Where the Signal Dies
Two things go wrong, according to Kristian.
First: the insight lives in one room and nobody else hears it. Marketing has it. Sales doesn’t. The people delivering the service don’t. So the story that goes to market is disconnected from the story the customer actually experiences. The brand promise splits from the brand reality.
Second: insights don’t stick unless they’re translated into language each team can act on. What does this mean for sales? For the creative team? For product? A brilliant research summary filed in a deck nobody opens changes nothing.
What he calls the hymnal—a documented, codified source of truth that the whole organization can reference—is what keeps the signal alive. It becomes the creative brief. It’s the guardrail against drift. And in the AI world, it’s the context you feed into the system instead of just asking it to generate copy from nothing.
When you give AI the hymnal, it amplifies the right signal. When you don’t, it amplifies your mirror. Faster.
The Brands that Get it Write [sic]
Kristian walked through several real examples in the episode.
Nike makes everyday athletes feel like they belong to something. They’re not selling to professional athletes. They’re selling to the person shooting hoops in the driveway who wants to feel like Jordan. The gear becomes armor. The brand earns that feeling because it knows the Yearning—not the product specs.
FedEx understood that their brand lived with the drivers. Not in the warehouse, not in the logistics system…with the person who shows up at your door. So they invested in those drivers specifically.
Peloton’s 2019 “The Gift” ad missed the mark because it centered the brand—and a controlling-husband read on top of it—instead of centering the customer’s transformation. The closing line made Peloton the hero of the wife’s story. That’s the mistake.
McDonald’s, as Curtis put it, built something that made a mom with three kids in the back of a minivan feel like she had the situation handled. That’s the struggle. That’s the Yearning. Not the best ingredients. Happy meals. “We love to see you smile,” after all.
Are You Trying to Sell Me a Story?
Show me, don’t tell me. One of Tom’s favorite fallbacks.
You can tell me how great you are. How fast your product works. How “unparalleled” your service is. How you’ve got “the best people in the business.” (Right. Okay, sure.)
Those are all claims. Unverifiable to anyone who hasn’t already experienced them for themselves. That’s not marketing copy. That’s a naked sales pitch swaddled in braggadocio.
Or you can show me.
Show me the happier customer singing your praises…in their own words, with their own voice, through their own real, lived experience. Show me the hero who has already overcome the struggle that the next customer (read:hero) is starting to recognize in their own world. Show me the “unparalleled” commitment to service in real time. On video. Raw, and uncut…unscripted. Show me the struggle…the yearning…and, ultimately, the happily ever after.
That’s the difference between copy that’s trying to sell and stories you can authentically tell.
Because, put yourself in your own customer-shoes. You. How you shop. How you evaluate providers. Why you gravitate to one brand over another.
Is it the sales pitch? The shiny feature set? The bold, unprovable and wholly unverifiable performance claims?
Or is it the story that your favorite brands allow you to tell about yourself?
Watch and Listen to Season 3, Episode 4
Available on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and everywhere you listen.
Bullhorns & Bullseyes is hosted by Curtis Hays and Tom Nixon. Season 3 drops a new episode every two weeks.
