Origins of the Narrative Pyramid
A short story of how the S.N.A.P. method gave birth to the Narrative Pyramid.
Clear and Consistent explores Narrative Clarity for Tech Companies.
Learn the four-step method that can help you to come up with your own framework.
Origins of the Narrative Pyramid
By Art Lapinsch
After the last piece, one of the readers sent me the following question:
I got the feeling that the Narrative Pyramid was a tool you developed, but I'm not sure it is.
If this is your creation, I'd love to know more about how it came to be.
After thinking about it, this might be the answer 👇
🔍 Survey: Uncover the basics.
📝 Note: Document the knowledge.
✍️ Apply: Test it in the real world.
💎 Polish: Adapt it as needed.
I call it the S.N.A.P. method 🤌
🔍 Survey: Uncover the Basics.
I have been obsessed with marketing for a long time.
Collecting Ideas
It started in 2008 - my first year of college - and I would consume everything slightly related.
Notable books:
Back of the Napkin (Dan Roam): A primer on visual problem solving. I referenced the book in the essay “Explain it on a Napkin”.
Business Model Canvas (Alex Osterwalder): A framework to create, share, and iterate your company’s business model. As far back as 2010, I was giving workshops on how to apply it in the start-up context.
Resonate (Nancy Duarte): How to craft compelling storylines for presentations. The same consultancy crafted Al Gore’s “An Inconvenient Truth” presentation.
The Advertising Concept Book (Pete Barry): A book proving that the creative idea - the “concept” - is more important than its execution. A true work of art and a tremendously useful resource.
Made to Stick (Chip & Dan Heath): The S.U.C.C.E.S. framework with which you can craft remarkable and memorable stories. I have discussed it in this blog post.
Notable websites:
ffffound: Pinterest for creatives before Pinterest existed. R.I.P.
Under Consideration: Brand New: A branding and re-branding review site. Once upon a time, these in-depth analyses used to be free.
The first years were a constant fire hose of new information.
New ideas, new tools, new frameworks.
📝 Note: Document the Knowledge.
After a while, it was possible to identify patterns.
Taking Notes
In grad school (2013-14), I started refining a useful habit: note taking 📝
Before traveling to London, my friend Michi recommended reading Cal Newport’s book “How to Become a Straight-A Student.”
I’ll summarize it for you:
Focus on the big ideas vs. small details → Once you understand the principles, the applications become easy.
Keep a note with all the big ideas → Think through the big ideas. Find what makes sense, what doesn’t. Think of examples for those big ideas.
?
Become a Straight-A Student
This method might have been the academic unlock I have been looking for all my life.
By taking notes, you are building a repository/library/tool kit → call it whatever you want.
It is a resource you can use and re-use over and over again.
✍️ Apply: Test it in the Real World.
Now, you might ask: What does all of this have to do with the initial question?
I got the feeling that the Narrative Pyramid was a tool you developed, but I'm not sure it is.
If this is your creation, I'd love to know more about how it came to be.
Now, we’ll start seeing how the collection of ideas came together into the Narrative Pyramid.
Perengo: Brand Pyramid v1.0
In 2015, I co-founded Perengo - a programmatic advertising start-up.
There was a particular set of challenges we faced when building the company:
🦾 Technological Novelty: No one in our market (i.e. recruitment marketing) knew what programmatic advertising was or why it was needed.
🧭 Internal Alignment: Every new employee would have the same questions: What do you do? How? Why?
📘 External Narrative: Every outbound marketing and sales activity would require us to come up with a story/narrative/script.
Initially, we would have to these problems over and over again. It didn’t scale and cost a lot of time. We were running in circles.
So we asked: How do we solve these challenges in a scalable way?
After some research, we had found the Brand Pyramid - a nifty framework from the world of brand strategy.
Perengo: Brand Pyramid vN.0
Fast forward, we adapted the Brand Pyramid concept to our specific context and kept using/re-using it from start-up idea to exit (and beyond).
Compared to other frameworks (e.g. Kapferer’s Brand Prism; Positioning Statement; etc.) it had a few very specific benefits:
Simplicity: Everything fits on one page.
Scope: It includes the full range from high-level to low-level messaging points.
Clarity: Each component is described in easy-to-understand language.
(Vertical) Consistency: Each level of the brand pyramid aligns with the levels below and above it.
Our application of the Brand Pyramid allowed us to solve our challenges (technological novelty; internal alignment; external narrative) in a scalable way.
💎 Polish: Adapt it as Needed.
After leaving Perengo, I consulted clients of all sizes:
Personal Brands
Technology Start-ups
Technology Scale-ups
Publicly-listed companies
The method worked.
Over and over again, we would see in these consulting sessions that executives would benefit the most from the framework.
Why?
Because it addresses the top-of-mind challenges of tech executives:
🦾 Technological Novelty
🧭 Internal Alignment
📘 External Narrative
But… the common misconception of new audiences was that it was “only relevant for marketers and product managers.” It’s called the Brand Pyramid after all.
The problem was that the tool didn’t correctly promise what it could deliver.
The term “brand” was in the way.
It was unclear.
Adapting it to a More Fitting Term
Now, after working through the method, I arrived at Narrative Clarity.
As a result, the pyramid would have to be called Narrative Pyramid.
⚠️ The exact workflow of coming up with “Narritive Clarity” will be documented in a future post.
The S.N.A.P. Method
To summarize: The Narrative Pyramid builds on top of the Brand Pyramid framework, yet is customized to the context of tech companies.
Connecting the dots in hindsight, I arrived there via the S.N.A.P. method:
🔍 Survey: Uncover the basics.
📝 Note: Document the knowledge.
✍️ Apply: Test it in the real world.
💎 Polish: Adapt it as needed.
Going through these four steps, eventually led me to the Narrative Pyramid.
The interesting thing is that a typical consulting gig would go through the same steps. These four steps lead the client from the initial problem set to an actionable Narrative Pyramid for their own tech company.
We will discuss this in the coming posts.
🙏 Request for you: Please let me know: What was helpful? What was confusing? Where do you disagree?
When you leave a question, I’ll try to answer it as best as possible - like I tried with this post ✌️
Art
soooo, SNAP is your creation?
JK
Thank you for the origin story of the Narrative Pyramid. This is a great destination of scaling up insight