In The Big Short, Wall Street was obsessed with managing portfolios of individual assets; mortgages, ratings, quarterly returns.
Selling sub-prime mortgages to low-income individuals was making people rich; but nobody was paying attention to the bigger picture.
In the movie, only one hedge fund manager — Michael Burry — looked close enough to see a terrifying story about to play out: the U.S economy was going to collapse, and nobody was going to stop it.
Look at most content teams today and you'll see the same thing; asset managers shipping a disconnected portfolio of blogs, webinars, and case studies.
On their own, these assets look great, but they're not part of a bigger picture, and it's creating measurable drag nobody notices.
Research from System1 found that the most narratively consistent brands report double the profit gains. Whereas, narratively inconsistent brands end up spending 1.75x more just to keep pace.
And yet, instead of addressing the root problem — the lack of a cohesive story — teams are told to turn the dials faster, flooding the internet with content and burning themselves out.
Everyone’s optimizing for speed, volume, and keyword share just to keep pace...But nobody’s asking, “What happens once we get the click and how do we hold their attention as long as possible?”
If you’re stuck there, you’re not alone.
In a minute, I'm going to share the four step approach I use to build a Narrative driven content program...
But first, how do you "measure" narrative?
"Stories? Cute. We have a $5M gap to close this quarter. Show me how this translates to immediate pipeline." - every executive ever.
Narrative consistency isn’t just a "create better content" thing, it's a behavioral thing, and something we, as content marketers, need to re-frame the conversation around.
You measure it the same way audiences prove they care:
Recall: Do they remember your message unprompted? (Brand-lift surveys, direct response attribution, or branded search.)
Resonance: Are people quoting you back to yourself? (Comments, replies, message mirroring in inbound calls or demos.)
Repeat Engagement: Are the same people coming back? (Returning visitors, multi-session consumption, email click depth.)
Narrative Momentum: Is there a rise in session continuity — people consuming 2–3 pieces per sitting instead of one?
Sales velocity: From first touch-point to first payment, are people closing faster?
Customer lifetime value: Do existing customers who interact with your content retain longer, or spend more than those who don't?
Over time, these signals compound.
The more familiar your narrative, the faster a new buyer can place themselves inside it.
So yes, you’ll still watch traffic, clicks, and MQLs, but once you've purposefully sketched out the narrative, you should be able to see a direct cause and effect reaction from the narrative choices you make, and how they ripple throughout the market and more private conversation.
To illustrate how we make a Narrative Calendar work, we'll build one around a specific persona: the Head of Onboarding at a fast-growing SaaS company, a perfect customer for a platform like Rocketlane.
Step 1: Find the Super-Objective
Every great narrative starts with a character having a big, seemingly unobtainable goal.
This isn't something small like "win baseball" or "onboard customers," it is deeply personal and from the character's perspective, nearly impossible.
In Moneyball, Billy Beane's Super-Objective was to prove that his system, built on overlooked data, could beat opponents with 3x his budget. He was fighting for validation and a new way of seeing the world.
What makes the goal feel impossible is the context of their situation at the start of the narrative.
In Billy's case, his team had no money, his best assets were gone, the entire industry believed his methods were heresy, and his own staff was actively sabotaging him.
Billy didn't just want to win; he wanted to prove the entire system, and everyone who believed in it, was wrong.
Back in the real-world, our Head of Onboarding has a similar objective.
She wants "To transform onboarding from a reactive, chaotic cost center into a proactive revenue engine."
But right now she's under-resourced, her staff is burnt out, she's fighting for attention in culture that cares more about acquiring customers rather than the post-sale experience.
So it's not that she just wants to onboard customers efficiently; she wants to prove that the entire industry's perception of post-sale value is wrong.
What makes this "not so easy"
While you could technically make it up, if it's not the distillation of conversations with customers, prospects, and/or observations of real people in market, either the objective itself will be off base, or it will be missing the context as to why it seems impossible.
(We're addressing that, and how AI can help, in The Narrative Design Toolbox btw)
Step 2: Identify the Central Conflict
A story is only as good as the forces of antagonism the protagonist has to overcome, and are what create the context as to why the character's goals seems so out of reach.
These forces are what's happening in the world that's out of your control, specific people like bosses or lovers, or challenges with the mind, body, or emotions.
In Jaws, the conflict isn't just the shark.
It's the town's political and economic inertia—the mayor who refuses to close the beaches. It’s the systemic force that actively ignores the existential threat, allowing the monster to thrive.
For our Head of Onboarding, the conflict isn't a single competitor.
Her Central Conflict is: "The inertia of a siloed go-to-market motion—where post-sale is an afterthought—is actively undermining customer value and creating a leaky revenue bucket."
This looks like chaotic handoffs from sales, running the entire process on a patchwork of spreadsheets, and the internal perception that her team's job is just to "clean up" after the deal closes. This system is the shark, and it's eating future revenue.
What makes this "not so easy"
It’s easy to misidentify the villain. Most companies blame external forces—a tough competitor or "bad-fit customers." It’s much harder to admit the antagonist is an internal, broken system. A true conflict must be validated by the stories of frustration you hear from both your customers and your own frontline employees.
(And you guessed it, we'll talk more about this in The Toolbox too)
Step 3: Break the journey into four phases
Once you've settled on a Super-Objective and Central Conflict, you'll end up with something that looks like this:
"I want to transform onboarding from a reactive, chaotic cost center, but the established school of thought actively undermines lifetime value."
That's has the makings of a pretty good narrative I think.
If we break that journey up into four phases or Acts, we'll have the basis of a quarterly marketing calendar:
Act 1: Escape the chaos of reactive onboarding.
Act 2: Challenge the mindset that treats onboarding as a cost center.
Act 3: Build a scalable system that compounds customer value.
Act 4: Transform onboarding into a long-term growth engine.
The overall idea is that we can plot the broad movements of the narrative in advance.
In this case:
Chaos → Clarity
Clarity → Consistency
Consistency → Compounding
Compounding → Culture
As we build each Act out, it will have it's own smaller set of objectives and obstacles.
So for example:
Act 1's "Escape the chaos of reactive onboarding."
Objective: Bring stability to the process and prove onboarding doesn’t have to be firefighting.
Conflict: Every department handles onboarding differently, creating chaos for new customers and employees alike.
There's more we include in The Narrative Design Toolbox, but the idea is that now that this is planned, everything we publish in the quarter will help the prospect take one step closer to that single objective, and overcoming the conflicts that comes with it.
It seems like it could get repetitive by working toward the same objective for a quarter, but you'll see how that couldn't be any further than the truth in the next step.
What makes this "not so easy"
Even though narrative planning gives everyone a stronger since of direction, it can be a departure from the primarily ad-hoc approach we're used to.
"What if priorities shift" or "How can you know if that's going to be relevant 6 months from now?"
Fair questions.
Since the Super-Objectives and Central Conflicts are universal desires, the journey can be painted in broad strokes, and it is designed to create structure without rigidity.
Think of it like architecture: the blueprint doesn’t change. You can swap out materials, finishes, or even the furniture, but the foundation stays the same.
It turns “What should we post this week?” into “Where are we in the story right now?”
And that shift makes it so:
- Strategy teams stop chasing topics and start advancing plot.
- Writers and designers know what emotional beat to hit next.
- Leaders finally see how each campaign ladders up to something bigger than impressions and clicks.
This approach forces clarity, discipline, and long-term thinking in a medium addicted to immediacy.
Once the story spine is in place, it's easy to adjust the small details instead of scrambling to rewrite the story every single time.
Step 4: Break each phase down even further.
This is essentially the same process on a more granular level.
Each “Act” (or quarter) gets broken down into three smaller phases, each with its own objective and conflict.
So if Act 1 is “Escape the chaos of reactive onboarding,” with the objective of “Bring stability” and the conflict being “departmental inconsistency,” what are the three smaller goals the person much achieve to reach their goal?
Those become our months:
Month 1: Expose the chaos — learn to identify and document the inconsistencies hiding in each department’s onboarding process.
Month 2: Define what “good” looks like — create shared standards and language that unify how success is measured.
Month 3: Build the first repeatable process — pilot one consistent workflow that brings early stability.
So if Act 1 is going from Chaos → Clarity, then the three phases of that act are:
Denial → Awareness
Awareness → Alignment
Alignment → Stability
To keep this going, we’ll then plan topics and initiatives that naturally flow into each other — each with its own smaller objectives and conflicts.
Assuming you only publish one major piece of content per week (a video, article, podcast, etc.), Month 1 might look like:
- Why every team defines “onboarding” differently
- How to identify gaps in your onboarding experience
- How to talk about onboarding problems without sounding defensive
- How to help stakeholders see the real cost of broken onboarding
These aren’t final titles.
The point is to create a clear, logical progression that forms a complete narrative arc from start to finish.
This structure also isn’t tied to any one medium. One of these could be an article, another a video, another a podcast episode, or even a workshop. You’re not designing a content calendar — you’re designing a narrative.
And if you publish more than once a week, you can split your narrative into multiple, related plotlines, each with its own objective, conflict, and resolution, and all serving the same larger transformation.
What makes this "not so easy"
Discipline.
It's really easy to get distracted and tell a bunch of random, disconnected stories, because that's what we're used to.
But you already know where that leads.
As the internet gets noiser, the algorithms get harsher, and the harder it gets to grab attention. So we have to hold onto it and get people consuming two, three, four assets per session, and giving them reasons to come back more often.
Like the Google research said at the top, it's the brands that that maintain narrative consistency that are getting higher recall and repeat engagement.
If that doesn't underscore the importance of narrative in the era of getting buried by AI slop, I don't know what will.
This is just the beginning
This is just the beginning of the framework we break down inside The Narrative Design Toolbox. But the system is only as good as the team that runs it.
I have two spots open for Q1 Narrative consults.
It's a live personalized workshop where we build this out for your team, mapping your customer's Super-Objective and turning it into a story spine you can execute against.
If this clicked, let's talk.
We'll map your narrative and show you how to build a moat around it.
