Why narrative consulting is NOT PR
Small talk is getting tough.
When people ask me what I do and I respond, “Oh, I’m a narrative consultant,” I usually get a blank stare or, at best, a need for an explainer. It’s happened so much I’ve started telling people my job title while defining it at the same time. It’s turned into various iterations of:
I’m a narrative consultant, so I help organizations break through the noise of the attention economy with messaging that lands.
I’m a narrative strategist, so I diagnosis where the internal and/or external messaging is becoming muddy or inconsistent and then provide a fix.
I’m a narrative consultant, so I help companies using AI to stay authentic to the people they’re trying to reach.
It’s all become rather wordy, but it’s worth it to avoid being confused (God-forbid!) with PR.
No offense to the hard-working flacks out there but having spent most of my career on the P side of things, I can tell you there’s something of an unspoken rivalry between journos and PR folks. I guess “spin” successfully deflected enough fact-finding that journalists are trained to be skeptical of any information coming from a press office.
Having put my traditional journalism work to the side, I still cringe at being compared to a flack. Not just because of my long-standing indoctrination against them, but because the two operate in fundamentally different ways.
Traditional PR is largely about generating a narrative—crafting a message that persuades audiences to see an issue through a particular lens. Narrative strategy begins from the opposite premise: Instead of trying to impose a story onto the public conversation, it asks what stories already exist and how people are interpreting the issue before a campaign ever speaks. The goal is not to manufacture a narrative but to diagnose the one already shaping public understanding, and then help organizations meet that conversation where it is.
My proof-of-concept for this came from my work with Free the Vote 2020, a campaign to garner support for California’s Proposition 17. The measure sought to restore voting rights to people on parole, but the policy itself was not the central challenge. The real question was how voters understood what was at stake. Opponents framed the measure through a familiar narrative about crime and punishment, suggesting it would “give voting rights to criminals.” If the coalition had tried to counter that framing by spinning it—better slogans, different language—it would have remained trapped inside the same story. Instead, we worked to situate the measure within a different narrative entirely: one about democracy, citizenship, and the idea that people who have served their time should have a voice in the society they are reentering. In doing so, we positioned the campaign within the narrative that aligned with the broader democratic values the measure was meant to advance.
In other words, narrative strategy isn’t about inventing a story people should believe. It’s about understanding the one they already do.
That’s the part that can be hard to explain in casual conversation. People assume narrative work means crafting better messaging, or building out pretty (but ultimately low-traffic generating) websites. But the real work starts earlier than that. It begins by asking how people are already making sense of the issue in front of them — what assumptions, fears, values, and stories they bring to the table before a campaign — political, marketing, or otherwise — ever opens its mouth.
So when someone asks what I do and I say I’m a narrative consultant, the simplest answer might be this:
I help organizations understand the story they’re actually walking into.
