Brand Infrastructure: The Challenge and the Opportunity
A high-speed train operating in January in Hangzhou, China,. Credit: CFOTO/Future Publishing via Getty Images
In a world of neglected infrastructure
There is something telling about the moment we find ourselves in. Across much of the developed world, the infrastructure that holds societies together is visibly decaying.
According to the Italian National Institute of Statistics, 42.4% of the water fed into water supply systems across Italy is lost - but in Sicily where I'm writing from at the moment, the figure is over 51%. The infrastructure has been so neglected with incomplete dams and dilapitated pipes that it is regularly referred to as rete colabrodo - colander networks.
The NHS in England carries a maintenance backlog of £15.9 billion - work that should already have been done, growing at over 15% a year, now exceeding the total annual cost of running the estate it is failing to maintain. The King's Fund describes the consequence in language that should be unacceptable in a so-called developed nation: flooded corridors, reduced theatre capacity, roofs at risk of falling in. In schools, 700,000 pupils are learning in buildings the government's own assessment says need major rebuilding or refurbishment.
The American Society of Civil Engineers has graded US infrastructure since 1998. The most recent report card in 2025 projected a $3.7 trillion investment gap over the next decade - roads, schools, aviation, dams, energy, levees, and wastewater were all graded D+; stormwater and transit graded D.
But infrastructure neglect is not only visible in what is crumbling. It is equally visible in what was never built. The Amtrak CEO described US rail investment as "almost a rounding error" compared with Europe, with the US spending just $39 per capita on rail versus Luxembourg at $625 and Switzerland at $489. Meanwhile China (which spends more than 8% of GDP on infrastructure), built 45,000 kilometres of high-speed rail between 2008 and 2023, its Fuxing trains operating at a maximum commercial speed of 350kmph (217mph). That’s more than double the speed of the Acela which averages just 132kmph (82mph) between Washington and New York - slower than the nonstop Metroliner managed in 1969.
20% of global petroleum liquids consumption and 27% of global maritime crude oil trade transits a single strait - the Hormuz - a channel thirty-three kilometres wide at its narrowest point, flanked on one side by Iran, a state that has threatened closure repeatedly over five decades, and that mined it during the Iran-Iraq war. One firm, TSMC, headquartered on an island whose sovereignty is actively disputed by a nuclear power, manufactures over 90% of the world's most advanced semiconductor chips. Every smartphone, every AI system, every piece of military electronics that depends on leading-edge processing runs through that one bottleneck. These are not accidents of geography or talent. They are the accumulated consequence of decades of choosing not to build the distributed, resilient infrastructure that would make the alternative possible. The world outsourced its foundational systems to the cheapest or most convenient single point of failure, called it efficiency, and decided to worry about the consequences later. Later is arriving.
The neglect is not accidental. It is the result of a particular habit of mind that favours the visible over the structural, the immediate over the foundational, the thing you can point to over the system that makes all the other things possible. So it probably shouldn't surprise us that organisations make the same mistake with their brands. The brief gets funded. The campaign gets made. The platform gets built. The promise proclaimed. And the infrastructure that would allow all of it to accumulate - to compound, to permeate, to mean and be something durable - never gets built at all.
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Narrative does what story does not
If brands and businesses are are going to make progress on the building of infrastructure, then we are going to have to start distinguishing between story and narrative. This might sound like just so much pedantic quibbling or semantic policing, but the issue is substantive, so bear with me.
This kind of stuff (from the Harvard Business Review no less) - “Brand storytelling is a strategy where a company uses narratives to communicate its brand identity, values, and message to customers” - is everywhere. The persistent conflation of two words that do not mean the same thing, used interchangeably, and often in the same sentence. It is a sloppy diagnostic failure - and its victim is brand strategy.
Nobody has meaningfully improved on Aristotle’s articulation of the nature of story: it has a beginning, a middle, and an end, where the end is the thing that “naturally follows some other thing, either by necessity, or as a rule, but has nothing following it.” Story terminates. It’s an event. Something happens, or doesn’t, and the gap between desire and outcome is where the meaning lives. Story is bounded, temporal, specific. It takes place in time and then it stops.
Narrative, by contrast, doesn’t stop. Narrative is not a sequence of events - it is the frame that determines which events count, what they mean, and how they connect to each other. American intellectual historian Hayden White, in The Value of Narrativity in the Representation of Reality (1980), argued that the structure that appears to be immanent in events - the sense that they are naturally leading somewhere, naturally meaning something - is an illusion and something that we impose. Events arrive without pre-loaded meaning or instructions. The weaving of our narratives - the framing of events such that they have structure and coherence - is what supplies that. And it is this persistent, all-enveloping, all-explaining supply of structure, direction, and coherence that makes narrative infrastructure. Both for living and the creation and nurturing of brands.
The clearest illustration of the distinction does not come from marketing at all, but from therapy. Michael White and David Epston, who developed narrative therapy in the 1980s, observed that people arrive in crisis not because bad things have happened to them - bad things happen to everyone - but because the internal narrative organising their experience has become, in their term, problem-saturated.
Consider this fictional scenario. A man comes to therapy because he was passed over for promotion. That is the story. He tells it precisely: the interview, the decision, the colleague who got the job instead. He is articulate about what happened. What he cannot see clearly is the personal narrative that selected it as significant and typical in the first place. The narrative goes like this: I am someone to whom recognition is perpetually denied. I work hard. It is never enough. Others are preferred. Inside that narrative, the promotion story is not an incident. It is proof. It confirms what was already known. It joins a long chain of similar stories - the school prize he didn’t win, the relationship that ended, the father who never said it directly - all of which have been recruited as evidence for the same underlying case. He does not need a new story. He needs a different narrative.
What is true for humans is true for organisations and their brands. In supplying a persistent pattern and direction, narrative determines what an organisation sees and notices, where (to borrow from Roger Martin) it chooses to play and how it believes it can win, whether it believes its advantage lies (to borrow from Michael Treacy and Fred Wiersema) in operational excellence, product leadership, or customer intimacy, what it can credibly claim, what products it will make, what pricing it believes the market will accept, what behaviour from the company feels consistent and what feels like a betrayal, what it will refuse to do… It shapes what customers expect, what employees believe they are part of, what competitors have to respond to. Narrative sets the bounds of the possible and the desirable - across the entire business. Brand after all, is the manifestation of a business strategy and internal culture.
In providing this narrative governs. And in doing so it makes each new piece of activity more valuable than it would be in isolation. Every impression, every product, every decision that is coherent with the governing narrative adds to the store of meaning and value the brand has accumulated. This is the compounding logic of narrative infrastructure.
This sort of work is not a million miles away from the world of entertainment and the use of the 'series bible' to document a show's world, its rules, the character logic, the tensions that will never be fully resolved, the things that can happen in this world and the things that cannot. The Star Trek Writers' Guide from April 1967 drew some hard boundaries - Rule II of its seven rules put it simply: "Tell your story about people, not about science and gadgetry". It provided the governance that made every episode feel like it belonged to the same show, that allowed writers who joined in season three to work within a world they didn't invent, and crucially, that enabled the show to evolve without losing itself. A persistent, and crucially, practical, usable logic.
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Traffic not road
Everything that a brand does runs on top of the infrastructure. The product and how it is made. The hiring decision and what it says about who the organisation believes itself to be. The supplier it chooses and the terms on which it chooses them. The returns policy and what it signals about who the brand trusts. The data it collects and what it does with it… As Mark Ritson wrote in Marketing Week (2012), "the walls between internal policies and external promises are paper thin and liable to collapse under even the faintest bit of scrutiny. The only way to ensure that behaviour matches brand is to align them from the outset. Inside is the same as outside, and outside the same as in." All of it runs on the infrastructure.
Advertising is just one of these things. And it's worth taking a brief detour to Adland, not because it is the most important surface, but because its visibility (in our own eyes at least, given the persistent under-investment in it) makes it easy to mistake it for the upstream work, to conclude that a strong platform or a distinctive tone of voice or a set of what we must now call ‘DBAs’, means the strategic job is done, and to never commission the work that would make everything that follows coherent and compounding.
The distinction matters not philosophically but operationally, because narrative infrastructure governs decisions in a way that advertising cannot and was never designed to. Advertising does not govern. It expresses. It crystallises. It proves. Running on the infrastructure, sometimes beautifully. But even so, most advertising is not even a story. It's impressions. Tableaux. Emotional weather. This is not a criticism, it is its strength. Consider some of the most notable ads produced by my alma mater, Wieden+Kennedy:
Nike’s If You Let Me Play (1995): girls of different ages addressing the camera directly, delivering the case for what sport does for women’s lives. No arc. No resolution. A series of propositions accumulating into a demand. But it is not a story.
Coca Cola’s Happiness Factory (2006): a man puts a coin in a vending machine; we dive inside to find a fantastical animated world of creatures producing the bottle and filling it with Coca-Cola. Pure smile-inducing world-building. But it is not a story.
Old Spice’s The Man Your Man Could Smell Like (2010): Isaiah Mustafa addresses the camera in a single unbroken shot - bathroom to boat to horse - delivering a rapid-fire monologue. A rhetorical performance. A man asserting an identity at you. But it is not a story.
Heineken’s The Entrance (2011): a man arrives at an embassy party, moves effortlessly through a series of increasingly absurd encounters - returning a general’s glass eye, charming a kung fu assassin, navigating a gun-slinging oil baron - and ends by joining the band on stage. Tagline: Open Your World. No protagonist who changes, no pressure that transforms him, no gap between who he was and who he is at the end. It is a sustained demonstration of a quality, not a transformation. But it is not a story.
And closer to ground level, the oversupply (I use the word deliberately) of the content called ‘performance’ marketing is not storytelling either - the consumer is already in the market, and there is little or no need for seduction or showmanship. Its entire function is to interrupt attention at the moment closest to purchase and convert it. It doesn’t ask you to feel anything about the brand - it asks you to click. It is not in the business of meaning at all. It is in the business of interest conversion and friction reduction.
I tend to think that the most convincing story the advertising industry has ever told is that it is in the business of telling stories.
But let's leave Adland, and return to narrative.
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The upstream work
Creative strategy - the brief, the insight, the campaign platform, the idea - operates within the narrative infrastructure. It is the work of finding the most resonant, surprising, or precise expression of what the narrative already contains. It asks: given what this brand means, what is the most powerful thing we can say right now, in this context, to this audience?
Narrative infrastructure work asks a different order of question. Not what should we say but what do we believe - and whether what we believe is actually true. Not how do we express the brand but what is the brand's account of the world, and does that account hold up under pressure. Not what's the insight for this brief but what are the governing principles that should make this brief unnecessary to write at all. Not just what we say but what we build - what services, what products, what experiences either evidence or betray the thing we claim to stand for.
The confusion between the two can be expensive. Agencies trained in creative strategy get handed narrative infrastructure problems and produce brilliant executions of the wrong question. Marketing departments with media plans to fill and targets to hit reframe a narrative infrastructure problem as a comms task. Handed narrative infrastructure problems big box consultancies structured for analysis rather than the kind of imaginative construction this work requires, produce frameworks nobody can extract a brief from, whatever surface area of the business is it pointed at.
There is a further consequence that the reductive tendency makes urgent. Strategy as practised by communications or 'creative' agencies has become the art of compression - of arriving at the one thing: the proposition, the promise, the message, the single-minded platform. The brief as irreducible distillation. But the narrative lens is wider - the all-enveloping persistent structure through which an organisation makes sense of what it is, what it is for, who it serves, how it makes choices, and what it will and will not do. The confusion between the two produces organisations that can write a brief but cannot answer a harder question: what governs us when there is no brief?
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Just a fancy word for strategy?
To those who might be thinking that 'narrative' is simply a fancy word for strategy and this post is rapidly turning into a long walk for a ham sandwich, I'd say this - narrative is not a replacement for strategy - it is what gives strategy its very form. Without a narrative, strategy simply cannot exist.
What brand strategy is, when it is working - when it is genuinely informing and governing decisions rather than merely decorating them - is narrative construction. It is the work of building and maintaining the interpretive infrastructure through which everything the organisation says and does takes on meaning. It is the work of answering, with enough precision to actually constrain choices: what does this brand believe about the world, what is its account of the category it operates in, what does it stand for under pressure, and what would it never do? These are not communications questions. They are narrative questions - and they require narrative thinking to answer them. Calling it narrative makes the actual job visible. And the actual job is infrastructure - the road, not the traffic.
That question is becoming more urgent, not less. As AI agents increasingly mediate buying decisions - researching, comparing, filtering, and in some cases completing transactions on behalf of users - the brand is no longer communicating only with people. It is being read, interpreted, and acted upon by systems that have no patience for ambiguity, no tolerance for inconsistency, and no capacity to infer intent from tone. A reductive proposition - a tagline, a promise, a campaign platform - gives an AI agent almost nothing to work with. A governing narrative, by contrast - one that runs consistently through product, pricing, conduct, claims, and culture - gives it everything. Infrastructure is legible to machines in a way that impression-making is not. Which means the organisations that have done the upstream work are not merely better positioned to communicate with human audiences. They are better positioned to be accurately represented by the systems that increasingly stand between them and those audiences.
Which raises a related question. If you wanted to build a system that could represent the brand with that kind of consistency - one that didn't just know what the brand looks like but how it actually thinks - what would you put inside it?
There is a growing conversation about AI-enabled brand systems and the idea of encoding not merely what a brand looks like but how it thinks, so that the intelligence persists beyond any individual. The aspiration is a system that holds how the brand actually thinks and decides =- how it argues when challenged, how it navigates a cultural moment it didn't choose, what it will charge and what that price communicates, who it hires into leadership and what that signals, which partnerships it accepts and which it declines, how it responds when its supply chain contradicts its stated values, what it builds next and why that follows from what it is, how it behaves in a customer service exchange at midnight when no one senior is watching, the upsells it accepts, the returns policy it sets. The aspiration is a system that can meet the full range of choices and decisions - commercial, cultural, organisational, creative, operational — that a brand faces every day, with a consistency that comes from deeply encoded logic.
But the question is what you would encode. You can't train a system on a campaign platform, or a brand book (however visually exciting and inspiring it might be), or a design guidelines manual, or a brand onion. What the system would need - to make genuinely intelligent judgements about how the brand behaves when the context shifts, what it stands for under pressure, what choices it makes when competing imperatives collide - is precisely the kind of propositional, hierarchical, operationally specific governing narrative I'm arguing for. The kind that says: this is what we believe about the world, these are the governing principles that establish priority and intent, this is what we would never do and here is the reasoning. This is the kind of structured logic a system can learn from. And it is precisely the kind of intelligence that narrative infrastructure makes possible.
Which brings us to the tools many organisations still use for the upstream work - and their inadequacy. Narrative construction requires different instruments designed not for the communications brief but for the whole canvas: the internal reality of the organisation, the external meanings surrounding the brand, the narrative architecture that makes intent and conviction durable at scale.
Brand onions. Brand pyramids. Brand keys. Brand houses. Brand wheels. Brand temples. These frameworks have been the dominant instruments of brand strategy for thirty years, and they share a common architecture: a series of concentric rings, or layered boxes, or hierarchical tiers, each one labelling a different dimension of the brand - values, personality, essence, rational benefits, emotional benefits, reasons to believe. They are useful for one thing: getting a room of people to agree on a vocabulary. They are almost useless for everything else. A brand onion does not tell you what the brand believes about the world. It does not establish what takes precedence when competing imperatives collide. It does not constrain a decision. It is not used by the engineering, science, or product development teams - not least of all because they don’t know it even exists. It is not used to judge whether a pricing move is consistent, or whether a leadership behaviour is a betrayal. It describes (badly); it does not govern. The essence at the centre of the onion and their ilk - the one-word or one-phrase distillation that is supposed to capture everything - is the most dangerous part of the whole exercise, because it gives the impression of precision while providing almost none. Progressive. Ingenious. Pure. Human. These words do not contain strategy. They contain aspiration - or wishful thinking - dressed as structure. A narrative is different because it is propositional - it makes claims about the world that can be tested, contested, and used to make decisions. An onion makes no claims. It is a mute and impotent word mosaic.
The corporate mission and vision statement is, if anything, worse than the onion - because it carries the additional pretence of authority. The onion at least admits it is a model, a heuristic, a way of organising the conversation. The mission statement presents itself as a conclusion. It has been workshopped, wordsmithed, approved at board level, engraved on the reception wall, radiating institutional seriousness and governing nothing.
Start with the words themselves. Most organisations could not tell you with any confidence what distinguishes a mission from a vision, or a vision from a purpose, or a purpose from a set of values, or any of these from the brand essence sitting at the centre of the onion. The distinction, such as it is, tends to run like this: the mission is what we do and why, the vision is where we are going. Which sounds all very rigorous until you notice that knowing where you are going is only useful if it constrains what you do to get there - and that is precisely the work these instruments refuse to perform.
Consider what most of them actually contain. A verb of ambition - empower, inspire, transform, enable - attached to a beneficiary so broad it encompasses all of humanity - people, communities, the world - in pursuit of an outcome so uncontested that no sentient adult would ever argue against it - better lives, a brighter future, meaningful progress. Microsoft's mission - “to empower every person and every organisation on the planet to achieve more” - is a useful specimen of the form. It has the verb, the beneficiary, the outcome. It also generates no constraint. It cannot tell you which product to build or decline, which market to enter or abandon, what Microsoft believes about the world that Samsung or Oracle does not. Put it at the top of a decision memo and watch it do nothing. The most honest thing you could say about the average corporate mission statement is that it is a proof of alignment on the absence of disagreement - which is a very different thing from a proof of shared conviction.
The vision is usually worse - a description of a future state so desirable and so vague that its achievement could never be confirmed, contested, or held to account. We will be the world's most trusted…We will create a future where everyone.. We will lead the transition to… It’s corporate vaporware.
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What the work actually looks like
A governing constitution - a core narrative, seven principles, and a set of operational rules extending across product, pricing, communications, retail, talent, and leadership conduct. Not a description of wafty 'values', but a system of judgement designed to reduce interpretive drift and hold the organisation to account, at scale. Confidentiality forbids me, but if I were to share the most recent deliverable I shipped, I would wager that you would immediately know what brand it was for.
The work could not have been done inside an advertising agency. Not for a moment do I suggest here that the strategic skills necessary for such work do not exist in agencies. But the fact of the matter is that advertising agencies are built to produce advertising - and that defining constraint shapes the access sought and granted, the questions asked, how the problem is framed, the solutions proposed, and how success is defined. Narrative infrastructure work requires a far wider aperture, a far wider access to the whole organisation and its decision-makers, not just the marketing function; the freedom to name what is actually broken before anyone decides what to build, and a frame of judgement measured not just by communications potential but by operational consequence.
It would be deeply unfair to suggest that the quest for a creative idea never touches the upstream work of narrative. Sometimes, in the search for a platform or a campaign thought, a strategist or a creative director does put their finger on something true - the defining character of the brand, its particular way of seeing the world, the thing that makes it genuinely unlike anything else. And sometimes that happens almost by accident. Struggling the night before a client presentation to find a line that would unify five different TV commercials his team had created for Nike, Dan Wieden recalled reading about the word of Gary Gilmore before a firing squad. When asked for his last words before execution, Gilmore said "Let's do it." Dan changed it to 'Just Do It' and presented it the next day. The rest is history.
Dan spoke in the documentary Art & Copy, about what a great agency at its best can do: "You're giving an idea not just to the customer but to the company itself of who they are, and a sense of themselves and a sense of their role". Those moments matter enormously. They can capture lightning in a bottle. But they are moments - expressions or discoveries. The infrastructure is what allows those ideas to compound, manifest across every surface area of a brand and the business behind it, and remain coherent over time. And there is is a significant difference between touching the narrative and actually building the durable infrastructure. This is not a criticism. If narrative infrastructure is the operating system of the organisation, advertising is one of the apps that run on it. Apps can be brilliant, but an app developer cannot write the OS - different access, different tools, different frame of judgement, different output. Asking an ad agency to build this is like asking an app developer to rewrite the kernel.
That upstream narrative work cannot always be done from the outside alone, nor can it always be successfully delegated entirely within. Clarity and practical application often requires (particularly when conviction and direction have leaked from the organisation) both proximity and distance. But however they accomplish it, the organisations that do the work find that they become more deliberate and more coherent - not just in their communications, but in their decisions, their culture, their product, their conduct under pressure. The organisations that don't find that the activity never quite adds up to anything - and that consumers (and their own people) can feel the gap between the promise and the delivery. The infrastructure either gets built or it doesn't. The difference accumulates in both directions.
In the end, organisations don’t get the brand they advertise. They get the brand their decisions build. And those decisions either run on narrative infrastructure - or they drift.
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Sources:
Italian Water Infrastructure
ISTAT (Italian National Institute of Statistics). Water Statistics: Years 2020-2023. World Water Day press release, 22 March 2024
ISTAT. Water Statistics: Years 2020-2024.
Earth.org. Drought in Italy's Southern Islands Made 50% More Likely by Climate Change. February 2026
UK Infrastructure Investment as % of GDP
Office for National Statistics (ONS). Infrastructure in the UK, Investment and Net Stocks: July 2024
House of Commons Library. Infrastructure in the UK. Research Briefing SN06594, updated 2025.
NHS Maintenance Backlog
NHS England / DHSC. Estates Return Information Collection (ERIC) 2024/25. Published October 2025
Perspective Media / PA Media. Maintenance Backlog for Decrepit NHS Buildings Jumps to Almost £16 Billion. 16 October 2025
UK Schools
House of Commons Public Accounts Committee. The Condition of School Buildings. HC 78, Session 2023-24, November 2023
National Audit Office (NAO). Condition of School Buildings. HC 1516, Session 2022-23, June 2023.
Social Housing Waiting Lists
UK Government / MHCLG. Social Housing Lettings in England, Tenants: April 2023 to March 2024.
UK Government / MHCLG. Social Housing Lettings in England, Tenants: April 2024 to March 2025. November 2025
Centre for London. London's Social Housing Waiting Times. October 2024
US Infrastructure Investment and ASCE Report Card
American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE). 2025 Report Card for America's Infrastructure. March 2025
ASCE. ASCE Report Card Gives US Infrastructure Highest-Ever C Grade. Press release, 25 March 2025.
US Rail Investment vs Europe
Fortune. Why Doesn't the US Have High Speed Trains?. 19 May 2024
China High-Speed Rail
Xinhua. China's High-Speed Rail Mileage Tops 50,000 km. December 2025.
Brilliant Maps. The Insane Growth of China's High-Speed Rail Network Between 2008 and 2024
Wikipedia. High-Speed Rail in China.
Strait of Hormuz
US Energy Information Administration (EIA). Amid Regional Conflict, the Strait of Hormuz Remains Critical Oil Chokepoint. 2025
Congressional Research Service (CRS). Iran Conflict and the Strait of Hormuz: Impacts on Oil, Gas, and Other Commodities. Updated March 2026
Wikipedia. Strait of Hormuz
TSMC / Semiconductor Concentration
Economics Observatory. How Did Semiconductors Become So Central to Taiwan's Economic Progress?. May 2025.
EE Times Asia. Inside Taiwan's Semiconductor Supremacy. April 2026
SAIS Review of International Affairs. Strategic Redundancy in Semiconductor Supply Chains. December 2025.
Microsoft:
Martin Weigel is a brand strategist, former Chief Strategy Officer at Wieden+Kennedy Amsterdam, and founder of EMDUB. He helps companies find their superpower - and turn it into action.