Stories Truer Than The Truth: The Brand of Social Entrepreneurship

by Nathaniel Whittemore

categories: Branding and Marketing, Ideas, Meta

Published July 01, 2009 @ 04:27PM PT

What is truer than the truth? The story.

So began Isabel Allende at her TED Talk in 2007. Paraphrasing the Jewish proverb, she was saying that the stories we tell about ourselves and our lives often reveal as much about us as any facts ever could.

This has always been clearest to me in music. The early American folk ballads that were adapted from the Old World and which would become the root of country and popular music almost invariably had dueling escapism and morality. They told stories of abberational (and unacceptable) behavior that, in their telling, made people feel liberated, if only for a brief few minutes. For every action though there was a consequence, reinforcing not only the dominant morality but the strict structure that allowed social groups to survive the brutality of early colonial life.

A great example is "The House Carpenter," a famous folk ballad (originally British) that has been peformed by everyone from Natalie Merchant to Bob Dylan. In the song, a long-lost lover returns to a woman who has settled with her carpenter husband and new baby and entices her to run off to sea with her, leaving her family behind. What seems like a grand adventure quickly turns sour. The woman becomes despondent, weeping for her child left behind. As she drowns metaphorically in her sour, the ship springs a leak and literally sings, ending her life.

In it's particular combination of escapism and morality, "The House Carpenter" reveals a huge amount about the mores of Appalacian society in the 18th century where the contemporary form of the song was popularized.

But stories are not just codified in contemporary culture; they are often explicitly created to generate a particular response. This is, of course, what we call branding. Brand's help people form an emotional connection with something, and can often quite literally change people's perception of a thing. I recently heard a great story that reinforced this point.

The cousin of a friend of mine was traveling with the Grateful Dead a couple of decades ago. Having run out of money to buy tickets to the shows, he began tie dying and selling t-shirts outside of each new arena. By mistake, however, he had only purchased XXL t-shirts to sell. For a few shows, he was completely unsuccessful. But then it doned on him to call them "Jerry-sized," connecting them with the portly and beloved Dead frontman Jerry Garcia, and quickly sold out.

This all matters for this blog because we are in the midst of major branding shifts. Of course many are trying to better calibrate the brands of their organizations with the value they're creating - from the social impact on whatever issue they're working on to the experience for staffers and volunteers involved.

Perhaps even more importantly, however, we have a branding opening in the social enterprise space. Just what to call this is still up for grabs: social enterprise? Social entrepreneurship? Blended Value Social Capital Markets for Good?

We converse about definitions, but perhaps more time should be spent on brand implications. What if capitalism just was social enteprise? What if we rejected the fracturing of social, environmental, and financial value? What if we said that the real abberation were corporations that didn't care about all of their impact? What if we said that every person should be viewed as someone with talents to cultivate, grow, and direct? What if we said that every resource should be stewarded rather than exploited? And what if we build structures to reinforce that?

Those are the real implications for the branding of our movement. I'm thrilled to see groups like BeDo, Endeavor, Acumen Fund, and the Social Capital Markets folks who are telling that story, but I want to see it biggified. I want to tell the story of how individual entrepreneurs fit into larger ecosystems. I want to tell the story of where we want to go, not where we are. I want self-fulfilling prophecy of a better, more just, smarter, more sustainable system.

That's the story we must make truer than the truth.

Photocredit: Nyaong on Flickr