I've spent years arguing that narrative coherence is the backbone of long-term brand strategy. So when I came across a recent episode of Rishad Tobaccowala's What Next? podcast, I expected to nod along. Instead, I got a grenade lobbed by Rei Inamoto, founding partner of I&CO and one of the sharper brand strategy minds. "The obsession with storytelling is hurting brands."
On the surface, what he said sounds like a direct challenge to everything I've written on the subject, and while it ended up not being, it did push my thinking somewhere useful.
This Isn't About Storytelling. It's About What Comes After.
Inamoto is clear on this. Storytelling, he says, is more important than ever, especially in a world where nobody can tell the real from the generated. His argument is narrower and more damaging: brands that treat storytelling as a substitute for action are building on sand.
That's a distinction worth sitting with. A story can create an impression but can't survive contact with a product that contradicts it, a customer service call that undermines it, or a corporate decision that exposes it as performance. The internet makes those gaps visible in real time.
This is where Inamoto and I are looking at the same problem from different angles. I've argued that narrative coherence requires a consistent thread running through every touchpoint, from brand advertising down to a loyalty email. He's arguing that the thread only holds if the company's actual behavior is doing the weaving. Both are true.
"Brand" is Doing Too Much Work
Inamoto calls brand a "suitcase word," a term for words that carry so many meanings that they stop meaning anything. Ask 10 marketing executives to define it and you get 10 different answers, most of them clustering around story, impression, or promise. He offers a tighter definition: trusted differentiation.
The case he uses to illustrate this is hard to argue with. In December 2025, about 60% of enterprise AI customers were signing contracts with OpenAI. By mid-March 2026, that number had flipped completely, with over 73% choosing Anthropic. A three-month reversal driven not by a campaign, but by behavior. Anthropic held a safety-first position under real pressure, including from the US government, and didn't move. Enterprise customers noticed.
That's a brand taking action.
The Four Shifts That Make This Urgent
Inamoto identifies four changes in the last decade that put storytelling under pressure in a way it hadn't been before.
The proliferation of short-form video content collapsed attention and accelerated trend cycles. The rise of personal brands gave individuals distribution that rivals companies. Product as content changed the equation entirely: if your product is remarkable, customers become the storytellers. And rising consumer expectations, shaped partly by Amazon Prime and the assumption of frictionless everything, mean that the gap between promise and experience is measured in hours, not months.
Together, these shifts mean the old model, where you could shape perception through media spend and a well-crafted narrative, is genuinely harder to sustain. Not impossible. But harder. The story has to be earned at every point where the customer touches the brand.
The Story Has to Be Earned
In a piece I wrote for Destination CRM, I made the claim that CRM is the strategic nervous system of long-term storytelling, the mechanism that keeps the central narrative alive through personalized touchpoints during the 95% of the time customers aren't in a buying window. I still believe that. But Inamoto's argument sharpens the underlying requirement.
The narrative only works if the actions behind it are real. A coherent story built on top of an inconsistent product, or a compromised culture, or a corporate stance that shifts with the political weather, will get found out. The story doesn't protect you. The behavior earns the right to tell it.
What Inamoto is really describing is brand coherence that goes to a deeper level than most marketing conversations ever reach. Not just consistent messaging, but consistent decision-making. Not just a unified voice, but a unified set of values that show up when the money is on the table and the easy answer is to fold.
That's harder to build than a content calendar. But it's the only foundation a story can actually stand on.
This article was originally published on Publicis CRMOne's LinkedIn page. Follow here.
