*By Craig Honick, Founder and Principal Advisor, The Good People Research Company
Beverage Brands Are Cultural Symbols
Do brand stories help companies become part of consumers’ lives and rituals, not just their shopping carts? Strong storytelling builds brand equity: the cultural admiration and meaning that drive preference beyond product features. When a story resonates, a consumer subculture adopts a brand as a symbol of identity, aspiration, and lived experience — and begins promoting it for the brand. The key question isn’t whether to tell stories, but which stories create ritual, relevance, and distinction in a given category.
How Brands Gain Cultural Value
Brands typically move through four market stages:
- Inspiration – Brand enters the market
- Interpretation – Consumers assign meaning
- Integration – Brand becomes well understood
- Utilization – A subculture uses it to express identity
At utilization, consumers become advocates for the brand. Stories determine whether a brand advances through these stages. When a brand’s story supports identity and aspiration over time, brand equity grows, increasing lifetime value and lowering acquisition cost.
Most Brand Stories Miss the Critical Layer
Most beverage brands focus on origin stories, craft, ingredients, or experiences. That’s useful — but incomplete. What’s often missing is alignment with the story consumers tell themselves about their own lives: their internal meaning framework, what we call the Guiding Narrative®. If a brand story doesn’t fit that inner story, it doesn’t land, no matter how polished the campaign.
The Guiding Narrative®
Every consumer carries an internal story about who they are, what matters, and how life should be lived. It shapes how they interpret messages and choose brands. A brand story is like an aircraft. The Guiding Narrative® is the runway. Without alignment, the story stays airborne, visible but irrelevant. Understanding this narrative is a positioning advantage because it shows how a brand can become meaningful to a specific consumer subculture.
Why This Matters More Now
Beverage choices are ritual choices, tied to identity, reward, craft, celebration, balance, or belonging. Meanwhile, AI-driven marketing is increasing content volume but often stripping out human meaning. Markets are becoming more transactional and commoditized. Brands that connect through human-centered storytelling (stories that truly “land”) gain loyalty and reduce competitive pressure.
Meaning Beats Features in Marketing
For example, the story some might tell about their life is that they have worked hard and deserve a beer-drinking ritual that symbolizes fun, relaxation, and mild abandon. The narrative is about life balance, and the beer ritual is the reward; others may see themselves on a path of growth, depth, and refinement, and so the ritual is about the appreciation of craft and art as a shared group value. Still others may see a brand as nostalgic or culturally centering– a brand they grew up with or one that’s made in their hometown.
Companies are marketing meaning, not features. Their customers come to their products with a story in their minds, and their products are supportive symbols or artifacts in that story.
The Do’s and Don’ts of Using Guiding Narrative-Based Storytelling
Asking the Right Questions About Target Audiences
Companies should constantly ask themselves these questions:
- What story do customers tell themselves about their lives that could involve our product? What does our brand mean in that story?
- Do we want to focus on consumers who are telling themselves a particular story about their lives? If so, which story?
- Which story or stories are we currently serving or reinforcing the most? Are we clear on that?
Companies should not build their marketing around the following questions. These should be treated as tactical, not strategic:
- How can we get the most customers as quickly as possible?
- What technology will produce content the quickest?
- What technology will mimic our successful competitors?
Being Intentional About Story Content
Companies should ensure that marketing content accurately portrays the rituals their target audiences engage in. They should learn the details of those rituals and what they mean to the group itself. They should also learn the norms of their target audience so their marketing does not land as culturally inappropriate or unrecognizable.
Companies should not create content that they believe is attention-getting before knowing for sure if and how it will “land” in different consumer subcultures.
Segment Audience by Values and Aspirations, Not Convenience
When possible, companies should segment their audience by what each segment values most, understanding meaningful differences, and which values more closely align with who they are or want to be as a company. Companies should not segment their audience, prioritizing what conveniently aligns with marketing capabilities like demographics or buying patterns, or that simply “makes sense,” unless this is the same as segmenting their audience by what they value.
Share Storytelling Insight With the Entire Company
Companies should enable their entire company population to immerse themselves in the story their customers are telling themselves about their life and their brand.
Companies should not limit market insight to their marketing team. The more aligned employees are with customer identity and aspirations, the more aligned all aspects of the company will be in furthering the company’s goals.
Ensuring a human narrative-centered paradigm for telling a brand’s story signals to the marketplace that the company is there for their benefit, not the other way around. It will inspire the right market audience to begin telling the brand’s story for them, and to invest in the brand as an integral part of the rituals they seek out every day to reinforce their identity and aspirations. Assuming the company is producing an appealing product, adopting and sustaining this marketing paradigm is the surest way to grow and preserve brand equity for a beverage brand.
Get deeper insight into brand equity and the culture of U.S. beverage consumers: goodpeopleresearch.com/beverage-study