Your brand doesn't need to be the hero of every story
There is a moment in a communication meeting when someone asks, “But where do we talk about what we do?”
It is a reasonable question. The business is paying for the work. There are services to explain, expertise to demonstrate and commercial objectives to meet. Somewhere along the way, though, that question can take over. The organisation becomes the starting point of every story, and the people it wants to reach have to find their own way in.
What changes when we begin with their experience?
Two projects offer useful ways to think about this: a breast cancer awareness campaign from Novartis Portugal and OncoGlam, and an oral history project from Instituto Superior Técnico. Different organisations, different purposes. Both give people a substantial role in how the story unfolds.
A question someone already lives with
“Nós levamos a peito. E tu?” brings together the experiences of four women: Carina, Inês, Rita and Telma. The campaign addresses life with breast cancer, including the questions and fears that continue beyond treatment.
In the campaign introduction shared by Novartis, one woman describes keeping questions on her phone because she knows she will forget some of them.
That detail gives the communication somewhere useful to begin. A person preparing for a consultation has something she needs to understand, and limited time in which to ask. Information about recurrence becomes connected to a situation she may recognise.
The strategic value sits in that connection. The experience helps determine which information matters and why someone might use it. The intended next step is practical: ask questions and discuss concerns with the medical team.
We can examine that structure without claiming the campaign has already changed behaviour. Establishing whether more women prepare questions or feel better able to discuss recurrence would require further evidence.
An institution told through what people remember
For its 110th anniversary, Técnico developed “110 Histórias | 110 Objetos”, exploring its history through objects and conversations with people connected to them.
An anniversary could easily become a sequence of institutional milestones. Here, objects provide the thread through scientific work, teaching and everyday life. People explain what those objects meant, how they were used and what happened around them.
The organisation’s own evaluation of the project describes an archive of interviews and feedback from listeners grateful for the preservation of stories. It also reports that episodes connected to community memories were particularly popular.
This suggests a useful direction for institutional communication: look closely at what people remember. Their accounts can reveal value that a list of achievements leaves unexplained.
The archive also gives the work a life beyond its original occasion. The conversations remain available for people to return to.
Having a voice in the story
Neither example gives us enough public evidence to say how much influence participants had over the brief, editing or final decisions.
That matters when we talk about human-centred communication.
Someone can appear in a campaign, share a testimony or help decide what the campaign should address. Those are different forms of involvement. Each can be valuable, but they give people different degrees of influence.
Before describing a project as participatory, I would want to understand what participants could change. Could they challenge the questions? Introduce something the organisation had overlooked? Decide how their experience was represented?
Those answers tell us more than the presence of a face or a first-person quote.
Four questions before the next brief
For a business reviewing its communication, I would start here:
Whose problem are we addressing?
Name a situation the audience experiences and its consequences. In professional services, that might be a team making decisions with conflicting information. Be specific enough to explain why this communication needs to exist.
Who shapes the story?
Look at whether people’s experiences influence the questions and information provided. Consider what would change if their contribution were removed.
What does the evidence support?
A testimony can explain an individual experience. A measured result can support a claim about change. Both need context, and neither should carry more weight than it can bear.
What can someone do next?
Define a feasible action: prepare a question, discuss a problem with colleagues, understand a choice or begin a conversation. Then decide how you will learn whether it happened.
These questions belong early in the work, when the organisation is still deciding what to communicate. They can change the brief, the people involved and the measures of success.
For healthcare and professional services, where expertise can be difficult to assess from the outside, that is particularly useful. People need to understand how the knowledge connects to the decisions they face.
There is still a clear role for the brand. It brings expertise, resources and responsibility for the work. Finding the thread means understanding where those contributions meet something people already care about.
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