The narrative hierarchy refers to how related stories of varying status affect one another. Essentially, the strengths and weaknesses of stories at different levels reinforce and/or disrupt one another. This concept is used primarily in storytelling for enterprise.
Imagine a software company with several products in different categories. It’s generally understood that the parent company has a narrative or “brand story,” and that each individual product also needs a sales narrative about who should buy it and why, and that these narratives need to complement one another.
However, that’s not the full narrative hierarchy. At the top, there’s the company. At the bottom, there are individual products. And in the middle, there are often one or more levels where the end user or consumer has conscious or intuitive awareness that a level exists.
With a broad brush, let’s consider Nintendo, Microsoft, and the New York Times as they relate to narrative hierarchy and gaming.
Nintendo: From a storytelling perspective, when someone buys a Nintendo game, the purchasing narrative for the game inherits and reinforces the Nintendo console narrative and the Nintendo parent company narrative. At each level, there’s a strong emphasis on family and fun. A family is a relatively tight social unit with clear boundaries. This fits with many games being playable only on Nintendo consoles. The concept of family also fits with Nintendo’s mission “to put smiles on the faces of everyone we touch,” which embodies a fun concept of family. Therefore, Nintendo’s game exclusivity makes narrative sense at all levels because it’s congruent with the notion of being in a fun family.
Microsoft: Microsoft’s mission is “to empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more.” We could distill this into power and inclusion. This fits with the Gaming division’s move toward being more platform agnostic and focused on subscriptions, and with the XBOX console’s muscular design and tech specs. Thus for a given XBOX game, we would expect it to make the player feel powerful and give the player options to connect with/include just about anyone. Microsoft’s emphasis on multi-platform availability and subscriptions doesn’t reinforce the theme of power, but does make narrative sense because of how it relates to inclusivity and community.
New York Times: Consider The New York Times (NYT) and their mission “to seek the truth and help people understand the world.” Of course, the NYT is a news organization which still produces newspapers. We could even think of the newspaper as the NYT “console.” However, their primary revenue growth is not coming from newspapers or from news. It’s coming from digital subscriptions to non-news content such as Games, Cooking, Wirecutter, and The Athletic.
This creates a conflict in the narrative hierarchy between the company’s brand story, which is about the news, their primary product narrative, which is about the news, and the gaming narrative which is NOT about the news. Even if we understand that the NYT games involve seeking truth and understanding the world, the premise of the company is that truth-seeking and understanding is a function of the news. Therefore, the proportional growth of non-news revenue undermines the narrative for the news division and weakens the company’s overall brand story.
This is why the concept of narrative hierarchy is important. The stories at each level need to work together for product sales narratives to make the most sense and have the greatest impact.