By: Kate Sarmiento
A company can spend months getting its website exactly right and lose the effect with one email. The website might be beautiful and easy to use, with copy that sounds friendly without trying too hard. Then the order confirmation arrives and reads like a notice from a government office. Most customers aren’t going to stop and diagnose the problem, but they’ll probably register that the company suddenly feels different. This is familiar territory for Anna Rosa Parker, founder of EVOKE Your Story™.
Anna grew up in Iceland and began her career as a competitive aerobics athlete and instructor. She later studied theatre and playwriting at the University of Washington, and her path from the performing arts into luxury branding eventually led her to New York. Her work there included voice and storytelling for Baccarat Hotel & Residences, 1 Hotels, Sóley Organics, Furtuna Skin, and EleVen by Venus Williams.
It might seem like a long way from theatre to branding, but both rely on understanding the story behind what people see and experience. Through EVOKE, Anna uses storytelling to explore the narratives shaping identity, communication, and the choices people make. For companies, the real challenge begins when that story has to live beyond the marketing department, showing up consistently in how the organization communicates, makes decisions, and connects with people.
Nobody Falls in Love With a Color Palette
There is nothing wrong with caring about a logo. Problems usually begin when the logo is expected to carry the whole personality of the business.
Brand experience is about much more than what people see. It’s shaped by how a company communicates, how its products are packaged, and every place where customers encounter the business (Source: Journal of Marketing, 2009). That feels fairly obvious once you think about how people actually get to know a company.
Say a neighborhood restaurant has a casual, welcoming website, so booking a table feels easy enough. Then the automated confirmation lands with a wall of capital letters, warnings, and cancellation rules. There may be perfectly good reasons for every rule in the email, but the restaurant suddenly sounds much less like the place someone thought they had booked. Neither message has to be badly written for the combination to feel strange. It’s the disconnect between the two that creates the problem.
Hospitality makes this especially obvious. A hotel can control every photograph on its website, but it can’t keep the brand safely inside the website once a guest arrives. The experience now includes the welcome at reception and how a problem is handled at 10 p.m. The carefully chosen adjectives on the booking page have to survive all of that.
Anna’s background in theatre offers another way to think about the problem. An audience accepts plenty of artificial things on a stage because they belong to the same world. A detail that feels as though it wandered in from another production can break that illusion. Brands face a similar challenge. Every interaction becomes part of the story people experience, and when those interactions contradict one another, the story begins to lose its credibility.
A Good Story Has More Work to Do Than Sound Good
The business case for storytelling is often reduced to the idea that people like stories. That’s true, but it isn’t particularly useful advice on its own.
Research has explored how emotionally engaging stories can influence our attention, emotional responses, and even our willingness to help others. In one series of experiments, participants watched a film involving a father and his young son. Researchers observed changes in stress- and social-bonding-related hormones in some participants, alongside differences in subsequent giving behavior (Source: Cerebrum, 2015). While the science is still evolving, the research raises interesting questions about how stories connect us emotionally to experiences beyond our own.
Nobody needs to turn the company origin story into a screenplay because of that. The usefulness is much simpler. Facts become more meaningful when we understand the story behind them. A feature list, for example, might tell a prospective customer everything necessary about a product and still leave them wondering why any of it exists. Hearing about the frustrating problem that inspired the product changes how those same features are understood. Suddenly, they’re not just additions to a sales page, but solutions to something real.
Anna’s work touches another part of this conversation because stories aren’t limited to what companies tell customers. We all carry stories about who we are, what we’ve experienced, and what those experiences mean. Psychologists call this narrative identity, the evolving story we create to make sense of ourselves and our lives (Source: Evolutionary Studies in Imaginative Culture, 2019). Through EVOKE, Anna explores how these narratives shape identity, communication, and decision-making, bringing together storytelling, neuroscience, and Heart Intelligence.
Businesses aren’t people, of course, but something familiar happens inside them. Ask why customers choose the company and the answers can change depending on who happens to be in the room. The person closest to customers may talk about the personal attention they receive, while somebody working elsewhere in the business sees convenience as the obvious reason. Neither perspective is necessarily wrong. But when people aren’t curious about these different interpretations, each can become a separate story about what the company stands for. Over time, customers begin encountering those different versions, and the company’s identity becomes less clear.
Read the Boring Stuff, Then Listen to the People Behind It
The quickest brand audit may be sitting in an inbox, particularly in the messages nobody thought of as branding when they were written. Homepages get plenty of attention because everyone knows customers will see them. The messages sent after somebody books an appointment or places an order aren’t always treated with the same care, and some were probably written years ago, turned on, and forgotten about because they kept doing their job.
Those neglected messages are worth reading again, since they often reveal where the company’s voice has drifted. Of course, no email needs to mimic the website. An overdue payment notice is going to sound different from an Instagram caption. The odd part is when it sounds as though it came from a business with an entirely different personality. Sometimes the explanation is simple, like a template left over from an earlier version of the business that nobody thought to revisit.
A few outdated templates are an easy fix. But if the same inconsistencies keep appearing, the writing itself may not be the whole problem. Different teams may have different ideas about what the company stands for and what customers should experience. Ask people inside the business how they would describe that experience, and pay particular attention when the answers don’t match. Those differences can reveal the stories and assumptions shaping how people understand the company. The goal isn’t to make everyone think alike, but to discover the common values that connect them.
Customer service makes this especially visible because polished language can only help so much once someone has an actual problem. A customer waiting on a missing package is unlikely to care how beautifully the company describes itself online. How that conversation is handled will probably become a much stronger memory of the brand.
Some of the best explanations of a company never appear in its official materials. Ask a founder about the business away from a prepared bio and the story can sound quite different. They may remember the customer complaint that wouldn’t go away, the original idea that failed, or some small moment that eventually pushed the business in another direction. Details like that are easy to edit out when a company story gets cleaned up for a website, even though they’re often the details that explain the company best.
The language used inside the business can be revealing in the same way. Employees develop their own ways of explaining what they do, especially when they’re talking to people unfamiliar with the company jargon. Customers simplify things too. What they choose to tell a friend about the business may be something the marketing team hardly mentions. If that keeps happening, it’s worth getting curious about why. Sometimes customers recognize something valuable about an experience that the company itself has become too familiar with to notice.
Trying to make every employee sound identical won’t solve that. A salesperson who knows a customer well is going to speak differently from the person answering an angry email about a package that never arrived, and that difference alone says nothing bad about the brand. Trouble starts when the customer begins to wonder whether they’re dealing with the same company at all. Tone can change with the conversation without losing the identity and values that connect every part of the experience.
What Story Is Already There?
This is the territory EVOKE Your Story™ explores. Through its online courses, private coaching, and customized executive and team training, EVOKE helps individuals and organizations recognize the stories shaping their identity, communication, and decisions, bringing together storytelling, neuroscience, and Heart Intelligence.
For a business, the first clue might be surprisingly ordinary: the emails already sitting in an inbox, the way employees describe the company when they aren’t quoting the website, or what customers keep bringing up on their own. Somewhere in all of that is the story people are actually experiencing, whether it’s the one the company intended to tell or not. And perhaps the most important question isn’t what story the company wants to tell, but whether the story it tells is reflected in how it shows up every day.
More about Anna’s work and the different ways to work with EVOKE can be found on the EVOKE website.
