Brand the problem, not the solution

Loris Colantuono on narrative strategy, the death of differentiation, and why creatives need a seat at the table

I don’t remember when or how I stumbled on Loris Colantuono’s newsletter. But I kept reading because it felt like I had finally found a kindred spirit. Someone who believed that writing and strategy were equally important—and had articulate, original things to say on the topic.

So many of the startups and VCs I’ve worked with don’t understand that narrative—how you tell your business’s story—is core to their survival. Writing is strategy. When AI makes everything look the same, this is even more true.

Loris understands this intimately. He’s helped founders and leadership teams clarify the problem they solve and express it as a narrative that drives everything from sales to product development and worked with companies like Decathlon, Sephora, Mazda and Veolia.

Our conversation gets into why differentiation is overrated, why creatives have lost their seat at the decision-making table, and what AI means for anyone who defines themselves by a skill. There’s so much here—buckle up, bookmark it, bring your notebook.

• Storytelling isn’t a layer of paint, it’s the architecture. When you get the narrative right, everything else (sales, content, product) gets easier.

• Brand the problem, not the solution. In a market with 10,000 options, owning the problem is what makes you stand out.

• AI is accelerating an identity crisis for creatives. Stop defining yourself by a skill; start defining yourself by the problem you solve.

How would you describe the work you do today?

I work at the intersection between strategy and storytelling. I help founders and leadership teams clarify what problem they truly solve, then help them express that in a story that lines up with the product and the growth strategy.

When you have your narrative right, everything gets easier. Sales cycles get shorter. Content gets easier. Product development gets easier.

How did you get here?

About 10 years ago, I was studying cultural and social anthropology at university in Lausanne. My master’s thesis was about how belief systems and narratives shape the amplification and adoption of new forms of money—digital currencies like Bitcoin. I thought my ideas were interesting, and that I would be invited to discuss my ideas by people in the industry. But I had no traction, no interest.

I had ideas, but I couldn’t make people care. And an idea that doesn’t travel doesn’t exist. It’s invisible.

There were two paths to learn how to make my ideas interesting enough that people cared: become a novelist—someone who can make you read 300 pages about an idea—or go into communications and advertising. I chose advertising because I wanted to get paid, and that’s where I rapidly discovered the most powerful tool to make an idea interesting: storytelling.

How did you go from storytelling within advertising to understanding storytelling as strategy?

I don’t remember the exact moment, but I remember working with a startup in the solar tech space—the first time I’d ever worked on a startup fundraise. They were fundraising 5 million Swiss francs but were stuck at 1 million.

Their pitch was dry and very technical: “This is our amazing technology. Give us your money.” So I crafted a story about the future instead of the past: What is the context? What’s the problem? What is changing? What new market is being born? And why is this startup the best to lead that new market?

We raised 7.7 million in three weeks.

That story became more than the pitch. It was the framework for how we thought about everything: the sales funnel, the ads on Meta and the radio, branding. It was a strategy.

It’s a great example of how companies need to inspire their audience and provoke emotion, making people believe that they can go somewhere together. On the flip side, what do companies get wrong?

They think storytelling is like a layer of paint. You build your house, and then storytelling is the paint—something tactical you add at the end. That’s incorrect. Storytelling is the architecture. It’s the design of the house.

Can you give me an example?

I worked with a direct-to-consumer company. My vision was to transform them into a media brand and position them in the landscape, but they just wanted to ship more. So we created storytelling sales pages, storytelling emails, storytelling everything...

Sometimes it worked, and other times it didn’t, but they didn’t know why. Because they were just shipping. You can’t have feedback if you don’t have strategy behind it. Build your story and it will build your strategy.

This reminds me of a mistake I see many technical founders make. They think they don’t have to tell a story because their product is so great that customers will flock to them.

I think engineers need stories the most because they think the product sells itself. They also think they need to cram all the features into the narrative, like when I was doing a strategy workshop with a crypto startup recently. They wanted to talk about exchanges, payment gateways, this and that.

I asked them: do you want to propose a menu with everything? Or a recipe, where every ingredient is essential? Your recipe is your moat—you link every ingredient together to create something original. Then, they understood.

Your clients lead real lives and don’t spend all day thinking about your product like you do. They only care if there’s a good story that can change something about their life.

You mentioned originality. When I went to business school, we learned that branding and marketing was all about differentiation, which is one way of being original. But you argue that standing out is about clearly articulating the problem you’re solving.

I understood this from working with clients. When you have 10,000 products to choose from, and you try to package yours in a different way, sure, it might have a bit of impact, but only a little.

When a market is too heterogeneous, we actually perceive it as homogeneous. Too much difference is like no difference. Think of the shampoo aisle in the supermarket.

I found a beautiful solution to this: brand the problem, not the solution. You explain the problem but reframe it in your terms: “Everyone thinks this, but the real problem is this.” And when you reframe the problem, you de-position the competition and become unique.

“When a market is too heterogeneous, we actually perceive it as homogeneous. Too much difference is like no difference…I found a beautiful solution to this: brand the problem, not the solution.”

There’s a famous story about elevators. In the mid-20th century, people found the lifts in a building too slow, so they hired lots of expensive engineers to find a solution. And then somebody said: “Maybe the problem isn’t the journey time. It’s the perception of time. What if we just put something that could accelerate the perception of time like a mirror?” That’s reframing the problem to find new solutions.

I think that this also explains why big agencies are facing such a crisis. They aren’t reframing the problem. They’re still focused on making a new brand of shampoo look a bit different from all the others.

In the old agency model, there were big clients with very clear briefs who knew what they wanted. Strategists translated the brief, and creative just executed.

But most companies don’t have a strategy. They aren’t unique. So when they come to an agency for help expressing their uniqueness, the creatives at the agency are forced to invent something artificial.

What I do now with narrative strategy is I reveal, I don’t invent. I do a bit of benchmarking on competition, but not market research. I tell founders, “You’ve been in this industry for 10 years. Your insights—what you understand from living in this industry—are more valuable than data. Forget whiteboards and brainstorming. Let’s take a moment, maybe over a glass of wine, and discuss your ideas.” Why pay massive fees for that?

When you do true branding strategy, you end up doing business strategy, because positioning is business.

How does AI affect this kind of narrative positioning?

People introduce themselves in terms of their skills: “I’m a copywriter, I’m a writer, I’m a journalist. What I do is I write.” Tomorrow that might be the wrong framing because writing—or execution in general—is perceived as cheap due to AI. Even if I don’t think you can get beautiful text from AI, perception is reality. We have to act accordingly.

So the first shift for us creatives is an identity shift: stop defining yourself by a skill, and instead identify with a problem. Obsess over a problem that you own—the hole that your clients or your audience want to get out of.

But maybe AI isn’t really changing things so much as accelerating something. In the past, creatives like us—Leo Burnett, David Ogilvy—had a seat at the executive table where decisions were made.

How did you feel that in you work?

When I was working in an agency, I didn’t speak with clients. I did a campaign for Mazda—I worked on strategy, text, everything. Then I met the CMO of Mazda Switzerland and introduced myself. “I’m the copywriter.” “Copy... what?” he replied. He was very happy with the campaign, but he didn’t know my title existed.

Creatives are not at the decision table anymore. And if you’re not at the table, you’re on the menu. You will get eaten—by other people and by AI.

So creatives have to find a way to have a more strategic relationship with clients, to be invited to the table. That requires developing a more strategic mind, not just focusing on execution.

One thing that came to my mind while you were speaking was about specialization versus generalism. A lot of people say now that we need to be generalists, because execution is easy—you need to know how to pull many different things together. But while you were talking about positioning ourselves as a solver of a problem, I wonder how generalist or specific that positioning needs to be.

This is a question I struggle with myself. I would love to be a generalist, but it’s difficult because you’re a generalist in your own way. And then you have to explain to clients why your generalism is unique. I don’t like specialization either, because it bores me, and I’m not creative when I’m bored.

So I think it’s not specialization, it’s specificity. Be specific about the problem, about your methodology, and about the path you take the client through. Be clear about how you do things, and why. When you’re specific in that way, you can actually be more of a generalist.

Do you have an example of this?

I worked with a consultant who had helped independent hotels with dynamic pricing for 10 years. He had a good network and always had work, but he felt he could do something more.

So we spent a whole day together, and we realized that the real problem he’s solving isn’t about pricing. It’s that independent hotels are not really independent. They’re not part of franchises like Hilton or Marriott, but they’re dependent on big platforms like Booking.com and Airbnb.

So now, he’s developed a methodology to help hotels be really independent—or at least less dependent—on the big platforms. He’s doing more than just dynamic pricing. He’s doing branding, consulting on client onboarding—a complete ecosystem.

So paradoxically, he’s doing something more specific but less specialized. He’s hiring two people because almost all his current and past clients said yes to his offering immediately. They said: “This is our biggest problem, but nobody is talking about this.”

But then some pure skills are still important, no? I believe writing is my superpower.

A strategy or a business plan, in order to be understood and executed, has to be well written. So our skill is incredibly important, and it will be more and more important with AI. People think it’s easy to write, so they delegate their thinking—because writing is thinking.

But you have to sell that skill in a strategic way. Not just, “I will write you 10 posts on LinkedIn.” You have to sell your point of view, a proprietary methodology.

What’s interesting is that if you develop a proprietary methodology, you can then use AI to make it more accessible. You can offer simple AI tools for people who can’t afford the full service, or who just want to taste your methodology.

You could say: “Here’s my framework for writing a strategy document. Play with it on ChatGPT, but if you really want to go deeper, then come work with me.” I actually saw an executive coach do this for his end-of-year reflection document.

You just have to find the sweet spot where it’s not so easy that the user can do everything themselves—they should get maybe 70%. And if they love it, they can book a one-to-one session.

And as writers, I think we also have to raise our ambition.

Our competition is not just our competitors in the market. Our competition is the immortals—the best of the best that existed in the past. We should be trying to create work that lasts.

Resources

🔗 Subscribe to Loris’s newsletter (in French). It’s full of the kind of case studies and narrative thinking we discuss above.

📖 If Loris’s thinking resonated, revisit the original masters he references: David Ogilvy’s Ogilvy on Advertising and anything on Leo Burnett’s philosophy of finding the “inherent drama” in every product.

🧠 Try Loris’s reframing exercise on your own work: instead of describing what you do, describe the problem you solve. What changes?

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When has writing helped your company’s strategy? Message me on LinkedIn or reply to this email.