We’ve been sharing our process a lot in the last month or so. Lots of pitches, treatments, and a lot of trying to help brands understand how storytelling can and should play a role for them.

I think people are often surprised when we don’t really want to start with creative or by talking about the story. We actually just want to start by talking to people.

Not a kick-off call with the marketing team. Not a creative brief over email. We want to go out and have real conversations with the people in and around the organization. Ideally, that’s going to be a mix of senior leadership, employees, customers, and sometimes even community members and partners. Really, anyone who might have experience that touches the brand.

We call this phase Fieldwork, and our goal is to understand more deeply and, hopefully, uncover compelling stories. Who are the characters? Where's the conflict? Who are the people who live and breathe this organization that an audience would care about?

But here's a thing we didn't expect when we started working this way.

The conversations that find the stories also produce something else entirely. They lay the foundation for a surprisingly in-depth qualitative research report.

When you sit down with 30, 40, 50 people connected to a single organization and just have some unfiltered conversations, you end up with an incredibly detailed picture of how that organization is perceived. Not from a survey. Not from a focus group behind glass. From honest chats where people have the space to say what they actually think.

And almost every time, we find a story or a path that wasn’t on the radar.

I’ve always thought about it this way. There's the story the brand thinks it's telling. The one on the website, in the pitch deck, in the internal comms. And then there's the story the customers, the employees, and the community are actually hearing.

Those two stories are rarely the same.

A company might believe its positioning is all about innovation. But every customer we talk to mentions the same thing: a specific person who went out of their way to help them. The real story isn't the technology. It's the culture behind the support.

Or a nonprofit might lead with statistics about impact. But the people closest to the work keep coming back to one moment, one relationship, one turning point that changed everything. The data is accurate. The story is somewhere else entirely.

This is why we think storytelling works best when it leads, not follows.

So often, we’re asked to develop a story at the end of a campaign plan. “Find a story that we can slot in around everything we’re already doing”.

It inherits a message that was developed without this kind of listening. The brief says what the brand wants to say. But nobody went out and checked whether that's what the audience needs or wants to hear.

When the Fieldwork happens first, the learnings often don't just shape the film. They have reshaped the organization's thinking about its positioning.

We've seen it happen more than once. A client wants to tell a story through a documentary lens, and the discovery process surfaces patterns that change how they talk about themselves across every channel. The film gets made but the Fieldwork also informs elements of their sales, marketing, and brand work.

I think most brands skip this step. And I don’t think it’s on purpose. There are a lot of filmmakers out there that just want to make a good film. And there are a lot of agencies that do brilliant work, but might have never tried to make a film before.

The standard playbook has always been: have a great product, build the brand, set the strategy, plan the media, then figure out the creative and buy the ads. If storytelling even gets an opportunity at the end, it has to work within constraints that were set without it.

But the brands that flip this, that invest in listening before they start talking, end up with something the others don't. They end up telling stories, with real specificity, that break through and connect on a deeper level. And that clarity doesn't just make the film better. It makes everything better.

If you're planning a campaign, a rebrand, or even just a single piece of content, try starting with the question most people skip.

What story is your customers actually hearing? Not the one you think you’re telling. The one they're actually receiving. If you don't know, that's worth finding out before you spend the production budget.