I gave an impromptu talk last night, at Refresh Events in Toronto. I may have been enticed to the front of the room with the promise of free beer, but in all honesty just watching others speak about their passions, and the lessons and challenges they’ve faced, got me up and talking about the transition I made from studying English Literature, to studying (and now working in) Communications.

I’m not going to repeat that talk here.

But I’m going to mention something related; the importance that my understanding of narrative has on my understanding of communication, in terms of marketing/communications disciplines. We can talk about messaging, or branding, or badge theory. In the end, we’re all talking about narrative. Everything has a narrative, is composed of smaller things with narratives, and can combine to form a meta-narrative. You don’t sell products, you sell expansions to the personal narrative of customers. Very few people buy a Tom Ford suit because they like the Tom Ford story. They buy it because they want their story to include the signifiers and meaning of Tom Ford suits.

Don’t create meaning for the product, or even the brand. Create meaning for the final narrative, that of the consumer. Create something that can be remixed and integrated into established lives and identities.

Narrative, and the tools and tricks of narrative, are what I loved, and still love, about english literature. In terms of durable, repeatable and distributable content, the written word, the written story, is the most developed medium our society will encounter. Learning to dissect that system, learning what it’s like to develop meaning in a format that often references ideas and concepts from an earlier century, another continent, from our collective cultural memory, taught me more about how to develop meaning from a patchwork of different influences than I realized.

To properly analyze a novel, you need to be able to understand the major references, regardless of how subtle or obtuse. I can’t think of any better training for building compelling narratives in the current media landscape, or for picking apart messages created and distributed in any other medium, all of which have had less time to develop and establish technique and idiom.

Except for a long string of self-effacing jokes, I’m very proud of my past studying English Lit. I’m certain it makes me a better communicator and strategist than I would have been otherwise, just as I’m sure it’s the only reason I ended up focusing on communication strategy.