Rasul Sha’ir, and his brand strategy group, Cnvrgnc, are rolling it up  bigtime in D.C. with a number of projects in the works that deal in narrative as the key to community.  Sha’ir and his partner in Cnvrgnc, Jamal Williams, begin their process by looking at the stories a community tells itself, and how those stories can be improved and shared.  Whether it’s an online group connected by a common interest, users of a social media platform, a city in the physical world, or some hybrid of the three, communities are held together by the stories they share.

In a couple of recent blog posts, one about a campaign in Greece for a Kraft Foods-owned chocolate brand called Lacta, the other observations about storytelling made by creative exec Lee Clow and Alex Bogusky of Crispin Porter + Bogusky, Rasul, looks at the role customers (a.k.a. ‘citizens of the community’) play in creating narratives.  Rasul makes this important observation:  brands are in the  business of producing their narratives in collaboration with their customers.  The campaign for Lacta, “Love in Action,” enabled by OgilvyOne Worldwide, was based on this observation.  The theme of love connects chocolate and the people who share it.  By giving customers the ’stage’ on which to profess their love–for chocolate and one anoher–the campaign transcended anything Ogilvy or Lacta could have possible produced on their own, in-house.  By sharing the narrative with their customers, Lacta generated positive unforeseen outcomes for its brand.

Give customers the tools and the rules and they will build it.  And if they build it, you don’t have to get them to go anywhere, because they’ll already be home.