How To Build Authentic Awareness And Win: A 6-Step Strategic Guide

To build brand awareness that lasts, SMEs must adopt a specific narrative lens that must not be seen as advertisements. Some of the approaches include founder-led, community-led, or ideas-led, which a company uses to communicate its values and mission to their target customers. You can either choose a single approach or a combination of multi-layer approaches to cut through market noise.

Most companies fail at this brand awareness game because they try to tell every story at once, resulting in a confusing message that no one remembers. People want something easy to understand. Memorability of a brand usually starts here. Whether you’re an SME in Penang or in Singapore, you can choose one or a combination of these six narrative frameworks to cut through the noise to establish organic growth for your brand awareness.

1. The Brand-Led Narrative

This is the "top-down" approach, pretty much a by-default one. Here, you are creating the demand for your products, services and brand. Your narrative is built on a philosophy that people don’t know what they want until you show it to them. You don't conduct focus groups to ask for permission; you merely dictate the future. By positioning your brand as the ultimate curators of taste, you create a narrative where the people aren't just buying your product or service, but also joining some special movement or way of living.

2. The Founder-Led Narrative

People don't fall in love with corporations. Usually, they fall in love with people. This framework uses the founder’s personal journey covering the grit, the failures, and the "why" to bypass traditional marketing scepticism. Take your CEO, for example. By wearing the t-shirt or a cap and taking the front lines, he will make the brand a populist movement. He can be the guy fighting those big players out there on behalf of the common man. He can also turn a boring corporate visibility into a personal brand story involving the company. In short, he turns the brand feel into a personal mission.

3. The Ideas-Led Narrative

If your product is functional and potentially boring, you shift the narrative from the object to the outcome. You stop selling things and start selling possibilities, just like how IKEA does it. This Swedish furniture giant transformed the furniture industry by selling the idea of a better everyday life. Their showrooms display both furniture and blueprints for a dream home at the same time. They offer interior design ideas for free, and the furniture just happens to be the tool to achieve it. This is how ideas-led narrative is created.

4. The Influencer-Led Narrative

This is about trust by association. The best brands, they prefer to pay for a post and embed a figure’s personal narrative into the brand’s specific niche, too, in parallel. If you run a skincare brand in Malaysia, Singapore or Southeast Asia, you may want to own a skincare-related space by creating sub-narratives for every woman. And the way to go about it is to collaborate with selected women in various age-groups who command a decent number of followers on their respective favourite social media channels. These women don't just show her using the product; you have her share her skin transformation journey. It feels less like an ad and more like a high-end secret being shared.

5. The Personnel-Led Narrative

This approach leverages your team’s collective IQ. It’s highly effective in B2B industries where trust is built on technical competence. You eventually humanise your brand’s massive scale by putting lead engineers and CxOs in the spotlight to explain the obsession behind a new feature of your latest product. Just a little warning, though. This is the highest-risk strategy. When you build a narrative around specific employees, you are building equity in a person you don't own. If that lead engineer or CxO leaves for a competitor, they take a piece of your brand's soul with them. You may use this approach to humanise the brand, but ensure the positive vibes and cultures are tied to the company's culture, not just an individual.

6. The Community-Led Narrative

Now, this is about fostering a movement where users interact with each other, not just the brand. Just like how Airbnb does it. Their narrative is predominantly written by their Host Community. By highlighting a host in a Malaysian village or a treehouse owner in Sarawak, they sell the concept called "Belonging Anywhere." They give the community the tools to share their own hospitality stories, making the brand feel local and personal in every city on earth.