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I ask Joshua Altman what the first ninety days look like when a company hires him, and he does something I don’t expect. He doesn’t talk about audits or deliverables or brand guidelines. He tells me to get a piece of paper.
“Divide it into story, narrative, brand,” he says. “Write that stuff down for your company.”
He makes it sound simple. Three columns. But then he starts explaining what goes in each one, and I realize the exercise is a trap — the kind of trap a good diagnostician sets, where the patient discovers the problem by trying to describe it.
Story, he tells me, is what you tell your friends at the bar. It has characters, setting, situation. A beginning, a middle, a present — not an end, because “we’re still telling this story.” It’s largely unstructured. This happened, then that happened, and on the way there someone got a phone call. Story is the stuff.
Narrative is harder. Narrative answers questions. “What are we saying about who we are? How do these events connect to our themes? And what should people conclude from our connected stories?”
He lets that last one sit. What should people conclude. I write it down because it sounds like the kind of sentence that reorganizes a company if the founders actually try to answer it.
And brand — brand is everything else. “It’s logos, it’s the website, it’s social media handles,” he says, and then he keeps going past the things I expected. “Your product packaging is part of your brand. If you’re a physical retailer, the music you play is part of your brand.” Giveaway pens. Customer interactions. The whole surface area of contact between a company and the people it touches.
The framework sounds clean when he lays it out like that — three layers, each building on the one below it. But the reason companies call Joshua is that they’ve been building from the top down.
“People call us at the brand stage when they really haven’t figured out the story and the narrative yet,” he says. He’s not frustrated when he says it. He’s diagnosing. “Which makes it much harder to effectively communicate that brand, because if narrative is connecting things to our theme, it’s what people should conclude — brand builds on that.”
I think about all the startups I’ve worked with. The ones that came to me with a polished deck and a hollow center. They had logos. They had color palettes. They had a website that said all the right things in all the right fonts. And when you asked what people should conclude from the company’s existence, you got a silence shaped exactly like the one Joshua is describing.
He tells me about the second framework, the one he layers on top of the first. He calls it the Four Languages Model. “What people read, see, hear, and experience.”
Read is intuitive — text on a page. See starts broader — visuals, video, infographics, signage. Hear is where it gets interesting. “It’s that in-store audio experience where they’re putting a lot of investment right now,” he says. “It’s if you do a branded podcast, if your leadership goes on podcasts.” And then experience, the one that trips people up.
“People tend to think it means big experiential events,” he says. “It does. That’s one part of it. But then there’s also how people experience what they read, see, and hear.”
He gives me the example that makes it click. “We are having the same information,” he says, meaning this podcast, this conversation. “We’re listening to the same conversation, but we have two very different experiences.” Someone listening while walking the dog. Someone watching the video. Same words, different encounter. He extends it to product: “Mobile versus desktop interactions, or app, native app, versus the web browser version on a phone. Two very different experiences with the same product.”
I come from product design and management, and I recognize this immediately — it’s user experience thinking applied to communications. But I’ve never heard anyone frame it as a language. Not a channel, not a medium. A language. The implication being that each one has its own grammar, its own rules for how meaning gets made.
I want to see what happens when the framework meets a real company, so I ask him to walk me through a client engagement. He doesn’t give me a name, but he gives me the pattern.
“Most have to wrestle through it a little bit,” he says, “because they haven’t really thought about it as much.” The problem he keeps encountering is a gap between intent and perception. “What we might be saying, people are coming in cold, we don’t know about your company yet. What we conclude might be very different than what you are intending for us to conclude.”
And then the harder version. “Especially when we’re dealing with founder-led companies,” he says. “It might actually be called Smith Corp., where that founder really has a strong tie to it. There could be a lot of pushback. It’s their baby.”
I can hear the diplomacy in how he phrases that. He’s describing a situation where he has to tell someone that the thing they built — the thing they named after themselves, the thing they’ve been explaining to investors and friends and their mother for two years — is sending a message they didn’t intend. The narrative they think they’re telling is not the narrative people are receiving.
“Narrative is the hardest part of the whole structure,” he says, “because it has to answer questions.” He pauses. “People can go and AI themselves a logo. You can pull a website off the shelf of a template, and even now, AI fill in the blanks for me, make it look pretty. Narrative’s a lot harder. It requires you to really look internally at what you’re doing, because you’re asking to make connections, and that becomes a lot harder.”
This is the sentence that earns the headline. The reason most companies call at the wrong stage is that brand is the layer you can buy. Story is the layer you already have, whether you’ve articulated it or not — it’s the stuff that happened. But narrative is the layer you have to build, and building it means sitting with questions that don’t have comfortable answers. What are we actually saying about who we are? Not what do we wish we were saying. What are we saying.
He uses Apple to show me what it looks like when a company has done the work. Not the obvious Apple — not the keynotes or the product launches, though he gets there. He starts with a detail I’ve never heard before.
“The direction the Apple logo appears when the laptop is closed and facing you,” he says, “was a huge debate within Apple.”
I know he can tell I’m interested, because he keeps going. “That might sound inconsequential, but it’s actually very important, because once you flip the screen up, that’s what everyone in the world sees if you’re sitting in a coffee shop.” The logo serves two audiences. Toward the user when closed, it tells you which way is up. Toward the public when open, it’s an advertisement. Apple went back and forth on this “over periods of product release.”
What I hear in that story is a company where brand decisions go all the way down to the hinge. That’s what happens when narrative is resolved — when you’ve answered the question of what people should conclude. Every subsequent decision becomes easier, because you have a principle to decide against. The Apple logo debate wasn’t about a logo. It was about who the laptop is for in the moment it’s being seen.
I bring up David Bowie, because Bowie is the version of this I think about most. A musician who made a chart-topping album every decade by intentionally reinventing himself. Different look, different sound, different era — but always, unmistakably, Bowie.
Joshua takes the example and turns it corporate. “You can’t get too far ahead, you can’t be too far behind,” he says. The trick is knowing “where to inject yourself as a company, as a business. You don’t have to be on, talking on every topic, because you can’t.” He tells me brands do periodic refreshes the same way Bowie did reinventions — deliberate, timed to the culture, but rooted in something consistent underneath.
“These things can change over time,” he says. “What you’re saying was your narrative when you started two years ago might not be the exact same narrative today, because it will change. It should change if you are doing things right.”
I ask him the thing I suspect a lot of founders are afraid to hear: does that mean abandoning what they started with?
Not quite. “Those core things might not change,” he says. “But a lot of what you do and what people might need to conclude will, and that’s just a natural part of your business growing and being more successful.”
He gives me the Amazon version. “When Amazon was just selling books, he was selling books out of the trunk of his car and putting them in the mail, no one was asking him about the gas mileage of his car.” Now they run Amazon Logistics, and environmental stewardship is something a lot of people care about. The story changed. The narrative had to change with it. The brand followed — not led.
Near the end of the conversation, I try to name the through line back to him. “There’s a ton of things that happen before brand,” I say. “Branding gets a lot easier when you’re very clear on how you’re positioning yourself, how you’re deciding to show up.”
He agrees, and then says the thing I think a lot of companies need to hear but won’t find in any branding deck.
“Sometimes you just have to get something live. It has to go up. You have to start somewhere. And it might not be the prettiest, it might not be the best, but it’s getting something out there.” Fifty percent of what you want, he tells me, is fifty percent more than nothing. “You can always change it. You can grow, you can iterate.”
And then: “We say all the time, there’s no content police.”
He means it literally. There is no authority that will penalize you for experimenting in public, for changing your colors, for posting more or less, for trying something and pulling it back. The only people who can tell you whether your narrative is working are the people receiving it, and the only way to find out is to put it in front of them.
I tell him it reminds me of comedians testing material. The hour-long Netflix special where every joke kills — nobody sees the thousands of hours in dive bars that got it there. “They’re testing out their jokes,” Joshua says. “They’re seeing what works, because the only way to do it is in front of a live audience, because they need to know — does this bomb?”
He’s describing narrative development as a live process, not a boardroom exercise. The comedian doesn’t write the special and then perform it. The comedian performs fragments, reads the room, rewrites, performs again, and the special assembles itself from what survived. That’s what narrative work looks like for a company too — if the company is willing to do it in front of people instead of waiting until everything is perfect.
The piece of paper Joshua told me to get at the beginning — story, narrative, brand, three columns — is still sitting in my head. I think about how many founders would fill in the brand column first, because brand is visible and concrete and feels like progress. How many would leave narrative blank, or write something that sounds like narrative but is actually just story wearing a suit. And how the ones who do the hard work of filling in that middle column — what are we saying about who we are, how do these events connect, what should people conclude — end up with a brand that doesn’t need to be explained. Because the explanation is already built into the structure underneath it.
Joshua started as a news producer, carrying fifty pounds of gear into assignments that a phone handles now. He left journalism thinking he’d go back. Instead he found companies that needed what he’d spent years learning to do — not the gear, not the software, but the ability to look at a set of facts and decide what story they tell, what narrative they support, and what the audience should walk away believing.
The tools changed. The question didn’t.
Guest Bio: Joshua Altman
Joshua Altman is the Founder and Managing Director of Beltway Media, a Washington, D.C.-based communications firm that provides fractional chief communications officer services to technology companies and startups. Rising to prominence over more than two decades in strategic communications, he became known for his Story-Narrative-Brand framework and Four Languages model, which help organizations align what people read, see, hear, and experience into a coherent communications strategy. His client roster spans scrappy startups to federal agencies including the U.S. Department of Justice and U.S. Department of Commerce.
Previously, Joshua served as a multimedia journalist at The Hill, where he covered federal policy across energy, healthcare, immigration, defense, and criminal justice, and reported from the front lines of multiple high-stakes election cycles. His background as a news producer — shooting, editing, and cutting four to five videos per day — gave him the operational reps and editorial instinct that now underpin his consulting work.
Joshua holds an M.A. in Communication, Culture and Technology from Georgetown University and a B.A. in Journalism and Mass Communications from The George Washington University. He is a member of The Telly Awards Judging Council and publishes The Comms Chief on Substack.
Hey,
Thanks for reading this. I mean that. There's a lot of content out there competing for your attention, and you spent some of it here. I hope it was worth it. Even better, I hope it prompted you to think about something differently enough that you'd share it with someone who'd get something out of it too.
I started this podcast because tactics never stuck with me. What stuck were stories — business biographies, autobiographies, the decisions people made and why they made them. The principle only clicks once you know the story behind it.
So I built the thing I wanted to read. Every week I have two conversations with people who build in technology and product. Then I write the essay I wish I could find — one that puts you inside the conversation, through my eyes. What caught me off guard. What I kept thinking about after we hung up. Where the principle actually lives once you strip away the jargon.
I make this for myself first. If you read the way I do, you’ll want it too.
PS — If you want to pitch coming on the show, or you know someone I should talk to, shoot me an email at caden@hey.com with "January752" in the subject line so it gets past my filters. I'm not optimizing for famous guests. I'm optimizing for interesting conversations, even from people who aren't LinkedIn influencers.
