The Brand Is the Business: Why Narrative Drives Growth

When CRED launched in 2018, it was difficult to say what the product was. On the surface, it let you pay your credit card bills. But that description felt almost deliberately inadequate. The company’s actual entry into public imagination was not through a feature list, but through a feeling. The earliest ads, quirky, expensive, filled with nostalgia, seemed to be announcing not a payments app but a cultural event. What CRED was selling, in truth, was not transactions but belonging. To use it was to signal that you were part of a club.

This was a striking way to introduce a product that, at the time, solved no obvious pain point. Credit card bill payments already had multiple digital options. CRED’s utility was not obvious until its narrative made it so. By framing itself as an exclusive ecosystem for India’s most creditworthy, it built both curiosity and aspiration. Users did not download the app because they needed a better bill-paying tool. They downloaded it because they wanted to be part of what it represented.

That was the genius of CRED’s launch. It understood something many founders sense intuitively but rarely articulate. In the early life of a startup, the brand is not separate from the product. The narrative you project is not a marketing afterthought but the scaffolding that makes the product legible to the market. A startup does not first exist as a set of features and then later acquire a story. It exists first as a story, and only through that story do its features gain meaning.

Other companies have demonstrated this in different ways. Zerodha built its reputation not only on low-cost trading but on a story about democratizing access to financial markets. Apple’s early success was not simply about personal computers but about a narrative of creativity and rebellion against conformity. Patagonia built a global following by positioning itself as an environmental movement as much as an apparel company. These companies show that narrative is not a garnish added after scale. It is the strategy that allows scale to begin.

CRED’s trajectory makes this especially clear. The company kept layering product innovations such as rewards, commerce, and lending, but each addition was absorbed into the same overarching narrative of an elevated, aspirational world for the financially responsible. That narrative made users willing to experiment with what CRED added, and investors willing to believe in what CRED promised. It was not that the brand sat on top of the business. It was that the brand was the business.

Seen this way, narrative is not cosmetic. It is infrastructure. It is what allows startups to enter noisy markets and demand attention before scale is achieved. It is what makes investors suspend disbelief long enough for the product to prove itself. It is what keeps early adopters loyal even when the product is imperfect. Narrative is not a distraction from the real work of building. It is the condition that makes building viable.

The larger point is not that every startup should mimic CRED’s theatrics. Few can, and fewer should. The point is that every startup, whether it is building a consumer app or a SaaS tool, must wrestle with the same truth. People will always encounter your story before they encounter your product. The narrative you construct is the lens through which your product is judged. Ignore it, and you risk invisibility. Attend to it, and you create the foundation on which growth is built.

The irony is that many of the founders most focused on product craft are often the ones who dismiss narrative as fluff. But narrative is not a diversion from substance. It is the form in which substance travels. To craft it well is not to fake meaning but to clarify it. CRED did not invent a falsehood about itself. It dramatized its real proposition until it became irresistible. That is the art.

And that art matters now more than ever. Markets are saturated. Attention is scarce. Trust is fragile. In such an environment, a product without a story is like a book without a title, invisible, unchosen, unread. The startups that succeed are the ones that grasp this early, that narrative is not decoration, not a campaign, not an accessory. It is the strategy. It is how products become businesses.

The lesson of CRED is not that branding works. It is that narrative is the operating system. If you are building today, the question is not when to do branding. The question is whether you have a story strong enough to let your product enter the world. Because in the end, the market does not scale the product first. It scales the story.

And that is where the real work lies. For startups, for institutions, for anyone trying to create momentum, the challenge is less about adding new features and more about clarifying the story that makes those features matter. The companies that invest in this clarity early on give themselves a head start that no marketing budget can replicate.

If you are building something new, the question is simple. Have you begun writing the story that will allow it to grow?