How I got there
In 2020, I was 22 and doing a communications internship at Real Madrid. Not the kind of internship where you make coffee and sit in the back of meetings. Actual work: vetting media coverage, supporting internal communications, handling correspondence in English between the club and external parties.
I had no marketing experience. I had a sports journalism background and, apparently, good enough written English to be useful. I was there because of a set of circumstances I still find unlikely when I think about them.
I stayed for about a year. It was one of the most useful years of my professional life.
What a brand at that scale actually looks like
The thing that strikes you when you work close to an institution like Real Madrid is how deliberate everything is. Every word that goes out is checked. Every response to a media query is considered not just for what it says but for what it does not say. Every piece of communication, internal or external, is treated as something that either adds to or subtracts from the brand.
This is not paranoia. It is the natural behaviour of an organisation that understands how much a brand is worth and how quickly carelessness can damage it.
I had read about brand narrative before. I had studied it, in a loose undergraduate sort of way. Watching it operate at that level was completely different. The brand was not a style guide. It was a set of commitments that everyone in the communications function understood and protected.
The thing I carried out
I left Madrid with one idea that I have not been able to shake since.
Narrative is infrastructure. Not a campaign. Not a positioning statement that lives in a deck somewhere. Infrastructure, in the same way that systems and workflows are infrastructure. It is the thing that everything else runs on. When the narrative is strong and consistent, every piece of communication becomes easier to produce and more effective when it lands. When it is weak or inconsistent, you are rebuilding context from scratch every time.
Most companies treat brand narrative as a marketing deliverable. Something you commission, approve, and then reference occasionally. The organisations that have genuinely strong brands treat it as an operating principle. It shapes what they say yes and no to. It informs who they hire into communications roles. It is not finished.
How it shows up in my work now
I think about narrative infrastructure in every marketing role I have taken since. At Sportskeeda, it was how we built editorial consistency at scale across a large team. At Alltake, it was the thing I had to establish from scratch before any campaign work made sense. At Aquilon, it was the foundation the inbound engine was built on.
The specific tactics change. The underlying question is always the same: what is the one thing this brand needs every piece of communication to do, and are we doing it?
I did not learn that from a course. I learned it by watching a room full of very careful people treat words as if they mattered.
They do.