The storytelling of potential: how to sell the future without telling lies

You’re in a co-working space in Shoreditch, East London. The air smells of acidic filter coffee and electric ambition. On stage, a twenty-eight-year-old lad in the standard-issue hoodie is telling a room full of investors that his app is going to be "the Amazon of pharmaceutical logistics". He hasn’t actually shipped a single aspirin yet, but he’s talking like he’s already conquered the global market. Rapturous applause.

Two weeks later, I’m in Caserta. I’m sitting in the office of a mozzarella producer who exports across half of Europe. He’s got state-of-the-art machinery, a three-generation history, and a product that, if you taste it, makes you forget your own name. I ask him how he wants to present himself on the new site. He clears his throat, looks out of the window, and says: "Well, Umberto... just write that we make decent stuff. That we put the work in."

In that exact moment, you feel the weight of the disconnect. On one side, pure potential sold as a mathematical certainty — often pushing the limits of decency. On the other, a solid reality that doesn’t know how to turn itself into a narrative, hiding behind a shyness that the market mistakes for a lack of vision.

Both are getting it wrong. Both have a problem with the storytelling of potential.

Welcome to the story of what isn't there yet, but will be. If your company is young, if you're launching a project, or if you want to sell your vision of the future, this article is your compass.

The problem nobody teaches you: the "virgin brand" dilemma

Branding literature is full of advice on how to tell your story. "Bring out your values," they say. "Talk about your past." But what do you do when you don't actually have a history yet? When the company is three months old, the product is still in beta, and you can count your customers on the fingers of one hand?

Traditional narrative leaves you exposed. And so, almost by instinct, entrepreneurs take one of two paths. Both are dangerous.

The "Low Profile" path — typical of Southern Italy

I’m not promising anything; I’ll let the product speak for itself.

The risk here is real: in the white noise of the digital market, the product often doesn't speak at all. Or it speaks far too quietly. If you don't give the story a direction, the audience will assume you simply don't have any ambition. Silence, in marketing, is always read as an absence of vision. We also talk about this in our article on the Brand Voice.

The "Silicon Valley" path — Fake it till you make it

Promise the world, paint galactic scenarios, and then "course-correct" while you're running.

The risk here is a direct route to the courtroom or, worse, irrelevance through a total loss of trust. If you build an expectation that you can't even get close to, you're not doing marketing. You're writing fiction. And fiction doesn't pay the bills.

The point isn't about being bold or bashful. It’s a matter of anchoring yourself to reality. The challenge is to sell a credible future — not an irresponsible fantasy, but a promise built on foundations that are visible today.

When potential becomes a lie: the parable of Theranos

We can't talk about storytelling the future without conjuring the ghost of Elizabeth Holmes. Founded in 2003: a brilliant 19-year-old girl starts Theranos with a simple, revolutionary promise — a machine capable of performing over 200 blood tests from a single drop taken from a finger. She called it Edison technology.

The narrative was perfect. The "new Steve Jobs" in a black turtleneck. A peak valuation of 9 billion dollars. The most prestigious names in American politics on the board of directors. Shame the technology didn't work. Not even once.

But here's the interesting part for us communicators: Holmes didn't start out with the intention to defraud. She started with a vision of potential. The problem was commitment escalation. As the promise became bigger and more public, there was less and less room to admit that reality wasn't keeping pace with the narrative. Instead of scaling back the storytelling, she chose to hide the reality.

At what exact moment did the promise become a lie? The boundary has a specific name: verifiable anchoring. The moment Theranos stopped saying "we're trying to solve this technical issue" and started saying "the problem is solved and it works perfectly" — while secretly using competitors' machinery for the tests — the narrative became fraud.

The storytelling of potential must be a bridge, not a smoke screen.

Three brands that sold the future (and actually pulled it off)

To understand how to do this right, let's leave the California courts and look at those who built empires starting from a promise. Two British examples and one Italian — our own excellence.

1. Innocent Drinks: the "yes" bin

London, 1998. Three Cambridge graduates — Richard Reed, Adam Balon, and Jon Wright — spend six months blending fruit in a kitchen. They spend their last £500 on stock and head to a music festival. They put a sign above their stall: "Should we quit our jobs to make these smoothies?".

In front of the stall, two bins. One labelled "YES", the other "NO". They asked people to throw their empty cups into the corresponding one. By the end of the weekend, the "yes" bin was overflowing. They resigned on Monday morning.

Why did it work? Innocent didn't have a corporate history, but they used storytelling to make the audience the co-author of their own future. They didn't say "we're going to be the leaders in smoothies." They said: "We'd like to do this, are you lot in?". It’s that honesty about the uncertainty that built unshakable trust. Today they turn over around £200 million (2019-2020 data, before the full integration into Coca-Cola), but that honest soul remains their main asset.

It’s the same principle we analysed from a literary perspective in the article on how to write a brand's future: the reader believes in what they feel a part of.

2. Fever-Tree: selling the gap, not the bottle

In 2004, Charles Rolls and Tim Warrillow looked at the premium gin market in the UK. It was exploding. But there was a jarring paradox: people were spending £40 on a craft gin and then drowning it in a discount tonic full of saccharin.

Their narrative of potential wasn't "we're going to make the best tonic in the world." It was a logical challenge: "If three-quarters of your drink is the mixer, wouldn't you want it to be the same quality as the gin?" They spent 15 months sourcing ingredients in Africa and South America before launching. The promise: "We’re bringing quality back to a sector that’s forgotten it." In 2018, Fever-Tree overtook Schweppes as the number one mixer in the UK market. They weren't selling themselves — they were selling the logic of the gap.

3. Brunello Cucinelli: the future as a moral act

Back to Italy. In 1978, Cucinelli founded his company in Solomeo, a small Umbrian village. He didn't have today's turnover yet. He had a crystal-clear vision: "Humanistic Capitalism". The spark? Seeing his father return from work with teary eyes from the humiliations he’d suffered.

Cucinelli didn't sell cashmere jumpers. He sold the promise of a business model where profit doesn't trample on human dignity. The difference from Theranos? The promise was measurable in concrete actions every single day. He restored the village brick by brick. He set the finish time for work at 5.30pm. He created the School of Crafts.

His storytelling of potential wasn't "this is what we'll become." It was: "Come and see how we're building this model, step by step." The future is built in public. Today the group turns over more than €1.2 billion, with 12% growth in 2024.

The credible promise framework: the Insight ADV Triangle

In the agency, we've synthesised this approach into a model we call the Triangle of Credible Potential. If you want to communicate your company's future, these three angles must be solid. The same framework applied to building a coherent brand story applies here with even more force.

Pillar 1: the Seed of Truth

Every future promise must be anchored to something that exists now. I don't need the full technology; I need the proof of concept. Innocent had bins full of cups. Fever-Tree had the chemical analysis of competing tonics. Cucinelli had the family history.

A question for you: What is the real, verifiable element today that proves your vision isn't a hallucination?

Pillar 2: the Plausible Path

Between where you are today ("Point A") and where you say you'll be tomorrow ("Point B"), there must be a road that common sense can follow. If you tell me you're going to be the next Amazon of logistics but you can't explain how you'll handle the first hundred yards of delivery, your narrative collapses. The audience doesn't need guarantees — it's the future, by definition uncertain. They need logical plausibility.

Pillar 3: Public Accountability

Credible potential doesn't fear judgement: it invites it. Are you willing to set a public milestone? "Within 12 months, we will have opened our first store in Naples." Saying this takes guts, but it builds a level of credibility that no enthusiastic adjective could ever match. Honesty about risk is the most powerful marketing tool there is.

The vocabulary of potential: what to say (and what to avoid like the plague)

The words we choose are the bricks of our future cathedral. There are expressions that build trust and others that turn it to dust instantly.

Cultural calibration: two markets, two registers

The tone of the promise has to be adapted to the culture of the person you're talking to. The same sentence can sound bold in London and like total fluff in Caserta. — Umberto Mazza

In London or Manchester, a slightly "bold" tone isn't just accepted; it’s practically required. Anglo-Saxon investors want to see the big picture before the details. It works because the market is trained to read the vision as an implicit contract.

In Italy, especially in a Campanian context, distrust is the audience's natural filter. A promise that’s too big is read as "the usual bluff." Here, dropping the tone down a notch and increasing the technical details of the "groundwork" produces much more solid results.

A concrete example: for the same agritech startup, we used two versions of the pitch’s key phrase:

Same promise. Same product. Completely different cultural anchoring. Both versions are true. Zero boasting in either.

The 90-second test

Before you publish that LinkedIn post, write your "About Us" page, or step onto a stage, put your narrative through this quick test. Three questions. Thirty seconds each.

If you can't answer the third question, you're not doing storytelling of potential. You're doing propaganda.

The Insight ADV case: same truth, two narratives

A while ago, we worked with an agritech startup split between Caserta and the UK market. They had a sensor for monitoring vineyards: it detects soil moisture, leaf temperature, and water stress in real-time, sending alerts to your mobile. Zero history, just technology and vision.

In London, we focused on the storytelling of the gap: the wine market is changing due to climate change, and producers need data to survive. The startup was the answer to the problem of the future.

In Naples and the surrounding areas, we focused on the storytelling of augmented tradition: we weren't selling "alien technology," but a tool to protect what the producer loved most — their land, that specific vineyard on the Montesarchio hill that their father had planted forty years ago — using data as a new type of fertiliser.

In both cases, the promise was identical. We never said "we'll be the first in the world." We said: "Here’s the sensor, here’s the data from the first three vineyards tested, and here’s why this gave a 9-day head start on last summer’s water problem." What changed was the cultural anchoring.

It’s the point we also develop in the pillar on tradition as a narrative asset: the past and the future aren't in contradiction — they’re two ends of the same promise.

The 5 commandments of storytelling potential

Conclusion: the future is a credit of trust

Telling the story of potential isn't a shortcut for those who haven't achieved anything yet. It’s a form of civil responsibility.

Every time you ask a customer, an investor, or a collaborator to believe in your project, you're asking for a loan of trust. And like any loan, it has to be paid back with the interest of reality.

The difference between Elizabeth Holmes and Brunello Cucinelli isn't in the scale of the vision. Both wanted to change the world. The difference lies in the honesty of the process. One used words to hide a void; the other used them to give a name to every single brick he was laying.

The future is a book yet to be written, but the pages you publish today must be written with real ink, not pixels of smoke.

If you have a story that’s yet to begin but you don’t know where to start, or if you feel your "decent stuff" deserves a bigger narrative,

book a consultation.

Sometimes you just need someone who knows how to look at your "yes" bins — and help you figure out just how full they are.

Want to delve deeper into your brand's voice? Read the article on Brand Voice. And if you're wondering how to tell the story of a company with fifty years of history, our article on how to tell the story of half a century of tradition is the natural counterpart to this one.