Narrative intelligence is turning vibes into insight for brands | Webinar recap and key insights

In our recent installment of our Narratives Intelligence webinar series, brand strategist Safaniya Stevenson joined Pulsar co-founder Francesco D’Orazio to explore how Narrative Intelligence is transforming brand strategy in real time.

The discussion highlighted the practical ways that Pulsar’s Narratives AI platform helps strategists uncover and quantify cultural dynamics as they unfold. Safaniya, who has been using Narratives AI for a few months, noted it has “ really elevated my ability to do brand research, messaging, positioning, and also be a better cultural analyst.” Below, we recap the conversation’s key insights, showing how turning vibes into insight has become the new imperative for brands.

Making sense of culture’s pulse

Brands today face a challenge: culture moves fast. Trends don’t wait conveniently to be analyzed, so the question turns into how to analyze mid-flight and see all the different places it’s going. 

Safaniya explains that much of her job as a brand strategist is about capturing the “vibes” around a brand or trend. “I think a lot of what a brand strategist’s job is, is to bottle up and create vibes for your brand… and before now, it’s hard to quantify or do research around a vibe.” Strategists often sense a cultural mood or trend (“vibe”) but lack data to quantify it or understand its nuances. Traditional research methods struggle to keep up with the complexity, size, and speed of cultural trends. Safaniya’s articulating something commonly experienced, and to tackle this, we developed a new tool – Pulsar’s Narratives AI – the first search engine for public opinion. 

Safaniya points out that one single person can’t go through millions of posts to read all the things making up the negative or positive sentiment, but with Narratives, she can “go back and actually add context to what is coming out of a neutral section or what is coming out of a negative or positive and actually put conversation to it versus just me cherry picking two or three tweets that I have time to pull.” In short, narrative intelligence helps quantify the unquantifiable – turning the nebulous into concrete insights backed by data. It brings nuance and narrative where once there was just a flat sentiment score.

How Pulsar Narratives AI maps stories differently

So, what exactly is narrative intelligence doing under the hood? Fran, who spearheaded the development of Pulsar’s Narratives AI, explained that it required a fundamentally different approach than traditional social listening. In conventional social listening, analysts start with predefined keywords and collect data matching those terms – essentially looking for stories within a small “aquarium” of data. 

In today’s age of spin, stories (or narratives) often drive behavior more than objective reality. Brands need to spot those stories as they form. That means not just listening for what you expect, but scanning the entire cultural conversation for emerging narratives you didn’t even think existed. Frans says that “ we realized that we couldn't just build a way of detecting stories within a bubble… we can connect things to it that you didn't think were connected. And that I think is where the value is.”

By indexing hundreds of thousands of narratives and then letting users search within that index, Narratives AI surfaces themes and connections one might otherwise miss. It even clusters related narratives into higher-level themes to help make sense of the chaos. The result is a tool that doesn’t just monitor keywords but rather uncovers the web of stories shaping public opinion, offering a more holistic view of the cultural landscape.

Real-world narratives: from matcha to Tomato Girl Summer and Fortnite

Safaniya shares several compelling use cases where narrative intelligence revealed insights that would have been hard to find otherwise. These examples showed how Narratives AI can uncover hidden connections and emerging trends for brand strategists:

• Matcha’s hidden stories: When starting out on a simple exploration of green tea matcha, the research took an unexpected turn. “We were just gonna look at matcha to see how people are talking about it,” Safaniya thought. But Narratives AI pulled in not just generic chatter about lattes or health benefits – it surfaced a quirky trend called “matcha raves.” “So what started out as… looking at matcha turned into being introduced to matcha raves – why it came around and why it existed. And as a brand strategist, I now have new things to act on, new things to bring back to a creative team”, she said. The tool revealed that health-conscious Gen Z audiences were throwing “soft clubbing” events featuring matcha instead of alcohol, a concept Safaniya would never have thought to research on her own. Even more eye-opening, the narrative analysis uncovered conversations about cultural sensitivity – some voices noted that Western hype was driving overconsumption of ceremonial-grade matcha, causing shortages in the ingredient’s cultures of origin. “We went from just ‘people love it’… to cultural sensitivity and divisiveness about overconsumption of the product – things you're not gonna get from a simple social media query or a simple Google search”, Safaniya explained. This richer understanding meant a matcha brand campaign could be adjusted with these narratives in mind, avoiding cultural missteps and tapping into the wellness rave trend.

• Tomato Girl Summer – a fleeting aesthetic: In another case, Safaniya investigated “Tomato Girl Summer,” a viral aesthetic trend characterized by a rustic, Mediterranean-influenced vibe (think red tomatoes, tans, gardening, and leisurely home cooking). “Tomato Girl Summer is this aesthetic where it’s… lots of red, lots of tan… a polished, clean piece of gardening, homemaking… finding luxury in an everyday normalness”, she explained. Narratives AI helped trace the origin and evolution of this micro-trend – linking it to the historical concept of victory gardens and the modern ‘clean girl’ and cottagecore aesthetics. Importantly, the tool alerted her that this trend’s popularity was seasonal and short-lived. As Alex noted, today we cycle through aesthetics so quickly that “by the time a lot of researchers would get a handle on something, it’s too late”. In fact, Safaniya joked that “tomato girl is not around – tomato season is done… while you’re waiting for legal to get back to you, tomatoes are done. They’re not seasonal research”. The takeaway for brands? Narrative intelligence can help spot these blink-and-you-miss-it cultural moments early, so you can decide whether to seize them or skip them before they expire.
• Fortnite’s community narrative: Safaniya also used Narratives AI to explore why the video game Fortnite has such broad appeal across demographics (from teens to grandparents). Initially, one might assume the overwhelmingly positive sentiment around Fortnite is simply due to its fun gameplay. “If I were to see a positive sentiment… I’d think it must be because the gameplay is amazing,” Safaniya said. “But on the narrative side, a lot of the positivity comes from community building”. The analysis revealed that people celebrate Fortnite for its social features – the ability to share dances (emotes), play with matching skins, and connect with friends in a shared virtual space. Another strong narrative was about diversity and inclusion in Fortnite’s characters and community. “There are so many different types of characters with different skin colors, different hair textures, different backstories… narratives out there about Fortnite being an inclusive space and a community-building space,” Safaniya discovered. These insights give the Fortnite brand “more to build on,” she noted – for example, reinforcing diversity and social features in future updates, since those aspects drive positive buzz. Crucially, she pointed out, “you don’t get that from a social listening query and a pie chart that just shows the percentage of positive and negative”. Only by investigating the narratives behind the sentiment could the brand understand why people love the game and how to keep nurturing that goodwill.

Each of these examples underscores how narrative intelligence goes beyond surface-level metrics. It uncovers the context – the why behind public opinion – enabling brands to respond with more cultural awareness and agility. As Safaniya puts it, this approach positions strategists to have “a high degree of intellectual honesty and integrity”, because it might challenge your initial assumptions. But embracing the full story, even if it’s complex or unexpected, leads to stronger strategy. In other words, it’s a positive to change your mind based on new information, and Narratives AI is built to supply exactly that kind of insight.

Beyond social listening: a complementary tool, not a replacement

Given these benefits, one audience question was inevitable: Will narrative intelligence replace traditional social listening? The panelists’ answer is clear – Narratives AI isn’t a replacement so much as a powerful complement to existing tools. Fran explains that he actually uses both in a two-step workflow: “We start with Narratives to explore and define the interesting hypotheses. Once we lock into a specific hypothesis we want to validate, then we go into social listening to get the granular insights on that specific aspect… Narratives answers what you can’t do with listening, and listening adds value to what you discover with Narratives. They’re complementary.”

Safaniya agrees and notes that narrative intelligence excels at analyzing broad cultural volume and context over time, whereas social listening provides real-time trend spotting and micro-level detail. “Narratives does a really good job analyzing the volume… I wouldn’t pull a Narrative report every week or month – I would give it a quarter, six months, a year. My social listening reports I could pull weekly or monthly”, she says, highlighting how Narratives reveals slower-burn shifts while social data captures immediate blips. Safaniya likens the two to “two sides of one coin.” 

Though she doesn’t “see one replacing the other, they do highly complement each other.” Social listening shows you what’s happening today, while narrative intelligence tells you the story behind what’s happening – the historical context, themes, and emerging narratives that give a trend meaning beyond the moment. Used together, a strategist can catch fast-moving conversations and also understand the deeper currents under the surface. This blended approach leads to more informed decisions. As Safaniya puts it, you can see day-to-day changes via social listening, then use Narratives AI to “add historical context and narrative to the trends you’re seeing” – connecting the dots between now and the bigger picture.

Narrative intelligence: the new imperative for brand strategy

Throughout their conversation, one message came through loud and clear for Fran and Safaniya: narrative intelligence is no longer a “nice-to-have” – it’s a must-have for modern brand strategy. Today, the brands that succeed are those that can keep up with and even anticipate narrative shifts in society. Traditional tools alone can leave strategists flying half-blind, stuck with either overly broad trends or shallow sentiment stats. Narrative intelligence fills in the blanks, providing a richer lens to understand why people feel the way they do and how those feelings are changing. It enables brands to respond with authenticity, spot opportunities in unexpected places, and steer clear of cultural pitfalls.

Fran says that, “the idea that stories drive behavior is more true today than ever”. Every brand exists in the context of larger narratives – about identity, community, values, and change. Tapping into those narratives can inform everything from product innovation to marketing messaging. Safaniya’s experiences showed that even a whimsical vibe or niche trend can carry deeper significance if you have the tools to discern it. By adopting narrative intelligence, strategists equip themselves to see the whole story, not just isolated data points.

Narrative Intelligence – and Pulsar Narratives AI – is the new imperative for brand strategy. It’s about turning vibes into actionable insights and ensuring your brand’s story evolves in step with the culture around it. The webinar’s final takeaway for marketers and analysts is that embracing narrative intelligence now will be key to crafting resonant, future-proof brand strategies in the fast-changing cultural landscape ahead.

Watch the full recording

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