It’s fine to latch onto a narrative as a way to describe yourself - it helps people mentally bucket you - but you can’t expect a narrative to be your key differentiation factor, because it leaves you open to narrative encroachment.
Consider Marinade and Jito. Superficially both are in the liquid staking business, with different narratives: Marinade’s original narrative was stake decentralization, whereas Jito was focused on MEV.
However, Jito’s narrative was born out of an actual business differentiator: having a flywheel. This allowed them to claim that MEV would increase APY, which would bring more stake, which would mean there would be more opportunities for MEV, which would increase APY, etc. People didn’t know if this narrative would play out, but it was something they could hypothesize about and throw some concrete numbers at (alternatively, you could also see it as a practicality alibi people could use to justify themselves which horse to bet on).
The fact that Marinade relied on the narrative as its differentiator left it open for Jito to encroach by announcing StakeNet at Breakpoint 2023. And while one could nitpick how StakeNet operates or if it achieves the same goal, the whole point of narratives is they are most useful when people don’t want to be bothered looking under the hood.
Yet another example was Facebook’s rebrand into Meta. The metaverse narrative got too hot before there was anything users could use, which made it easy for Facebook to encroach on it (even easier given their global megaphone). The fact Facebook had achieved even less in the space than the various web3 startups was irrelevant - it successfully intruded in an area they saw as a threat to its social networking dominance, and its miserable, legless avatar attempt is what people now associate with the term.
Narratives are all about perception. The moment your narrative gets encroached upon, it is as good as gone.