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August 29 - September 8, 2023
What Mike helped me understand is that, without us knowing it, human beings are constantly scanning their environment (even advertising) for information that is going to help them meet their primitive need to survive.
Searching for ways to survive
Mistake Number One The first mistake brands make is they fail to focus on the aspects of their offer that will help people survive and thrive.
Lack of focus
The second mistake brands make is they cause their customers to burn too many calories in an effort to understand their offer.
To much effort to understand
The narrative coming out of a company (and for that matter inside a company) must be clear. In a story, audiences must always know who the hero is, what the hero wants, who the hero has to defeat to get what they want, what tragic thing will happen if the hero doesn’t win, and what wonderful thing will happen if they do.
The hero story
What we think we are saying to our customers and what our customers actually hear are two different things. And customers make buying decisions not based on what we say but on what they hear.
Technically speaking, music and noise are similar. Both are created by traveling sound waves that rattle our eardrums. Music, however, is noise that has been submitted to certain rules that allow the brain to engage on a different level.
Music vs noice
The brain remembers music and forgets about noise just like the brain remembers some brands and forgets about others. Story is similar to music.
Noise vs music. Good vs bad brands.
But it doesn’t matter. People don’t buy the best products; they buy the products they can understand the fastest. Apple has inserted themselves into their customers’ story like no other technology company, and as a result, they’re not only the largest technology company, they’re in the top ten largest companies period.1 If we want our companies to grow, we should borrow a page from their playbook. We should clarify our message.
Clarify our message
A major paradigm shift in the SB7 Framework is that the customer is the hero of the story, not your brand. When we position our customer as the hero and ourselves as the guide, we will be recognized as a trusted resource to help them overcome their challenges.
Customer is the hero
Once we identify who our customer is, we have to ask ourselves what they want as it relates to our brand. The catalyst for any story is that the hero wants something. The rest of the story is a journey about discovering whether the hero will get what they want.
When a brand comes along and positions itself as the hero, customers remain distant. They hear us talking about how great our business is and start wondering if we’re competing with them for scarce resources. Their subconscious thought pattern goes like this: Oh, this is another hero, like me. I wish I had more time to hear their story, but right now I’m busy looking for a guide.
Guide
Stories live and die on a single question: What’s at stake? If nothing can be gained or lost, nobody cares. Will the hero disarm the bomb, or will people be killed? Will the guy get the girl, or will he be lonely and filled with self-doubt? These are the kinds of questions in the minds of a story-hungry audience. If there is nothing at stake in a story, there is no story. Likewise, if there’s nothing at stake in whether or not I buy your product, I’m not going to buy your product. After all, why should I? Simply put, we must show people the cost of not doing business with us.
What's at stake? Cost of not doing business with us
story doesn’t really pick up until the hero needs to disarm a bomb, win someone’s heart, defeat a villain, or fight for their emotional or physical survival. A story starts with a hero who wants something. And then the question becomes: Will the hero get what she wants?
The story begins when...
When we identify something our customer wants and communicate it simply, the story we are inviting them into is given definition and direction. Here are some more examples from companies we’ve worked with: Financial Advisor: “A Plan for Your Retirement” College Alumni Association: “Leave a Meaningful Legacy” Fine-Dining Restaurant: “A Meal Everybody Will Remember” Real Estate Agent: “The Home You’ve Dreamed About” Bookstore: “A Story to Get Lost In” Breakfast Bars: “A Healthy Start to Your Day” When you define something your customer wants, the
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Define something your customer wants
In story terms, identifying a potential desire for your customer opens what’s sometimes called a story gap. The idea is that you place a gap between a character and what they want. Moviegoers pay attention when there’s a story gap because they wonder if and how that gap is going to be closed.
The story gap
The goal for our branding should be that every potential customer knows exactly where we want to take them: a luxury resort where they can get some rest, to become the leader everybody loves, or to save money and live better. If you randomly asked a potential customer where your brand wants to take them, would they be able to answer? Would they be able to repeat back to you exactly what your brand offers? If not, your brand is suffering the cost of confusion. You can fix this. Define a desire for your customer, and the story you’re inviting customers into will have a powerful hook.
Define a desire for your customer
It bears repeating. The more we talk about the problems our customers experience, the more interest they will have in our brand.
Customers and their problems
The villain doesn’t have to be a person, but without question it should have personified characteristics. If we’re selling time-management software, for instance, we might vilify the idea of distractions. Could we offer our product as a weapon customers could use to stop distractions in their tracks? Sounds kind of dramatic, right? And yet distractions are what’s deluding our customers’ potential, wrecking their families, stealing their sanity, and costing them enormous amounts of time and money. Distractions, then, make for great little villains.
The villian
Here are four characteristics that make for a good villain on your StoryBrand BrandScript: 1. The villain should be a root source. Frustration, for example, is not a villain; frustration is what a villain makes us feel. High taxes, rather, are a good example of a villain. 2. The villain should be relatable. When people hear us talk about the villain, they should immediately recognize it as something they disdain. 3. The villain should be singular. One villain is enough. A story with too many villains falls apart for lack of clarity. 4. The villain should be
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Villain's characteristics
Companies tend to sell solutions to external problems, but people buy solutions to internal problems. The purpose of an external problem in a story is to manifest an internal problem. If I wrote a movie about a guy who simply needed to disarm a bomb, audiences would lose interest. What storytellers and screenwriters do, then, is create a backstory of frustration in the hero’s life.
Internal problems
What stories teach us is that people’s internal desire to resolve a frustration is a greater motivator than their desire to solve an external problem. This is where most brands make a critical mistake. By assuming our customers only want to resolve external problems, we fail to engage the deeper story they’re actually living. The truth is, the external problems we solve are causing frustrations in their lives and, just like in a story, it’s those frustrations that are motivating them to call you.
Mistakes
People want to be involved in a story that is larger than themselves. Brands that give customers a voice in a larger narrative add value to their products by giving their customers a deeper sense of meaning.
Deeper meaning
The crucial mistake: Jay Z failed to answer the one question lingering in the subconscious of every hero customer: How are you helping me win the day? Tidal existed to help the artists win the day, not customers. And so it failed.
How are you helping me to win the day?
The guide, not the hero, is the one with the most authority. Still, the story is rarely about the guide. The guide simply plays a role. The story must always be focused on the hero, and if a storyteller (or business leader) forgets this, the audience will get confused about who the story is really about and they will lose interest. This is true in business, in politics, and even in your own family. People are looking for a guide to help them, not another hero.
People look for a guide, not a hero. They are the hero.
A guide expresses an understanding of the pain and frustration of their hero. In fact, many pundits believe Clinton locked up the election during a town hall debate in which Bush gave a rambling answer to a young woman when she asked what the national debt meant to the average American.
A guide understands the pain
Plans can take many shapes and forms, but all effective plans do one of two things: they either clarify how somebody can do business with us, or they remove the sense of risk somebody might have if they’re considering investing in our products or services.
The plan
For instance, if you’re selling an expensive product, you might break down the steps like this: 1. Schedule an appointment. 2. Allow us to create a customized plan. 3. Let’s execute the plan together. Whether we’re selling a financial product, a medical procedure, a university education, or any other complicated solution, a process plan takes the confusion out of our customer’s journey and guides them in the next steps. So far I’ve mostly talked about stones we can place in the creek that lead our customers to make a purchase, but another kind of process plan would be
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Step by step
Remember, the whole point of creating a plan is to alleviate customers’ confusion. Having more than four steps may actually add to, rather than reduce, confusion. The key is to simplify their journey so they are more likely to do business with you.
Alleviate customers confusion
The reason characters have to be challenged to take action is because everybody sitting in the dark theater knows human beings do not make major life decisions unless something challenges them to do so.
Chellenged to make desitions
The moral of the story is people don’t have ESP. They can’t read our minds and they don’t know what we want, even if it seems obvious. We have to clearly invite customers to take a journey with us or they won’t.
Betsy and the moral of tghe story
The other company’s site wasn’t nearly as beautiful, but it dared to be clear. “If you’re worried about a presentation, we can help you hit a grand slam.” The truth is I was worried, and they spoke to my internal fear. They also painted a picture of a climactic scene: to hit a grand slam. Then they asked me out: they offered a PDF called “5 Things Great Presenters Get Right,” and I was quite curious. I downloaded the PDF and read it in a few minutes. Their transitional call to action earned my trust and positioned them as the guide in my story. They had authority, it seemed. Then, on their
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Transitional call to action. "5 Things Great Presenters Get Right"
Direct calls to action are simple and obvious (though ridiculously underused), but transitional calls to action can be equally as powerful to grow your business. In fact, StoryBrand grew into a multimillion-dollar company in only its second year based solely on the use of a transitional call to action. Recognizing that most of our clients were using the StoryBrand Framework to fix their websites, we released a free PDF called “5 Things Your Website Should Include,” and thousands of people downloaded it.
Transitional calls to action
Our desire to avoid pain motivates us to seek a resolution to our problems.
Prospect Theory, as it was called, espoused that people are more likely to be dissatisfied with a loss than they are satisfied with a gain. In other words, people hate losing $100 more than they like winning $100. This, of course, means loss aversion is a greater motivator of buying decisions than potential gains. In fact, according to Kahneman, in certain situations, people are two to three times more motivated to make a change to avoid a loss than they are to achieve a gain.
Loss aversion
Years ago, a friend gave me the best leadership advice I’ve ever received. He said, “Don, always remember, people want to be taken somewhere.”
Always tell people
My friend Ryan Deiss at DigitalMarketer created a great tool to help us imagine the success our customers will experience if they use our products and services. In a simple grid, Ryan allows us to see how our customers’ lives will look after they engage us, how they will feel, what their average day will look like, and what kind of new status they will enjoy.
How will customers feel after using our product
The three dominant ways storytellers end a story is by allowing the hero to 1. Win some sort of power or position. 2. Be unified with somebody or something that makes them whole. 3. Experience some kind of self-realization that also makes them whole.
Ending the story with the hero...
The idea behind the success module in the SB7 Framework is that we offer to close a story loop. Human beings are looking for resolutions to their external, internal, and philosophical problems, and they can achieve this through, among other things, status, self-realization, self-acceptance, and transcendence.
Closing the loop
If we don’t tell people where we’re taking them, they won’t follow. A story has to go somewhere. Have you told your customers where you want to take them?
Tell people where you want to take them
I’m talking about the human desire to transform. Everybody wants to change. Everybody wants to be somebody different, somebody better, or, perhaps, somebody who simply becomes more self-accepting.
Everybody wants to transform
Though the hero is still filled with doubt, they summon the courage to engage, and in the climactic scene defeat the villain, proving once and for all they have changed, that they are now competent to face challenges and are better versions of themselves. The story has transformed them.
How the story transforms them.
I’ve asked that question to hundreds of people who’ve attended the StoryBrand Marketing Workshop, and the answer has always come back the same: no. It was not a waste of money. It was well worth the forty dollars. I can’t help but agree. The truth is I got a knife and something more than a knife. In a way, Gerber helped me become a better person. They defined an aspirational identity and invited me to step into it. They made me feel more tough and adventurous, and they even created a moment between two friends. And that’s worth a great deal more than forty dollars.
They help me become a better person
Playing the guide is more than a marketing strategy; it’s a position of the heart. When a brand commits itself to their customers’ journey, to helping resolve their external, internal, and philosophical problems, and then inspires them with an aspirational identity, they do more than sell products—they change lives. And leaders who care more about changing lives than they do about selling products tend to do a good bit of both.
Changing lives
GREAT BRANDS OBSESS ABOUT THE TRANSFORMATION OF THEIR CUSTOMERS
IDENTITY TRANSFORMATION In the foundational module of your StoryBrand BrandScript, we’ve included a section that will allow you to define an identity transformation your customer may experience as they relate to your brand. Who does your customer want to become as they relate to your products and services?
Identity transformation
PET FOOD BRAND From: Passive dog owner To: Every dog’s hero FINANCIAL ADVISOR From: Confused and ill-equipped To: Competent and smart SHAMPOO BRAND From: Anxious and glum To: Carefree and radiant
A strong, StoryBrand-inspired narrative expels the Narrative Void the way light drives out darkness. Companies who calibrate their activities around a common story don’t just state their mission; they're on a mission. They didn't just dream about a better story, their culture tells one.
Dont state the mision. Be on the mision.
Did you notice the Narrative Void in this story? Without a unifying narrative at the center, there was nothing to inspire the new hire beyond the status quo. The company didn’t do anything wrong. But they didn’t do anything special either. In a competitive environment, that approach won’t get you very far. That’s the intoxicating deception of the Narrative Void. It lulls the company to sleep. And eventually to death.
Narrative void
The number one job of an executive is to remind the stakeholders what the mission is, over and over. And yet most executives can’t really explain the overall narrative of the organization. Here’s the problem: if an executive can’t explain the story, team members will never know where or why they fit.
