Building a StoryBrand: Clarify Your Message So Customers Will Listen

by Donald Miller

foes (like a lion with a loud roar), and if we’re into shallow companions, might even help us secure a mate. Rolex, Mercedes, Louis Vuitton, and other luxury brands are truly selling more than just cars and watches; they’re selling an identity associated with power, prestige, and refinement. Accumulating resources. If the products and services you offer help people make money or accumulate much-needed resources, that will quickly translate into a person’s desire for survival. With more money, our customers will have more opportunity to secure many of the other survival resources they may need. Many StoryBrand clients run business-to-business offerings (StoryBrand itself is a business-to-business company), so offering increased productivity, increased revenue, or decreased waste are powerful associations with the need for a business (or an individual) to survive and thrive. The innate desire to be generous. None of the desires I’ve listed are evil. They can all be taken too far, but the reality is we are designed to survive. Still, we should be comforted by the fact that nearly all human beings have an enormous potential for generosity. Achieving an aspirational identity of being sacrificial actually helps us survive (fends off foes, decreases outside criticism, helps earn trust in our tribe, and so on), but it also taps into something truly redemptive: we want other people to survive too. Most people are not nearly as Darwinian in their thinking as we’ve be...