Building a StoryBrand: Clarify Your Message So Customers Will Listen

by Donald Miller

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. Now that I’ve pointed out the technique of vilifying our customers’ challenges, you’ll see it in television commercials all the time. Who knew that those dust bunnies collecting along the baseboards of our houses move around in animated, criminal gangs wearing leather jackets, coordinating their devilish efforts to ruin our floors? Ah, that is until they meet their match: the new mop from ACME Mop Company. Advertisers personify the problems their customers face in order to capture their imagination and give their frustrations a focal point. Fuzzy hairballs with squeaky voices living in your drains, making nests, and clogging up the pipes? Yellow globs of living, breathing, talking plaque vacationing between your teeth? These are all personified versions of conflict. They’re all villains. Here are four characteristics that make for a good villain on your StoryBrand BrandScript: