Building a StoryBrand: Clarify Your Message So Customers Will Listen

by Donald Miller

The Fatal Mistake The fatal ramifications of positioning our brand as the hero could be huge. Consider the failure of the music streaming service Tidal. Never heard of it? There’s a good reason. Rapper Jay Z founded the company with a personal investment of a whopping $56 million with a mission to “get everyone to respect music again.”3 Instead of being owned by music studios or tech companies, Tidal would be owned by musicians, allowing them to cut out the middleman and take their products directly to the market. As a result, the artists would pocket more of the profits. Sounds like a great plan. But Jay Z failed to consider the mistake of positioning himself and other artists as the heroes. Were artists going to buy music from each other? No. He needed to position the customer, not the artist, as the hero. In the months leading up to the launch of Tidal, Jay Z recruited sixteen well-known musicians who agreed to release exclusive content on his platform in exchange for a percentage of equity. In their multimillion-dollar rollout, the artists stood shoulder to shoulder at a press conference to explain their mission. Predictably, this is where everything fell apart. If only Jay Z, in other ways a virtual genius, had understood the age-old rules of story, he might have avoided walking into a field of land mines.