Building a StoryBrand: Clarify Your Message So Customers Will Listen

by Donald Miller

This is not a book about telling your company’s story. A book like that would be a waste of time. Customers don’t generally care about your story; they care about their own.

Your customer should be the hero of the story, not your brand. This is the secret every phenomenally successful business understands.

Marketing has changed. Businesses that invite their customers into a heroic story grow. Businesses that don’t are forgotten.

May we all be richly rewarded for putting our customers’ stories above our own.

The fact is, pretty websites don’t sell things. Words sell things. And if we haven’t clarified our message, our customers won’t listen.

Because the human brain, no matter what region of the world it comes from, is drawn toward clarity and away from confusion.

The reality is we aren’t just in a race to get our products to market; we’re also in a race to communicate why our customers need those products in their lives. Even if we have the best product in the marketplace, we’ll lose to an inferior product if our competitor’s offer is communicated more clearly.

So what’s your message? Can you say it easily? Is it simple, relevant, and repeatable? Can your entire team repeat your company’s message in such a way that it is compelling? Have new hires been given talking points they can use to describe what the company offers and why every potential customer should buy it? How many sales are we missing out on beca...

“There’s a reason most marketing collateral doesn’t work,” Mike said, putting his feet up on the coffee table. “Their marketing is too complicated. The brain doesn’t know how to process the information.

The more simple and predictable the communication, the easier it is for the brain to digest. Story helps because it is a sense-making mechanism.

Essentially, story formulas put everything in order so the brain doesn’t have to work to u...

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. This means that when we ramble on and on about how we have the biggest manufacturing plant on the West Coast, our customers don’t care. Why? Because that information isn’t helping them eat, drink, find a mate, fall in love, build a tribe, experience a deeper sense of meaning, or stockpile weapons in case barbarians start coming over the hill behind our cul-de-sac.

So what do customers do when we blast a bunch of noise at them? They ignore us.

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.

All great stories are about survival—either physical, emotional, relational, or spiritual. A story about anything else won’t work to captivate an audience. Nobody’s interested. This means that if we position our products and services as anything but an aid in helping people survive, thrive, be accepted, find love, achieve an aspirational identity, or bond with a tribe that will defend them physically and socially, good luck selling anything to anybody. These are the only things people care about.

Mike said our brains are constantly sorting through information and so we discard millions of unnecessary facts every day. If we were to spend an hour in a giant ballroom, our brains would never think to count how many chairs are in the room. Meanwhile, we would always know where the exits are. Why? Because our brains don’t need to know how many chairs there are in the room to survive, but knowing where the exits are would be helpful in case there was a fire.

Mistake Number Two The second mistake brands make is they cause their customers to burn too many calories in an effort to understand their offer.

These two realities—the reality that people are looking for brands that can help them survive and thrive, and the reality that communication must be simple—explain why the SB7 Framework has helped so many businesses increase their revenue.

The key is to make your company’s message about something that helps the customer survive and to do so in such a way that they can understand it without burning too many calories.

STORY TO THE RESCUE Mike agreed the most powerful tool we can use to organize information so people don’t have to burn very many calories is story. A...

It identifies a necessary ambition, defines challenges that are battling to keep us from achieving that ambition, and provides a plan to help us conquer those challenges. When we define the elements of a story as it relates to our brand, we crea...

If you’re going to continue reading this book, I have to warn you, I’m going to ruin movies for you. I mean, these things really are formulaic. They’re predictable. And they’re predictable for a reason. Storytellers have figured out how to keep an audience’s attention for hours. The good news is these formulas work just as well at growing your business as they do at entertaining an audience.

THE KEY IS CLARITY

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.

If an audience can’t answer these basic questions, they’ll check out and the movie will lose millions at the box office. If a screenwriter breaks these rules, they’ll likely never work again.

The same is true for the brand you represent. Our customers have questions burning inside them, and if we aren’t answering those questi...

If we haven’t identified what our customer wants, what problem we are helping them solve, and what life will look like after they engage our products and services, for example, we can forget about thriving in the marketplace. Whether we’re writing a stor...

In fact, at StoryBrand we have a mantra: “If you conf...

All experienced writers know the key to great writing isn’t in what they say; it’s in what they don’t say. The more we cut out, the better the screenplay or book. The mathematician and philosopher Blaise Pascal is often credited for sending a long letter stating he simply didn’t have time to send a short one.

If we want to connect with customers, we have to stop blasting them with noise.

Story is the one thing that can hold a human being’s attention for hours.

Nobody can look away from a good story. In fact, neuroscientists claim the average human being spends more than 30 percent of their time daydreaming . . . unless they’re reading, listening to, or watching a story unfold. Why? Because when we are engaged in a story, the story does the daydreaming for us.

Story is the greatest weapon we have to combat noise, because it organizes information in such a way that ...

When clients want to add a bunch of confusion to their marketing message, I ask them to consider the ramifications of doing so if they were writing a screenplay. I mean, what if The Bourne Identity were a movie about a spy named Jason Bourne searching for his true identity but it also included scenes of Bourne trying to lose weight, marry a girl, pass the bar exam, win on Jeopardy, and adopt a cat? The audience would lose interest. When storytellers bombard people with too much information, the audience is forced to burn too many calories organizing the data. As a result, they daydream, walk out of the theater, or in the case of digital marketing, click to another site without placing an order.

Just think about the incredible transformation that took place in Steve’s life and career after Pixar. In 1983, Apple launched their computer Lisa, the last project Jobs worked on before he was let go. Jobs released Lisa with a nine-page ad in the New York Times spelling out the computer’s technical features. It was nine pages of geek talk nobody outside NASA was interested in. The computer bombed. When Jobs returned to the company after running Pixar, Apple became customer-centric, compelling, and clear in their communication. The first campaign he released went from nine pages in the New York Times to just two words on billboards all over America: Think Different.

When Apple began filtering their communication to make it simple and relevant, they actually stopped featuring computers in most of their advertising. Instead, they understood their customers were all living, breathing heroes, and they tapped into their stories. They did this by (1) identifying what their customers wanted (to be seen and heard), (2) defining their customers’ challenge (that people didn’t recognize their hidden genius), and (3) offering their customers a tool they could use to express themselves (computers and smartphones). Each of these realizations are pillars in ancient storytelling and critical for connecting with customers.

Story in a Nutshell Here is nearly every story you see or hear in a nutshell: A CHARACTER who wants something encounters a PROBLEM before they can get it. At the peak of their despair, a GUIDE steps into their lives, gives them a PLAN, and CALLS THEM TO ACTION. That action helps them avoid FAILURE and ends in a SUCCESS.

Simply put, this framework is the pinnacle of narrative communication. The further we veer away from these seven elements, the harder it becomes for audiences to engage. This is why indie films, which often break from the formula to gain critical acclaim, fail miserably at the box office. Critics are hungry for something different, yet the masses, who do not study movies professionally, simply want accessible stories.

Remember, the greatest enemy our business faces is the same enemy that good stories face: noise.

At no point should we be able to pause a movie and be unable to answer three questions: 1. What does the hero want? 2. Who or what is opposing the hero getting what she wants? 3. What will the hero’s life look like if she does (or does not) get what she wants?

In every line of copy we write, we’re either serving the customer’s story or descending into confusion; we’re either making music or making noise.

they should be able to answer these questions within five seconds of looking at our website or marketing material: 1. What do you offer? 2. How will it make my life better? 3. What do I need to do to buy it?

At StoryBrand we call this passing the grunt test. The critical question is this: “Could a caveman look at your website and immediately grunt what you offer?” Imagine a guy wearing a bearskin T-shirt, sitting in a cave by a fire, with a laptop across his lap. He’s looking at your website. Would he be able to grunt an answer to the three questions posed above? If you were an aspirin company, would he be able to grunt, “You sell headache medicine, me feel better fast, me get it at Walgreens”? If not, you’re likely losing sales.

THE STORYBRAND FRAMEWORK 1. A Character STORYBRAND PRINCIPLE ONE: THE CUSTOMER IS THE HERO, NOT YOUR BRAND.

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.

Positioning the customer as the hero in the story is more than just good manners; it’s also good business. Communication expert Nancy Duarte has done extensive research on how to create powerful presentations. The strategy she recommends to her clients is simple: when giving a speech, position yourself as Yoda and your audience as Luke Skywalker.1 It’s a small but powerful shift that honors the journey of the audience and positions us as a leader providing wisdom, products, and services our audience needs in order to thrive.

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. Unless we identify something our customer wants, they will never feel invited into the story we are telling. As we explore the first element of the StoryBrand Framework,...

2. Has a Problem STORYBRAND PRINCIPLE TWO: COMPANIES TEND TO SELL SOLUTIONS TO EXTERNAL PROBLEMS, BUT CUSTOMERS BU...

Customers are attracted to us for the same reason heroes are pulled into stories: they want to solve a problem that has, in big or small ways, disrupted their peaceful life. If we sell lawn-care products, they’re coming to us because they’re embarrassed about their lawn or they simply don’t have time to do the work. If we sell financial advice, they’re coming to us because they’re worried about their retirement plan. It may not be as dramatic or sexy as James Bond going to Q to grab the latest high-tech spy weapons, but the premise is the same: our customers are in trouble and they need help.

The Joker Club has to remind them how it felt like when they first discovered poker - it was fun, peaceful and rewarding. Before the current status of the industry disrupted that.

By talking about the problems our customers face, we deepen their interest in everything we offer.