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Whether it’s by fulfilling some purpose or accepting themselves as they are, this return to contentment resolves something in a story that is universally human: the desire for self-acceptance.
Inspiration: If an aspect of your brand can offer or be associated with an inspirational feat, open the floodgates. Brands like Red Bull, Harvard Business Review, Under Armour, The Ken Blanchard Company, Michelob Ultra, and even GMC have associated themselves with athletic and intellectual accomplishment and thus a sense of self-actualization.
Acceptance: Helping people accept themselves as they are isn’t just a thoughtful thing to do; it’s good marketing. Not unlike the Dove campaign, American Eagle turned heads when they launched their Aerie campaign. In the campaign, American Eagle used real people as models and refused to retouch the images. Tackling body-image issues, American Eagle went beyond basic product promotion and contributed to universal self-acceptance among their clientele.
Transcendence: Brands that invite customers to participate in a larger movement offer a greater, more impactful life alon...
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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. If our products can help people achieve these things, we should make this a core aspect of our brand promise.
Offering to close a story loop is much more simple than you think. Even the inclusion of smiley, happy people on your website is a strong way to offer the closing of a story loop. People want to be happy, and those images promise your product will deliver.
Everybody wants to change. Everybody wants to be somebody different, somebody better, or, perhaps, somebody who simply becomes more self-accepting.
Your brand is helping people become better versions of themselves, which is a beautiful thing. You are helping them become wiser, more equipped, more physically fit, more accepted, and more at peace. Like it or not (and we hope you like it), we are all participating in our customers’ transformation, which is exactly what they want us to do.
A few important questions we have to ask ourselves when we’re representing our brand are: Who does our customer want to become? What kind of person do they want to be? What is their aspirational identity?
HOW DOES YOUR CUSTOMER WANT TO BE DESCRIBED BY OTHERS?
The best way to identify an aspirational identity that our customers may be attracted to is to consider how they want their friends to talk about them. Think about it. When others talk about you, what do you want them to say? How we answer that question reveals who it is we’d like to be. It’s the same for our customers.
hero needs somebody else to step into the story to tell them they’re different, they’re better. That somebody is the guide. That somebody is you.
Brands that realize their customers are human, filled with emotion, driven to transform, and in need of help truly do more than sell products; they change people.
Your website is likely the first impression a potential customer will receive about your company. It’s almost like a first date. The customer simply needs to know that you have something they want and you can be trusted to deliver whatever that is.
THE FIVE THINGS YOUR WEBSITE SHOULD INCLUDE
1. An Offer Above the Fold
There is no telling how many customers that site is losing because they are making their customers work so hard to understand why anybody would need their service.
Above the fold, make sure the images and text you use meet one of the following criteria:
They promise an aspirational identity.
They promise to solve a problem.
They state exactly what they do.
2. Obvious Calls to Action
There are two main places we want to place a direct call to action. The first is at the top right of our website and the second is in the center of the screen, above the fold. Your customer’s eye moves quickly in a Z pattern across your website, so if the top left is your logo and perhaps tagline, your top right is a “Buy Now” button, and the middle of the page is an offer followed by another “Buy Now” button, then you’ve likely gotten through all the noise in your customer’s mind and they know what role you can play in their story.
For best results the “Buy Now” buttons should be a different color from any other button on the site (preferably brighter so it stands out), and both buttons should look exactly the same.
3. Images of Success
If people come to our website and see pictures of our building, we’re likely wasting some of their mental bandwidth on meaningless messages, unless, of course, you’re a bed-and-breakfast. But even then, images of the building aren’t what I’d lead with. I’d save that for the second date. We believe images of smiling, happy people who have had a pleasurable experience (closed an open story loop) by engaging your brand should be featured on your website.
4. A Bite-Sized Breakdown of Your Revenue Streams
If this company sounds like yours, the first challenge is to find an overall umbrella message that unifies your various streams.
5. Very Few Words
People don’t read websites anymore; they scan them. If there is a paragraph above the fold on your website, it’s being passed over, I promise. Around the office we use the phrase “write it in Morse code” when we need marketing copy. By “Morse code” we mean copy that is brief, punchy, and relevant to our customers.
Some of the most effective websites I’ve reviewed have used ten sentences or less on the entire page.
As an experiment, let’s see if you can cut half the words out of your website. Can you replace some of your text with images? Can you reduce whole paragraphs into three or four bullet points? Can you summarize sentences into bite-sized soundbites? If so, make those changes soon. The rule is this: the fewer words you use, the more likely it is that people will read them.
The Narrative Void is a vacant space that occurs inside the organization when there’s no story to keep everyone aligned. In extreme cases the Narrative Void can take up residence in the very center of the organization, splintering it into factions of disconnected efforts that never quite come together as a unified mission.
For years, companies have attempted to exorcise the Narrative Void using the most sacred document available: the mission statement. The corporate mission statement is like the holy grail of organizational effectiveness. With monastic dedication, executives gather for off-site retreats where they etch painstaking phrases onto tablets few will ever read and even fewer will understand or apply. Talk about a story going nowhere. Needless to say, only in very rare cases has a mission statement actually led a company to be on a mission.
As it turns out, one of the biggest contributors to the rise of disengagement has been the information explosion. As I mentioned earlier, people are bombarded with more than three thousand marketing messages every twenty-four hours. And that’s just marketing messages. The number of non-marketing messages—through articles, Internet posts, and slanted news stories—is even higher. Compare that to, say, the 1970s. We’ve gone from three TV networks and one local newspaper to more than two hundred channels, millions of news blogs, podcasts, Internet radio, Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, Snapchat, and
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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.
When customers are invited into a magnificent story, it creates customer engagement. Could the same be true for employees? Absolutely.
Mission statements were never a bad idea. They were just never enough. In fact, a mission is exactly what people need in order to come together as a company. But a statement is inadequate to turn a mission into a story. It’s like reading the tagline on a movie poster instead of seeing the actual movie.
Killing off a Narrative Void isn’t easy, and it takes time. Around the StoryBrand office, Ben uses the term thoughtmosphere. A thoughtmosphere is an invisible mixture of beliefs and ideas that drives employee behavior and performance. A thoughtmosphere improves when a StoryBrand-inspired narrative is created, talking points are devised, and a plan of execution is put in place to reinforce those talking points so every stakeholder understands their important role.
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.
When your culture tells a great story, everybody wins. A company with a healthy culture looks something like this:
A true mission isn’t a statement; it’s a way of living and being. A mission is more than token rituals that make momentary reference to the things your employees should care about. A mission is a story you reinforce through every department strategy, every operational detail, and every customer experience. That’s what it means to be a company on mission.
We guide many organizations through a process that goes something like this: 1. Create a BrandScript with your leadership team. 2. Audit the existing thoughtmosphere. 3. Create a custom StoryBrand culture implementation plan. 4. Optimize internal communications to support the plan. 5. Install a self-sustained team to enhance the culture.
A StoryBrand Culture Turns Their Entire Team into a Sales Force
A StoryBrand Culture Honors the Story of Its Team Members
In these StoryBrand BrandScripts, the team is positioned as the hero and the company leadership is positioned as the guide. Compensation packages, leadership development, organized events, and more are all “tools” the leadership creates to help their employees win the day. Without understanding where a team member’s narrative is going, compensation, development, and events are all fueling fires heading in a thousand directions.
We’ve found time and time again that leaders desire to be seen as heroes when, in actuality, everything they think they want from playing the hero only comes by playing the guide. Guides are respected, loved, listened to, understood, and followed loyally.
When the story of the customer and the story of the company align with the story of the team, we get an alchemy that is ...
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Where there’s no story, there’s no engagement.
What are the five (almost free) things you can do to grow your business?
