Building a StoryBrand: Clarify Your Message So Customers Will Listen

by Donald Miller

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.

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 understand what’s going on.”

The first mistake brands make is they fail to focus on the aspects of their offer that will help people survive and thrive.

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. Without knowing it, the subconscious is always categorizing and organizing information, and when we talk publicly about our company’s random backstory or internal goals, we’re positioning ourselves as the chairs, not the exits. “But this poses a problem,” Mike continued. “Processing information demands that the brain burn calories. And the burning of too many calories acts against the brain’s primary job: to help us survive and thrive.” 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.

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.

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.

The same is true for the brand you represent. Our customers have questions burning inside them, and if we aren’t answering those questions, they’ll move on to another brand. 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.

In fact, at StoryBrand we have a mantra: “If you confuse, you’ll lose.”

What we think we are saying to our customers and what our customers actually hear are two different things. And customers make buying decisions not based on what we say but on what they hear.

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.

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.

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?

We tell our clients the same thing my filmmaker friends told me when I was writing screenplays: anything that doesn’t serve the plot has to go. Just because a tagline sounds great or a picture on a website grabs the eye, that doesn’t mean it helps us enter into our customers’ story.

Just like there are three questions audiences must be able to answer to engage in a story, there are three questions potential customers must answer if we expect them to engage with our brand. And 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?

Alfred Hitchcock defined a good story as “life with the dull parts taken out.”2 Good branding is the same. Our companies are complex, for sure, but a good messaging filter will remove all the stuff that bores our customers and will bear down on the aspects of our brand that will help them survive and thrive.