Building a StoryBrand: Clarify Your Message So Customers Will Listen

Author Donald Miller is the CEO of StoryBrand. I started reading this book after hearing Donald on a podcast and wanted to dig deeper into the construction of brand stories.

story is a sense-making device. 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.

customers make buying decisions not based on what we say but on what they hear.

In my work, I do a ton of user research and analysis. I can have all the data to back up my points, I come to meetings and presentations with all the numbers but what is consistent, is that the story, the snippet from a real user lands the strongest. I can get more approved, I can make the client lean into a recommended path much faster when I can construct a story for them and make their customer, their user the hero in the story.

This book is great at breaking down the aspects of a story and gives you the tools and the context to help you create your own stories.

I have several Kindle Highlights from the book that I would like to share with you.

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.

At the beginning of a story, the hero is usually flawed, filled with doubt, and ill-equipped for the task set before them. The guide aids them on their journey, rife with conflict. The conflict begins to change the character, though. Forced into action, the hero develops skills and accrues the experience needed to defeat their foe. Though the hero is still filled with doubt, they summon the courage to engage, and in the climactic scene defeat the villain

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.

We all use stories to help communicate our thoughts, and that is where this book will help you.

Here is the Link to the Amazon book.