David’s Notes
Miller, Donald. Building a Storybrand: Clarify Your Message So Customers Will Listen. Nashville, NT: HarperCollins Publishers, 2017.
Summary in a Sentence
Miller makes the customer the hero and champion-in-process of the story and the vendor the purveyor of the missing ingredient for the champion’s success.
Elevator Pitch
The StoryBrand grid helps companies focus on what matters most: clearly communicating in terms of customer-focused solutions, not brand-focused distractions. The less we make our customers’ brains confused and the more we put our solution presentations in ways that are easy to understand, we will influence our target demographics and close more sales. The Storybrand method helps businesses implement the grid into specific, actionable mechanics.
Problem, Solution, and Significance
Problem: Too many businesses lose sales because they promote their story instead of championing their customer. They generate excessive noise in their product or service narrative, making it difficult for the customer to buy-in emotionally. “Companies fail to focus on the aspects of their offer that will help people survive and thrive” (7). “They cause customers to burn too many calories in an effort to understand their offer” (8).
Solution: The seven-step StoryBrand grid offers the pattern to clearly communicate with potential customers, connect, and close more sales. The pattern is 1) a character, 2) has a problem, 3) and meets a guide, 4) who gives them a plan, 5) and calls them to action, 6) that helps them avoid failure, and 7) and ends in success (21).
Significance: Who cares how great the solution is if it doesn’t address the most important and pressing problems of the people it was intended for? Your brand may be instrumental in the identity transformation of your customers (what they want to become, the person they want to be, their aspirational identity) (133).
Personal Application
- I must make my offer clear for customers within five seconds of them visiting my website (5).
- I need to turn my concepts into clear, well-defined stories (9).
- My website must clearly indicate: 1) what I offer, 2) how it will make my customers’ lives better, and 3) what they need to do to buy it (24).
- My solutions must focus on the 1) external, 2) internal, and 3) philosophical problems of my customers. The more of these categories I can cover, the more my offer will potentially resonate (21).
- The customer is my hero, not my brand. I must show them the cost of not doing business with me (36).
- My message must be simple, relevant, and repeatable (40).
- My customer desires include: conserving financial resources, conserving time, building social networks, gaining status, accumulating resources, the desire to be generous, the desire for meaning (53-54).
- My villains should be a 1) a root source, 2) relatable, 3) singular and 4) real (60).
- Can I be trusted? Can I be respected? (83).
- I must clarify how someone can do business with me or removes the sense of risk of investing with me (87).
- Customer’s success 1) wins them power or position, 2) unites them with something or someone making them whole, 3) experiences self-realization that makes them whole (121).
Quotes
- “Customers don’t generally care about your story; they care about their own” (ix).
- “Businesses that invite their customers into a heroic story grow” (x).
- “The human brain, no matter what region of the world it comes from, is drawn toward clarity and away from confusion” (5).
- “The more simple and predictable the communication, the easier it is for the brain to digest. Story formulas put everything in order so the brain doesn’t have to work to understand what’s going on” (6).
- “The first mistake brands make is they fail to focus on the aspects of their offer that will help people survive and thrive” (7).
- “Alfred Hitchcock defined a good story as ‘life with the dull parts taken out’” (26).
- “When we identify something our customer wants and communicate it simply, the story we are inviting them into is given definition and direction” (47).
- “Companies tend to sell solutions to external problems, but people buy solutions to internal problems” (62).
- “Where there are no stakes, there is no story” (110).
Values Connection
- According to 1990s Gallup research, only 1 in 5 employees in America was truly excited about their work (159).
- The information explosion has contributed to employee disengagement (160).
David Lockwood 