What is StoryBrand?

Oct 5

What story does your brand tell and who is the hero? I’ll give you a hint: you are not the hero, your customer is.

This can be a challenge for many businesses trying to implement StoryBrand for the first time but getting it right is the first step to delivering a clear message to your customers about the problem you solve and the value you deliver.

So, why is it important that your business doesn’t place itself in the position of the hero? Well, it’s easy to relate with the hero: they’re motivated by success, they transform from having a problem to reaching their goal. Whether you’re destroying the Ring of Power in the fires of Mount Doom like Frodo in The Lord of the Rings trilogy or getting grass stains out of your kid’s soccer uniform, we all want success for ourselves…sometimes removing stains created by small humans feels like an epic, fantasy adventure story.

Your customer doesn’t want to help your business reach success, they want their own success, in the form of being the envy of the soccer field with the perfectly clean uniforms, and your messaging should convey how your business can guide them to achieve it.

On episode three of the Growing a Fruitful Brand podcast, Raj and Ben explain the seven elements of the StoryBrand framework and how to identify the hero, tell their story as it relates to your business and why getting this right is vital to having a clear message on your website.

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Ep.3: What is StoryBrand?

Automated Transcript

Raj Lulla:
What is StoryBrand? I'll tell you what it's not. It is not a way for you to tell your story. People get that twisted up all time. In fact, you'll hear a lot of marketing agencies tell you that they want to help you tell your story. If they tell you that, run away.

Ben Lueders:
Welcome to Growing a Fruitful Brand, where we discuss how to create and grow a brand that makes the world a better place for you, your customers, and your employees. I'm Ben Lueders, founder and art director of Fruitful Design & Strategy here in Omaha, Nebraska, and I'm joined by my business partner and brand strategist, Raj Lulla. Do you struggle with messaging? So when I started Fruitful Design & Strategy almost 10 years ago, it started as a graphic design shop and everything that I saw from my clients, I saw it as a design problem. They just need a better logo, they need a better website, and maybe those things were true, but one consistent thing I kept on noticing with my clients was they really struggled with their messaging. Around 2016, I started partnering with my friend Raj here and that's his specialty was messaging. What do you remember about those times, Raj?

Raj Lulla:
Yeah. Do I remember a lot. During that time, people would come in the door thinking that maybe their Facebook or social media wasn't performing the way that they needed it to. So they'd come to us and say, hey, I have a social media problem, and what it actually was, was that we'd go back to the website and we'd realize, but actually, it's a website problem, and even more specifically than that, it was that the messaging wasn't clear on the website, and I would say probably at least 50% of the projects we were doing at that time, people would ask literally just that question. can you help me with my messaging?

Ben Lueders:
Yeah, absolutely. And around that time too, we started hearing this term, StoryBrand. It started emerging around that time as well. There was a book written by Donald Miller called... It was…

Raj Lulla:
Building a StoryBrand

Ben Lueders:
Building a StoryBrand, yeah, and it became a hot buzzword in our circles a little bit, and then we decided basically to go all in on this marketing framework called StoryBrand.

Raj Lulla:
Yeah. Like Ben said, around that time, we'd heard of StoryBrand and Donald Miller was doing webinars at that time just promoting his new project, and I would pause the webinars, write down furious notes, and then we had one of our clients, still one of our best clients, who reached out to us and they needed help branding a product and they had some trouble defining exactly what the product was, who it was for, and it's like, okay, I'm going to try this tool, StoryBrand, with them, and it was a massive whiteboard. We did all seven elements of the story on there and helped them figure out who the character was and the problem and all of those things that we'll go into in a little bit here.

Raj Lulla:
And it helped bring so much clarity just in that one meeting, that it ended up helping name the product. It ended up helping create the brand positioning and the messaging for the product all based off of that one workshop that we did together. Fast forward a few years, I became a StoryBrand guide and then as we implemented into our agency, we decided to become one of about 35 StoryBrand certified agencies in the entire world, and it's kind of funny because we almost get the opposite question now. People used to ask us about messaging and now knowing that we're a StoryBrand certified agency, they'll ask this question, what is StoryBrand?

Ben Lueders:
Yeah, exactly, and that's what we want to kind of tackle today. Not only do we want to define what StoryBrand is, we actually want to take you through and give you a helpful guide for all the elements of the framework so that you can start to think about how to apply the StoryBrand framework maybe for your own company and maybe even for yourself personally. This is actually something that can help you just rethink how you view those around you and the audience around you.

Raj Lulla:
So first thing, what is StoryBrand? I'll tell you what it's not. It is not a way for you to tell your story. People get that twisted up all the time. In fact, you'll hear a lot of marketing agencies tell you that they would help you tell your story. If they tell you that, run away because they're going to tell some story about how your company was founded and started in a garage or old truck or whatever.

Ben Lueders:
Thousands of years of combined experience.

Raj Lulla:
Yeah. And that's not what StoryBrand is. StoryBrand is a marketing framework that helps you position to your customer as the hero of the story. It uses the seven elements of the story that have been used over thousands of years from Aristotle, all the way to Star Wars and Harry Potter, all those heroic movies, they all have basically the same seven elements and it uses those elements to position your customer as the hero of the story and then position you as the guide rather than the hero of the story.

Raj Lulla:
And the reason we do that is because none of your customers wake up in the morning and think about how they can make you rich. It doesn't happen. Everybody wakes up in the morning, including you, and thinks about how am I going to provide for my kids well today? How am I going to be a better husband or wife? How am I going to do well in the marketplace? So you think about your own business, but you don't think about, for example, you don't wake up and think about how am I going to make Target rich today? I should go buy some more groceries because I'm a little worried about that. Nobody does that.

Ben Lueders:
If you do wake up thinking about that, you may run Target or something like that would be the only person who thinks that.

Raj Lulla:
Yeah.

Ben Lueders:
One thing that, when you're saying that, Raj, reminded me of the first night of the StoryBrand conference we went to in Nashville. Donald Miller, he really put this in scientific terms talking about calories, spending calories, how actually, we have to exert ourselves and spend calories hearing other people's stories and we tend to think in a very survivalistic way. Often, we don't think that way, but it's definitely true.

Raj Lulla:
Yeah. It's kind of become a joke in today's culture where somebody will be like, oh, I'm sorry, I zoned out because you were boring me. They say that jokingly, but our brains do that a lot. In fact, one of my favorite things I learned in psychology classes when I was going through school was about this thing called the cocktail party effect where your ability to listen to just one person's voice at a cocktail party.

Raj Lulla:
Even though there's servers moving about and there's glasses clinking and there's forks and there's smells and all sorts of things, your brain selectively chooses what information to pay attention to based off of what seems important at the time, which is usually the person right in front of you, not the person across the room maybe stumbling because they had a little too much to drink or a kid running around and almost knocking a tray over, unless it's your kid and then your brain goes, okay, I got to pay attention.

Ben Lueders:
Exactly. Well, as the other person in the conversation, what's going through their head every minute is what's in this for me? What's in this for me? What's in this for me. They want to know, okay, there's lots of people I could be talking to right now. What is in it for me in this situation? Okay. Raj, we've been kind of hinting at it already, but how does StoryBrand really work?

Raj Lulla:
So it takes the seven elements of story, like I mentioned, and these are known from ancient times of Aristotle, Joseph Campbell in his book about the hero's journey. It's been used again by Star Wars, Harry Potter, The Hunger Games, basically any heroic movie you've ever seen. If it's got Bruce Willis in it, you can pretty much assume that it's that.

Ben Lueders:
I didn't know he was in Hunger Games. That's good to know.

Raj Lulla:
It uses those elements to make your customer the hero of the story and positions you as the guide to their successful end.

Ben Lueders:
Yeah. And so the graphic we have behind us right now is what's called the StoryBrand BrandScript, and this is kind of where you plot out where all the different elements of the story go and how they relate to one another.

Raj Lulla:
And you can actually go to mystorybrand.com and just create a quick little free account and you can open up a BrandScript for yourself and it even has questions in there to help you try to fill it out for your business. Now I will warn you, it can be a little bit difficult, and so I've even had a lot of people come to me and say, hey, I did one on my own, but I need help polishing it. I need help getting it right, and we're totally happy to do that with you, but you can get started on your own. Go to mystorybrand.com, and again, quick little free account. You can see exactly what we're seeing right here, these different boxes. So there's actually eight boxes on this because you have the seven elements of story, but then you also have this identity transformation as Ben has up on the screen here right now.

Raj Lulla:
So in the bottom right hand corner of the BrandScript is a thing called character transformation. A couple things that are really important in even starting your story is for one, deciding who the character is, and then the other is deciding what kind of journey that they're going on. So let's talk about the character. A lot of businesses struggle because they'll say something like our brand is for everybody, and the problem is that if your messaging is created to communicate that your brand is for everybody, it's actually really for nobody. That'd be like walking out onto the streets of Manhattan packed full of people and shouting, I'd like to marry someone, and if that worked for you, I mean, you are just the only person that worked for.

Ben Lueders:
Sure, yeah.

Raj Lulla:
If a whole bunch of people are like, yes, we're very interested in that, all of us, it will be a group marriage, it's totally fine, that's pretty unusual, I would imagine and there might be some substances involved. I can't imagine that working out. So because what happens is if you went out in the streets to Manhattan and you shouted, I want to marry someone, the questions that people would naturally ask are, first of all, what's wrong with you, but secondly, are you looking for a man or a woman or any other gender expression? Are you looking for someone young or old? Are you looking for someone who's educated or uneducated? Are you looking for somebody who's wealthy or down to earth, or there's just so many questions that you're going to ask about?

Raj Lulla:
I don't even know what you're proposing here, but who you're trying to find here with just this question of, I'd like to marry someone, and of course, that sounds ridiculous, but you'd be surprised how often we do this in our businesses that it's like, well, this brand is for everybody. We see it a lot with nonprofits of, well, we don't want to be exclusive at all and then it's like, okay, cool. What are you looking for? It's like, well, we're looking for high dollar donors who have a net wealth of more than $5 million a year, and it's like, that's someone. That's a pretty specific someone. So it's okay I want to give you permission right now to narrow down to a character.

Raj Lulla:
And one of the ways that we do that here is with what we call the 80% rule, and the 80% rule is pretty simple. If about 80% of your business comes from a certain type of customer, then that's who you should write your BrandScript after. Now, that's just the customer. That's just the character part of the story. The other part of transformation is the transformation, and the way that I like to think about that is when you have any product or service that you're trying to buy, there's something that you want out of it at the end. Let's go with a dentist, for example. You come in with tooth pain. When you leave, you want to be able to eat ice cream again without having tooth pain, or you want to be able to chew on those wonderful little Lifesavers mints that are probably cracking all of our teeth, but they're so delicious.

Ben Lueders:
Kind of addictive, really.

Raj Lulla:
For sure. You want to be able to do those without any pain and you want to not worry about your teeth, and so you need a dentist who can help you relieve whatever pain or chipped tooth, need a crown, cavity, whatever, that's what you need, and so-

Ben Lueders:
My mouth is starting to hurt now.

Raj Lulla:
So the transformation that you want to go on might be as simple from being in pain to being pain free, but you could probably also go slightly more aspirational than that because everybody's experienced having an injury where you're in pain, but there's also an element of fear because it's like, oh, I can't eat on that side of my mouth or it just hampers your life in a way, and so you're actually going from worried to relieved. That would be another transformation. One of the ways I like to think about transformation is that if you're writing the character transformation, you want to be able to say "I am" and then give them a real identity after that.

Raj Lulla:
So relieved is maybe not even quite strong enough because it's like, I don't think you wake up in the morning and go, I'm relieved. That's who I am as a person. That might be a temporary state, but it's not identity transformation, and the heroes in the stories that we talk about, Luke Skywalker, Katniss, Harry Potter, they experience a transformation. Harry goes from a guy who's living under the stairs in his house to being a wizard, being a powerful wizard. That's a real transformation. So in the case of a dentist, you might want to go instead of relieved, talking about being a carefree person or going back to being able to live your life without not having ice cream with a kid or choosing not to have ice cream with the kids because you're worried your tooth might hurt.

Raj Lulla:
You want to be a carefree dad or mom. You want to, again, get to an identity of how is this product or this service going to help me really be a different person as I'm moving towards who I want to be in my life. So that's character transformation, and then we get into what does the character need in order for this transformation to happen? On mystorybrand.com, you'll see what do they want, and the question that is on that BrandScript is what do they want as it relates to my product or service? So in the case of dentistry, you may want to be carefree. That may be the transformation that you're going towards, but what you actually need in order to do that is relief for your tooth pain.

Ben Lueders:
So Raj, as business owners, don't we already know what our customers need? Aren't the goods and services that we provide? I mean, isn't that kind of a given?

Raj Lulla:
Yeah. This is a very, very common mistake on a BrandScript is to just go to that "what do they want" box and just start listing your products and services, and the thing is that your customer doesn't think about it in the way that you think about it because you might want to put we offer managed IT services that will help you migrate to your Azure Cloud and whatever. I'm probably not using any of those terms right?

Ben Lueders:
Nailed it.

Raj Lulla:
But that's because that's how you think of your business and you're a little bit too close to it. What they really want is something more like to reduce their networking costs or to not worry about their IT services, and I pick on IT a lot because there's so much technical terminology in that, that it's so easy for IT companies to get this wrong.

Ben Lueders:
A lot of times, their websites just look like they're written for other IT professionals.

Raj Lulla:
And not even that, sometimes it's like, how do you be inspirational with IT? It's like, oh, innovation, transformation, and it's a lot of data. It's almost like word soup. It reminds me of the alphabet soup that kids eat and it's almost like there are IT terms in this bowl and we just scooped them out one at a time and some inspirational marketing words as well. Really, if you could just tell your customer how you are going to help them get to the place that they want to be, which is not worrying about being attacked by ransomware or by viruses or malware or any of those things. That's really what they came to you for. I know that it seems like they're shopping for managed IT services or they're shopping for migration to the cloud or they're shopping for certain products or whatever, and you can mention those later on a website page, but this early on, what they really want is to have the problem solved.

Ben Lueders:
That kind of leads us to the second part of the framework is talking about the problem and the problem has many different components to it.

Raj Lulla:
When we do a BrandScript, you'll see that we spend about half of our time in character transformation, character, and problem, and the reason for that, let's go back to the dentist thing. So you want to be a carefree parent, you want to be able to go out for ice cream with your kids and not feel tooth pain. That's great, but if your transformation is to a carefree parent, then there are about a million ways that you could help somebody be a carefree parent. Tide helps people be carefree parents because your kids won't have grass stains that are embarrassing on their soccer uniforms. You won't feel like a bad parent when all the other kids' uniforms are sparkling and clean. So you can worry less about that. You can be carefree. There's Google Calendar helps me be a more carefree parent because I can keep track of all the school plays and sports games and schedules and all those things.

Ben Lueders:
It's not very specific.

Raj Lulla:
It's not. So that's where you get into that character want. What do they need as it relates to what you offer? You want to be a carefree parent, so you don't want to have to be thinking about if the next bite that you take is going to cause you pain, make you yelp, or scare the kids and the dog at the dinner table. You want to be able to get back to your life. So that's what the character wants. So all these three are really, really connected. What we want to become, that carefree parent, what we need in order to do that, dental care that gets rid of our pain, and the problem.

Raj Lulla:
So now we get into the problem. The problem has three parts. It's got the external, the internal, and the philosophical. Again, you can see all this on mystorybrand.com, and each of those things is the way that your character is struggling to get what they need. Now, an external problem could be I don't know how to perform dental care on myself. I don't recommend it. Probably shouldn't be in there with a drill and-

Ben Lueders:
A lot of us have that external problem.

Raj Lulla:
And again, might not be the right external problem here.

Ben Lueders:
I just thought of Tom Hanks in Castaway performing dental surgery on himself with-

Raj Lulla:
I went with Ron Swanson in my brain getting the pliers and removing his fake tooth to scare people, but the point is, that's probably not the external problem they're facing. Much more realistically in a city like ours is there are a lot of dentists. It's hard to know which dentist to choose. Do you go to Google? Do you go to the reviews? Do you ask a friend? How do you know which dentist to choose, and maybe how do you know which dentist to choose for your specific problem, or maybe you have a specific need in dentistry? There are dentists that specialize in the kind of dentistry that you don't have to be awake for, or dentist fears. There are other ones that practice gentle dentistry, I've heard it called.

Raj Lulla:
There are others who are just cheap dentist and maybe a little more pain, but a little less cash. So it all kind of depends on what your character-specific problem, and this is how you could have 30 dentists in one city all use a StoryBrand BrandScript and come up with different stories because they each have different brands, different positions, and again, it could be around the price, it could be around experience, it could be around you may have some innovative dental technique that you use robots and lasers to get in there. Might really appeal to Star Wars fans or just people who really don't want other people's fingers in their mouths.

Raj Lulla:
Did you ever think we'd say that phrase on the podcast?

Ben Lueders:
Oh, I hope that stays in there, but that kind of gets to the guide, who the guide is, and we've heard Raj talk on a previous podcast about how you're not Luke Skywalker, you're Obi-Wan Kenobi or Yoda, either one and that the role of the guide is who you should be positioning yourself as instead of the hero.

Raj Lulla:
And so one thing you'll notice is that we're about 50% of the way through your BrandScript and this is the first time that you get to talk about yourself, and even in that, the first thing that we want to do is express empathy. We want to build a bridge between yourself and the customer because if you go just straight into the sales pitch, you're going to alienate your customer after you did all the work of figuring out what they're trying to do with their life. They want to be a carefree parent, or they need dentistry that will relieve their pain, and you see this all the time. Ben joked about it before of the people who have a thousand years of combined experience, or if you just jumped right in with, we have $10 million worth of dentistry equipment and it's like, cool, is that a million $10 scalpels, or what does that even mean?

Ben Lueders:
That's not relevant information or anything that an audience would have any idea about.

Raj Lulla:
We wouldn't have a reference for it, and beyond that, it'd be like if your spouse came to you with a problem and they're like, oh my gosh, these people at work were so frustrating today, and you just pulled out Donald Miller's book and was like, Building a StoryBrand, and it's like, I'm not sure the connection between the things that you're talking about.

Ben Lueders:
You've got to make this bridge to their problem.

Raj Lulla:
So we start with empathy and it really just sounds like, hey, we know how hard it is to find a technical dentist. Just identify what they're feeling. It is not that difficult, but it does get skipped a lot and when you are, if you think about it again, there might be 30, 100, 300, 3000, who knows how many dentists in your city, and if you're the one that says, hey, we know how scary dentistry can be or we know how frustrating it is to not be able to find a dentist that you can afford, any of those things, then it makes it easy to see that you're a better dentist for them because you're the only one expressing empathy for them.

Ben Lueders:
That dentist gets me. It gets my problem, and it's crazy, just like a little sentence sometimes on a website can speak volumes and it connects, that empathy can connect you to that authority. So this is the part where you actually can talk about yourself. You can talk about maybe experience, and your expertise a little bit after empathizing first.

Raj Lulla:
Yeah. And I want to mention too, this is a great place to mention this is why we became a StoryBrand certified agency because your design and your words work together in this place because near this empathetic statement, you probably want to have a picture of a dentist gently dealing with a patient, and on the rest of the page, you might want to have people eating ice cream, no pain, that's great and smiling, happy, showing the result of it, but in this empathy, it's okay to show the actual experience, graphically or photographically showing that you're going to be okay. This is going to be a gentle experience or this is going to be safe. Look at this person.

Raj Lulla:
They look happy. They're not scared of the dentist because we do things differently here. You can show as well as tell your empathy. The next part of being a guide is showing and telling your authority, and there are many different ways to do that. I'm not going to go through all of them, but just think about what makes you different from your competitors. It could be your experience, it could be the number of customers you've served, it could be the certain types of customers you've served. Just think about what makes you different, and what makes you stand out. What makes you the expert in solving this particular problem for your customer?

Ben Lueders:
Okay. So you've convinced me. You're the guide, you understand my problem, you've got the empathy, you've got the authority, but what's next? What do I do?

Raj Lulla:
Because you sell these products or these services every day and you think, well, it's so obvious. You just show up to the dentist and you get your teeth worked on or whatever, that it's easy to miss that your customer doesn't go to the dentist every day. They don't see the person who schedules every day. They don't know if they can schedule online. They don't know if there's a consultation visit first or if you can just get right in there and get to work and solve the tooth pain. They don't know if you have emergency visits or anything like that. So what they need is a plan.

Raj Lulla:
And the plan is really just about either what it's like to work with you or how to get started working with you. It's usually about three steps and it's pretty simple to write. It's just about really, how do you do business with us? Now, the thing I'll caution you on here is most people go, oh my gosh, our thing is so complicated. I couldn't possibly boil it down to three steps, and I hear this all the time. What I would just encourage you about is that you don't have to worry about all of the parts of the process. It reminds me of, did you ever do that activity when you were a kid where you had to explain how to make a peanut butter and jelly sandwich?

Ben Lueders:
No. How do you make a peanut butter and jelly sandwich? I never had a plan.

Raj Lulla:
So there's this activity to do with kids that they have to tell you exactly how to make a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, and the adult is purposefully obtuse in the way that they listen to the direction. So if the kid says to take the bread, the adult will take the whole package of bread, and if the kid says put the peanut butter on it, they will smear peanut butter on the outside, or they'll just put the jar of peanut butter on top.

Ben Lueders:
You're trying to get them to be more specific and in detail.

Raj Lulla:
This is actually the opposite of that because the adult we know is acting like an idiot on purpose because it's to teach kids how to describe every step of something. You do not have to tell your customers, well, the first thing you do is wake up in the morning and open your eyes and then brush your teeth or get out of bed, walk three steps to the bathroom. It's like, you don't need to do all of those things. Your customer is smart. What you do really need to do is tell them really just either how to get started with working with you, and so that might be to schedule your first appointment. You can do that online right here, or it could be here's what happens when you visit us. It's pretty obvious that you need to schedule your first appointment and so here's how it works. We do a consultation and then you have your appointment where we do the dental work, and then you can be pain-free. You can get back to eating normally after two hours.

Ben Lueders:
And you try to hint at that transformation.

Raj Lulla:
Yeah. I like to put some success at the end of a plan so that it's not just getting your consultation, have the appointment where we work on your teeth, and then you're going to want to ice that for a while because it's going to hurt. It's like, well, maybe we go past that part to the next, and again, that's another thing you can drop out of your plan. It doesn't mean that the icing and the rest aren't important, but it does mean that maybe we just pick the highlights of the plan rather than every single little step. You need to repack that gauze every... It's like, oh gosh, don't put that on your website. Definitely don't put a picture of that on your website either.

Ben Lueders:
Yeah. And I'd say too there is some real thought into really keeping that concise because you want to have, instead of having five to 10 steps there, you want something that's easy to remember, that's easy to repeat, and just really easy to ingest really fast there.

Raj Lulla:
Yeah. I mean, think about picking up hardware supplies from Home Depot's curbside service. It’s: add it to your cart, pick your location, drive up and dial this number when you get here or whatever. It's not doing your research between 18 different types of drills, decide which woodworking project are you working on here. Are you using treated lumber or are you using hardwoods or-

Ben Lueders:
That is how it feels when I go into Home Depot sometimes, not going to lie.

Raj Lulla:
But if they included every step of the process that you'd actually have to take, you would just leave the website because you go, I don't know. I'm not Ron Swanson. I'm not trying to build an Amish rocking chair here. I'm just trying to put a screw on a board here. So just what's the highest-rated drill? I don't know.

Ben Lueders:
All right. So the hero has the plan that you've given them as the guide, and so now it's time to call them into action.

Raj Lulla:
So this one is pretty simple, which is just to tell them what they need to do to do business with you, but I will say more people make it more difficult than you might think.

Ben Lueders:
Especially on websites.

Raj Lulla:
Yeah. Oh yeah.

Ben Lueders:
How many websites have you been to it's like beautiful pictures, maybe nice design, even the messaging, it seems right, but it's like, what am I supposed to do now? What is that clear call to action?

Raj Lulla:
If your website says learn more, if it has that button on your website, call me, call me because you need help. It's not a good call to action because your website is not there to educate people. It is to call them to action, and if the biggest button on your website says learn more, then you are boring them to sleep. You're not calling them to action.

Ben Lueders:
Well, another mistake I see related to this is just having too many different calls to action with all the same level of priority.
Raj Lulla:
If all the buttons are green and one says learn more and one says schedule now and one says buy now, you're going to confuse your customer and they're going to leave because there's at least a 33% chance they're going to pick the wrong button, and beyond that, even if they do think they know the right button, if they can't tell the difference for sure, it actually creates a level of anxiety in users and they will just literally leave your website. It may sound reductive to you and be like, well, we don't want customers that dumb. It's like, well, I don't know about you, but I want my business to keep growing and I'd rather do the work for my customers than have them try to figure me out.

Ben Lueders:
Yeah. Well, Raj, you already kind of hinted at it a little bit in the plan section, but what we're really trying to show them is an image of what success looks like in their story.

Raj Lulla:
Getting down to the last couple of pieces of the StoryBrand BrandScript here. Again, you go mystorybrand.com or my StoryBrand.com, it goes to the same website and it's free to create an account. You can look at all these boxes, you can look at these questions yourself, and it's just really what success does somebody experience when they do business with your brand? So great example here would be that dentist who's highly skilled. It's maybe a more pain-free experience, not being afraid of the dentist, getting your tooth pain resolved, and being able to eat your favorite foods again.

Raj Lulla:
I mean, part of the reason that we work so hard on transformation and character and problem is that you almost hit this tipping point when you go to guide where it's like you're coasting downhill for the rest of it a little bit, where if once you're in that customer's story, you realize, yeah, what are they trying to accomplish here? Now, one thing to just caution you on here, again, I'll say it with the rest of the BrandScript too, is don't put yourself into the success section. So if you find yourself saying things like your success is that you'll have the highest adhesive crown that will not fall off guaranteed because of our patented polymer formula, blah, blah. It's like, no. It's like literally, can the person eat ice cream or not?

Ben Lueders:
It's their success, not your success.

Raj Lulla:
Exactly.

Ben Lueders:
Obviously, your success is hinging on theirs, but you don't need to say that again.

Raj Lulla:
And if they don't know that they're looking for the highest tension adhesive or whatever, then don't say it. Say your tooth won't hurt anymore, and again, it's not treating your customers like they're dumb. It's treating them like they have a thousand other things on their mind and they don't care about that, and that's true for most people. When you go to a dentistry convention, you can talk to all the other dentists about how great this adhesive is, but for your general public, does your tooth hurt? Does your tooth not hurt?

Ben Lueders:
Yeah. So that's success. The seventh part and the last part of the framework is actually failure. So what part do we work failure into this? It seems like kind of a bummer to end on.

Raj Lulla:
Yeah. I think that you should always tell your client how much of a failure they are personally. It really brings them down to earth, helps you... No, no, no.

Ben Lueders:
Kick them around a little bit. Yeah. That's what you want. You want to end on that note, for sure.

Raj Lulla:
No. People do sometimes struggle with StoryBrand because it's like, wow, you talk a lot about the problem and then you talk about failure. My goodness, and they're like, isn't this negative, and the truth is it's not, for one because we don't use it a lot, but we do have to use it a little, and here's why.

Ben Lueders:
Try to sprinkle a little bit in there.

Raj Lulla:
Yeah, exactly. And here's why is because you know what could happen if they choose the wrong dentist, but they may not. They may end up choosing a dentist that they cannot afford, or they may end up choosing a dentist who's going to hurt their mouth or make them susceptible to infection for this particular ailment that they've got. You know what could go wrong and it's your duty to inform them about that. You can do it in kind of a positive way, but you could even tell them that they deserve to not worry about infection after their procedure, but you have to tell them because they won't know the risks.

Raj Lulla:
They won't know the stakes of not doing business with you, and sometimes they don't know the stakes of just not doing anything at all. Don't let this problem continue because there's so many studies about cavemen and stuff where it was actually dental disease that led to heart failure by just getting infected and all of that stuff. It can lead to much more serious problems and so many things. I'm too cheap to deal with this and I can deal with the pain because I'm tough, and it's like, yeah, but you can't deal with heart failure. So get this taken care of. You do have to warn them. Now what I wouldn't do is say, hey, get that dude taken care of or you're going to die. That's a little much, but you could say not having good dental hygiene can lead to more serious health problems.

Ben Lueders:
“So call today.” I think that's a really good point. I was even thinking about, if you think of those movie examples like the Hunger Games or something like that, that guide always does know best. It's like Haymitch or whatever in the Hunger Games, he understands what failure looks like more than Katniss would. So you have to learn from those people and you do have a level of authority because you do understand this better.

Raj Lulla:
He tells her that she has to play the game. He knows that she hates that it's televised and people make a sport out of it, but if she doesn't play to the camera a little bit, then she's not going to get the supplies she needs for when she's attacked by the wasps and when she needs healing ointment or whatever, needs more food. She's not going to get that if she doesn't play the game. So he has to tell her the stakes of what could happen if she doesn’t.

Ben Lueders:
Absolutely.

Raj Lulla:
So those are the seven elements of the StoryBrand framework. Again, you can go to mystorybrand.com and fill one out for yourself. There's also the great book, Building a StoryBrand both on audiobook and you can buy it at any of your favorite bookstores. We don't make any money for telling you this. We just believe in StoryBrand that much. I have sat with so many people who have said, oh my gosh, in 20 years of owning this business, I've never heard our value to the customer explained so clearly. I've heard that so many times and I've also heard people who are just starting up say, we thought it was this, but then when we really got on the story of the customer, we understand that it has to look a little bit more like this, that it can even change the way that you position your products or even what the experience of your product or service is based on understanding what the customer really needs.

Raj Lulla:
And sometimes what you'll find is that you're actually wasting money on pieces of the experience that customers don't really care about. If all they care about is their car is fixed at an affordable price, maybe you don't need the free sodas in the waiting room or whatever it is, especially if it'd be better for you to put that money towards Ubering them back to their job so they don't have to worry about it. Really get into the shoes of the customer and learn their story, and you'll be surprised at how much more value it adds to your business, to your marketing, and even the way that you create your products and services.

Ben Lueders:
Well, thanks for joining us today. It was fun kind of going through all the seven elements of StoryBrand. As a call to action, we want to encourage you guys to go listen to the Marketing Made Simple podcast with JJ Peterson. In episode one of that podcast, they're going to kind of take you through some of the same stuff, but this is coming from the guys who really helped create this thing and really understand it at a whole other level.

Raj Lulla:
And over the next six or seven episodes, they actually break down each piece into the more specific direction as well. You might even see a familiar face on one of those episodes.

Ben Lueders:
Raj is in episode six, I believe. So definitely check that out, subscribe, and also just thank you so much for joining us. Please go and subscribe, like, drop a comment, share this episode with a friend that you think might help, and let's grow something good together.