"Building a StoryBrand: Clarify Your Message So Customers Will Listen" chapter 1-3

The New York Times bestseller "Building a StoryBrand: Clarify Your Message So Customers Will Listen", written by Donald Miller, is a book about storytelling in marketing. Why do so many businesses fail even with good products and lots of marketing materials? Why do customers click to another website without placing an order? What do customers really want? All these questions are answered in the book.

What's the relationship between story and marketing?

Stories are agreed by many branding experts to be the most powerful tool that helps organize information. Since story is a sense-making mechanism, customers don't have to burn too many calories trying to understand the message given on the marketing collateral.

How to do good branding?

★ Related to customers' real needs

According to Maslow's hierarchy of needs, it's human's primitive need to survive and thrive, so positioning products and services as something that help people survive, thrive, be accepted, find love, or achieve an aspirational identity can definitely attract customers and increase sales. However, if the information of products or services that companies provide have nothing to do with helping customers survive or thrive, customers will ignore them.

★ Deliver simple and clear message

When customers receive too much or too complicated information, they will ignore the information to conserve calories, which means the survival mechanism in their brain will start working when facing useless or confusing information. The more simple the communication is, the easier it is for customers to understand you and listen to you.

Alfred Hitchcock once said that a good story is like life with the dull parts taken out. Good branding is the same. The unnecessary and confusing information should not exist in a good story, or the audience is going to burn many calories trying to understand. But how do we know whether the marketing is simple and clear for customers? If customers can answer the below questions after looking at the website or ads of a company, then they are likely to be potential customers.

1. What does the company offer?

2. How will the products or services make customers' lives better?

3. What do customers need to do to buy the products?

Reflection

After reading this book, I started to pay attention to marketing collateral in our daily life to see if it really followed the rules written in the book. Does the information focus on customers' survival in a simple and clear way? Or does it provide too much information that customers cannot find the core message?

I think Apple can be the most successful example in marketing. Their advertisements feature their customers as the hero in the story, not the products. They don't tell customers all the technical features that normal people don't understand. Instead, they are telling customers' story and inserting themselves into it. Their commercials are so simple and clear that even those who are not their fans can immediately understand the products' functions.

People don't buy the best products; they buy the products they can understand the fastest.