How to Tell Your Brand Story, from the Storytelling Master

0:00When someone comes to my door, I know, because I'm using SimpliSafe. I get an alert straight to my phone and I can see, is this someone I should unlock the door for because I know them? Or is it someone I need to tell to get lost? But here's the thing I love most about SimpliSafe. It works when I am not looking at my phone too, because when I'm not keeping an eye out, SimpliSafe is. SimpliSafe is proactive with a double layer of defense that stops crimes before they start. First, AI-powered cameras spot potential threats outside, and then live agents step in, talking to the person through the camera and letting them know they're on video and police will be dispatched if they don't leave.

0:44They can even trigger a loud siren or spotlight. That's how you help stop a crime before it starts. And SimpliSafe makes it easy to use. There are no long-term contracts, no hidden fees. You can cancel at any time. It was named Best Home Security Systems by U.S. News and World Report for five years running. It offers a 60-day money-back guarantee, so you can try it and see the difference for yourself. This month only, take 50 % off any new system. This is one of the best prices you will ever see for SimpliSafe, so don't miss it. Just go to simplisafe.com slash problem solvers. Again, that is SimpliSafe, S-I-M-P-L-I, S-A-F-E, simplisafe.com slash Problem Solvers and lock in your discount.

1:33There's no safe like SimpliSafe. From Entrepreneur Media, this is Problem Solvers, a show in which entrepreneurs do what entrepreneurs do best, solve unexpected problems in their business. We were completely wrong. And I'm just like, it's not selling. It was like, we have to start from scratch. I'm Jason Pfeiffer, the editor-in-chief of Entrepreneur Magazine.

1:59Founders struggle to pitch their brand, and it's understandable, right? How do you distill a complex company into a single sentence that will compel customers to buy? How do you take this thing that you know so well, that you have so many details to share about, and distill it down into that just few magic words. Well, in 2017, a guy named Donald Miller published an answer to that question. It was a book called Building a Story Brand, and it has now sold more than 1 million copies. And it cemented Don as the king of brand storytelling. In the book, he explains that brands must tell stories the same way that movies do.

2:41Let me just break down a couple of the really, I think, most powerful ideas. And one is never play the hero, always play the guide. That's Don. And what he's saying there is really profound. We often want to market ourselves as the hero. We are not the hero. Our companies are not the hero. Our customers are the hero. We are just the guide. And if you think about the heroes in stories and the way that movies tell stories, it's the same. Luke Skywalker has to be the hero, but Yoda is the guide. And Yoda, Yoda is who we ultimately love, who we revere. Yoda, Yoda is you. So look, your story must center on a hero.

3:25The customer needs a guide, which is you, your company. The guide provides a plan and a call to action and helps them avoid high stakes failure. Again, just like Yoda, the story must engage emotional and philosophical elements, and it must do it simply and clearly. Don recently released an updated version of this book, along with an AI tool called StoryBrand AI, which can craft taglines, marketing plans, and more. And so I started by asking Don to lay out the thing that founders just generally, foundationally don't understand about brand storytelling. And here's what he said. Everybody comes to me or many people come to me and they say, Hey, can you help us?

4:08You've got this great startup. We're trying to do this really great thing. Can you help us tell our story? We've got such a great story, you know, and there is a place I'm not saying there's not a place to tell your story, but the place to tell your story is sort of like the third date in a relationship. You know, what you really want to do on the first state is find out their story. And then once the person senses that, you know, you're interested in me and you're interested in knowing me, they really like you and they have no idea why, because they have no idea who you are. But what they actually know is that you are safe and you are for them and you are going to help them win.

4:48And, you know, that's just human nature. And so when we actually take the time to say, hey, what is our customer's problem? How can our product help them solve that problem? But let me first understand the problem. And then you help them solve that problem. Their subconscious realizes that you are their guide. Now, a guide is a character that exists in almost every story. Or usually, it's actually multiple characters. The story is about Luke Skywalker. The story is about, hey, Mitch, I mean, Katniss. The story is about, you know, whoever, Benji trying to get home. and the guide is Hamish, who's already won the Hunger Games, who's going to help Katniss win the Hunger Games.

5:29The guide is Mary Poppins, who's going to help Mr. Banks realize that he's neglecting his family. The guide is a very strong and powerful character in the story that helps the hero out of a hole. So if we want to grow a business, we have to say, look, we're in this business because our customers are in a hole. They don't know how to do this, They're having trouble with this. And we have products that can help them. And so at that point, they realize, first of all, they know they're in a hole. If they encounter you as another hero, you know, our brand has existed for 75 years. Our grandfather started the company.

6:05We're trying to increase our great places to work metric. They recognize you as another hero. And they may admire you. They may like you. They may wish you the best. But they don't want to do business with you. The reason is they're a hero in a hole and you're a hero in a hole and you're in separate holes. What they need to do is subconsciously realize they're a hero in a hole and you're standing at the top of the hole with a rope. And as soon as they realize you're at the top of the hole with a rope, they're going to be very, very interested. So we've got to get our offer really, really, really clear.

6:36And so the biggest thing is always position yourself as the guide in the story and position your customer as the hero in the story. The second thing, without getting into the whole framework, go watch the TED Talk if you want the whole framework. But the second thing is extremely clear, repeatable, and memorable sound bites. And you really need seven categories of them. However, you probably only need two in order to see fantastic growth in your business. One is, what problem do you solve? Every hero is in a hole because they have a problem. And what you want to do as a business owner or a business leader is you want to own a problem.

7:14In fact, write that down on a Post-it note, stick it on your computer and work over it over the next few weeks. You're going to own a problem. Donald Miller owns the problem of clear messaging. I own it. And we have a very successful company because I own that message. Now, I could own giving great presentations. I could own making people like you. I could, you know, the StoryBrand framework does a lot of things. but I choose to say, clarify your message, clarify your message, clarify your message, because I want to own that problem. And the more, and it's a very lucrative problem to own. So if I'm going to, so the other thing is you could say, well, Don, you know, other CRMs and companies like mine, they already own, they already have that problem.

7:56They may solve that problem, but I guarantee you they don't own it. So if they solve the same problem you solve, but you're constantly out there saying, if you struggle with X, you should buy Y. If you struggle with X, you should sign up with me. And always, when you say X, it's got to be exactly the same over and over. You've got to be so sick of saying it. And once you're sick of saying it, you just got to keep saying it. That's the only way to own that problem. Good marketing and messaging is an exercise in memorization. So the two things that I would say, position yourself as the guide, not the hero.

8:31Own a problem and do it with soundbites. I'm telling you, the king of brand storytelling. All right, we're going to take a short break. And when we come back, more with Donald Miller. All right, we're back. And I'm talking with Donald Miller, author of Building a Story Brand, and now Building a Story Brand 2.0, because he released an update to his book that has sold a million copies. Now, I'll explain more of the context a little bit later in the episode. But just know that while Don and I were talking, a bunch of early stage consumer packaged goods founders were listening. And so I asked him if he could share an example of great brand storytelling from the world of consumer packaged goods.

9:15Yeah, there's a couple. There's a couple that I can think of off the top of my head. Both of them I came up with. So I'm a little bit arrogant here. But one is there's a brand called Spectrum Brands. And Spectrum Brands is run by a guy named David Mora, who's become an acquaintance and just a really good guy. They started with George Foreman Grills. They made their money on George Foreman Grills. And then what David is really good at is finding distressed companies that he can buy for cheap and then scaling them up, fixing them and repairing them and scaling them. So he bought some sort of fish food, fish aquarium, fish filters market.

9:55he bought the company that was dominating that at PetSmart, Petco, all that kind of stuff. So I went to Florida to meet with their executives. They'd flown in from all over the world. And they're doing about$100 million in fish food, aquariums, things like that. They told me, look, we've got the hobbyists. Hobbyists walk into pet stores and they buy fish equipment. We want families and we're not getting family. And so I remembered my wife and daughter and I have a three and a half year old and she's the light of my life. And she we went to London for a month, take a little mini sabbatical. And in the apartment complex we stayed in, there was a fish tank in the lobby.

10:38And every time we couldn't pass by that fish tank without me rolling the stroller up to it for five minutes and trying to find Nemo. There were three Nemo's in this giant fish tank and we always had to find them. And I had a blast. And so I said, hey, have you guys tried just telling your customers that this is a good product for families? And they were like, what do you mean? And I'm like, well, just put kids love aquariums on everything. Put kids love aquariums on the aquariums, on the fish food, on the plants that you put on the fish themselves. Put kids love aquariums everywhere on the signage.

11:11You know, and these guys looked at me like, dude, I'm so glad our boss read your book. It's nice to meet you. Where'd you get that sweater? You know, it was like zero interest. Yeah. You're paying way too much money for kids. I'm like, wait, we get paid. We're real workers here. We're not writers, you know? And I'm like, look, look, I'm just telling you, if you put kids love aquariums on things, you're going to sell a lot. And it was very obvious they weren't going to do it with, which by the way, is the bane of my existence. I tell people this and they don't do it. You know, cause they get paid a ton of money and they don't, you know, they want to do testing and A-B testing and market research.

11:45It's pretty obvious. You see kids love aquariums, people are going to say, this is a great hamburger. You're going to sell more. And so I said in front of the group, David, will you test market this? Will you just put it in one test market? Will you promise me? And then will you pay all these people? Will you give them a raise if they don't do anything else? If they just defend kids love aquariums and they don't put any more signage or any more, because it's really hard to keep a message simple. Will you pay them to keep it simple if it works? about three months later, David calls me. Can I come to Nashville?

12:16Like, yeah, you can come to Nashville. And he sits in my office and I'm like, David, you flew to Nashville to talk to me. It's either really bad news or really good news. And he said, well, in our test market, 99 % increase in sales. 99%. Wow. If they roll that out, which of course they're going to over the, over a national release and all the pet codes and pet smarts, and you're going to start seeing signage. It may already be there. I haven't looked. That says kids love aquariums. That is a$100 million increase in sales with three freaking words, right? That's how powerful this is. And we all have to understand as business leaders and as leaders, period, people make decisions not based on colors or smells or all that shit that we spend money on.

13:05It's important, but it's not as important as the words that you use. And so you got to get psychologically in the mind of your customer. They're walking into a pet store. Almost all of them have kids. The reason they're there is because they're trying to teach kids about responsibility and pets. I mean, we have a dog and two cats, right? We don't have them because we like dogs and cats, although I do. We like them because it's our daughter. We love how she loves those kittens. I personally wouldn't have a cat, but she loves kittens. So I love kittens too. Kids love aquariums. That's it. That's going to do it.

13:37And I think we want to make things, listen, we want to make things very, very complicated and they're not complicated. And so what a genius can do, what Hemingway could do, what Annie Dillard is able to do is distill words, distill ideas into very basic fundamental concepts that make things come alive in your head when you say them. And they need to be able to be memorized and they need to be repeated over and over and over. So that's one example. The next example is Juice Plus. Juice Plus is a$400 million company. They were just here in my conference room and I was with their executives and they came up with an idea that they didn't want to ship, but I strongly encourage them to ship it and we'll see what they do.

14:23I think it's a$400 million idea. In other words, they'll go from$400 million to$800 million if they do it. And that is eat more plants. Three words, eat more plants. All of their stuff is made from plants. They don't add harmful chemicals. They don't add a bunch of crap to it. They take a truckload of kale and they put it into pills and powders and all that kind of stuff. I don't know whether it's good for you, but it sounds pretty good. Everybody knows we need to eat more plants. We all know that. And if you're trying to do that, it's really hard. And so if they want, think about eat more plants.

14:57You're telling people to eat more plants. And then your products are promising them that if they do, they have eaten more plants. It's just that simple. Now, here's what happens. And this is what's going to happen with some of the people on this call. Travis, the CEO, calls me back. And he says, hey, we were so excited about eat more plants. Super great. Great spending day with you. we may come up with a line of skin care that is not 100 % plant-based. And our R &D team is trying to figure that out right now. So we may pause on Eat More Plants. And I just said, Travis, why don't you try to cross that bridge with$400 million more in your pocket?

15:38Why don't you do that? And then you can come up with some other controlling idea for the skin care thing. I don't understand why people are allergic to money and success, but they are. And they want to complicate things, and you can't complicate things. Now, the other thing is you're like, you're going to get in your room and go, well, that's not 100 % true. This is kind of also true. We can't really make America great again. We can't really. Come on, guys. These are marketing messages. They are aspirational directions that we want to take people. And sometimes they can be absolutely true. the moral of the story here for all of us is customers do not nuance their thinking on the first pass now the second or third or fourth that's where you get like lead generators and product copy and product descriptions at this point you know if they're they're looking at your landing page and they've scrolled down five feet and they're reading a product description you can get nuanced in that you can get into the details hey we're all trying to eat more plants our stuff is 85 % plant-based.

16:43There's no fillers. If you take these supplements, it's the equivalent of eating enough vitamin C for five oranges. You can get nuanced on the second, third, fourth, fifth day, but not on the first day. And where most of us, especially startup companies, you're so deep into the trenches in what you sell and the nuances of your product that you haven't got your head around that one basic idea that makes people attracted to you so they want to know more. Does that make sense? And so that's the soundbite that you want to get, that you want to get right. Don, that was awesome. Incredible. Uh, what I noticed in particular was how, how you got those stories down to in both examples, three words, both all, both of which were, um, statements.

17:32They were, they were, they felt like simple statements. Um, I, I wonder, are you up for spending five minutes doing that live? Yeah, absolutely. Let's go. Okay. Here's where I interject. This is me talking to you, recording the podcast. To just explain the context. So I am a co-founder of a private network for early stage consumer packaged goods founders called CPG Fast Track, where we help members accelerate their businesses. It's an incredible network, an incredible experience. You gain access to folks like Don, but also just really in the weeds, authorities who could help you through all matter of challenges.

18:14If you're interested, you can go to cpgfasttrack.com and learn more and apply to join. Anyway, so this call was actually originally recorded inside of CPG Fast Track that I brought Don into. And so members were able to jump in now and start telling him about their businesses. And he was, he was just so rapid fire in coming up with incredible stories to tell. Um, I'm just going to play one of them. It was, uh, when a member named Jana Goodbaum, who has a kid's snack bar brand called happy wolf, um, all natural ingredients she'll, she'll explain it. But anyway, um, so Jana comes in and you'll hear what happens next.

18:58Jana, you had volunteered. By the way, real quick. Yeah. I'm one of the reasons I had my head down and was one minute late is I'm writing all the instructions, prompts, and rules for storybrand.ai. Now we're going to live in January and it will do this stuff for you. In fact, you can create an entire brand script and I'll write a tagline like eat more plants or kids love aquariums for you. That's incredible. it's just uh it'll be at storybrand.ai and you can join the wait list today if you want to and grab that and i'll email you when it's ready please do that's incredible okay well then uh then we're doing it old school here because we have to use an actual human being and process it through your slow brain you know it's funny this is this is funny and kind of sad and kind of cool at the same time i this morning my early morning project was working on our my our family mantra and mission statement and core values and building a bunch of prompts so that AI, I mean, we knew our mission statement is life can be beautiful.

19:58And our, I'm sorry, our mantra is life can be beautiful. Our mission statement is in a world tempted by cynicism, we believe life can be beautiful. And then we came up with core values, but it was amazing how much AI took those core values and helped me spell them out and distill them. We can teach them to our daughter. Oh, that's awesome. It's amazing how, well, how really brilliant it actually is. Yeah. I cannot wait to play with that AI tool. That's amazing. But for now, let's do it old school with human beings. So, Jana, are you there? Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Jana has a kid's brand appropriate for Kids Love Aquariums, but she's not selling aquariums.

20:34Jana, can you give Don a quick overview of Happy Wolf? Yeah. Perfect for your three-year-old daughter. We make snack bars made from real whole foods that live in the fridge instead of the pantry. Okay, so they have to be refrigerated? Okay. I did the whole, I did the exercise, but I don't know. Okay, well, first of all, just off the top of my head, real food can't live in a pantry. Can't live in the pantry. Yeah. Or real food has to be refrigerated. I mean, that's not your tagline, right? But it's nice, and it should be on your packaging. real food lives in the fridge real food in the fridge real food real food i would say real food has to live in the fridge right um not necessarily true because an apple doesn't have to live in a fridge and a banana doesn't but i think people understand what you're talking about you know uh and so i i first of all i would actually use that line a lot you know remember real food, real food has to live in the fridge.

21:42You know, why buy our stuff? You know, why work harder to buy our stuff or why people, because real food has to live in the fridge, you know? So I love it. You might just go ahead and ship it because, you know, a wine like that should make immediate sense. It should make immediate sense. And when, and even as I hear this, I'm thinking, you know, I, we feed our daughter, we feed our daughter, like probably 50, 40 % out of our own garden. But at the same time, I just gave her a snack bar the other day that had probably been in the pantry for three months. Now, if I saw a different snack bar that said - We always say like homemade, but we did it for you.

22:20Does that resonate for you? Actually, another quick interjection. This was recorded a few months ago. So Hannah, actually a quick interjection. This was recorded a few months ago. So Jana's been out in Whole Foods. It's going great. I like it, but I don't like it as much. Yeah, because like homemade, you know, Prego Italian pasta sauce would say like homemade, but we did it for you. It doesn't actually get to the unique differentiator. And more importantly, real food has to live in the fridge or because real food has to live in the fridge. It's a massive differentiator. And it's a warning. It's a warning about a villain.

22:57It's a warning about people are much more motivated to avoid negativity than they are to achieve positivity. And so you're basically you're basically shutting out all the competition. There's now no competition. In fact, I like it as a tagline. I mean, you know, I'd rather sleep on it, but I really like it as a tagline because real food has to live in the fridge. I'm going to send you some bars for your daughter and then you can think about the tag. Are they like refrigerated? How are you going to get them here? Oh, with ice packs. Hey, believe me. We'll talk after. Where can I get them? Do I get them online or do I get them at Whole Foods or where do I get them?

23:38Whole Foods next week. A quick interjection. This was recorded a few months ago. So actually, Happy Wolf is now at Whole Foods and it's doing great. You can get it there. Oh, brilliant. All right. You count on me for some sales. But listen, okay, so let's talk now real quick about how to execute this. Yeah. It's got to be on every package. It's got to be picture the snack bars because real food has to live in the fridge on your on the header of your website. It needs to be on every business card. Remember, it's it is it is an exercise and memorization, meaning you are causing people to memorize that idea.

24:15And, you know, what that means is you got to repeat it over and over and over and over. You know, and the reason our snack bars are so healthy is because they're made with ingredients that not unlike nature decay over time. That's why they have to be in the fridge. Listen, people, real food has to be in the fridge. You know, by the way, if you cut out anything, any food that doesn't have to be refrigerated in order to last longer, you will probably be healthier. You know, and, you know, that's a whole keynote address, right, the whole speech, it's a whole elevator pitch. You know, and people say, well, I want to have to refrigerate my food.

24:55Well, that's fine. You also don't want to have to live longer or feel good or be healthy or not struggle with inflammation, right? Yeah. If you don't want to have to do that. Yeah. So I love it. Eat it out of the fridge, eat your food out of the fridge. All right. And from there, Don helped a few other members out and then he had to run. Don, we are so appreciative of your time spending at CPG Fast Track and just explaining brand storytelling to everyone. Truly, I could not recommend this book more. highly. I have read it and took copious notes. And I am a storyteller by profession. Again, it's called building a story brand.

25:31And that's our episode. I would love to hear what you think, and maybe even about a problem that you solved. You can find me at my website, jasonfeifer.com. J-A-S-O-N-F-E-I-F-E-R.com. Also, I have some more useful stuff for you. I write a newsletter about how to future-proof yourself and become more adaptable and optimistic. I would love for you to sign up. It is at jasonpfeiffer.bulletin.com. Also, check out my other podcast. It's called Build for Tomorrow. In each episode, I take on some belief that we have that holds us back from progress and show you why it is not as bad as you think. Problem Solvers is a production of Entrepreneur Media and comes out every Monday morning, so make sure you're subscribed so you don't miss an episode.

26:16Thanks to Deepa Shah for production. My name is Jason Pfeiffer. See you next week.