#96: The Missing Piece of StoryBrand: Why I Wrote My New Book

0:00This is kind of a special episode. I'll be announcing the biggest evolution of StoryBrand since we started 10 years ago. I think it's the book that everybody who runs a small company needs. I think it's every CMO and every large company needs. This is their marketing system. This is their operating system. And I think it's every freelance marketer or marketing agency. This is the book that you want because it helps you figure out how to write an entire messaging marketing campaign. and put it on a single sheet of paper so that you can see it, you can understand it. Here's the words we're gonna use to talk about the product.

0:38With incredible discipline, we are going to use these words. We're not getting off message. And here's where we're gonna put those words. And here's the deadlines on every piece of collateral that we are going to create. This is what has been missing in the world of marketing. You're listening to the StoryBrand Podcast based on Donald Miller's bestselling book, Building a StoryBrand. The StoryBrand framework is made up of seven key elements, all of them anchored in one powerful idea. Your customer is the hero and you are their guide. Each week on the podcast, you'll get exactly what you need to craft clear messaging that connects with more customers and grows your business.

1:16Now let's dive in with your host, Donald Miller.

1:24if you're an old story brand fan and you love the seven-part framework and you read building a story brand you've used it to grow your business and clarify your message today's going to be especially fun why in the world would there be a new evolution well that is the that's the subject of today's podcast it's part announcement of uh the new evolution of story brand and the new tool that we've created and part me as donald miller the writer uh talking to you about the creative process and how this new evolution came about. Going back, gosh, 12 years now at least. In fact, let's see, I have been married 13 years come this November, and it was before we got married, the year before we got married, that I started teaching the StoryBrand framework.

2:09There was no book. There was no workshop. I was teaching it as a breakout session in another workshop that I was doing. But I knew this thing had some kind of a future. I mean, the idea that you could filter your marketing messages through an ancient narrative framework was exciting to me. It was fun. I had counseled a couple, consulted with a couple of businesses. We saw exponential growth in those businesses. I knew that this could probably be a big deal. And so we started the StoryBrand workshop. We had, I don't know, between 50 and 100 people come. We do that about twice a year. And it was during those workshops when I began really honing in the seven-part framework and helping myself even understand what it was, starting to develop case studies of people who've been to those workshops, and we would go back and employ their new message.

3:05and the business started growing. And then I took about a year and a half, I think, to write Building a Story Brand, the book. So that book came out probably four years after the Story Brand framework had been created and workshopped with, oh gosh, it had to be about a thousand different small businesses. And we were off to the races. I mean, we've just had so much fun. I've gotten to work with hundreds, if not thousands of small businesses in person. I've gotten to work with Fortune 500 companies, government agencies. I literally, Donald Miller, who did not graduate from Alvin Community College, home of the fighting dolphins, that guy who was never supposed to succeed in his life, wrote a bestselling business book.

3:53So the book came out and obviously the consulting business kept going and we certified story brand certified guides. These are freelance marketers who could use story brand methodologies and that program went extremely well. We've just had an absolute blast. And we've kept doing it for the last, since the book came out, nine and a half years. And one thing I noticed, though, as I used the StoryBrand framework to clarify our own messages in my own business, was that I would finish clarifying the message using the StoryBrand framework, and I would sit there and I'd look at my new sound bites that came out of the StoryBrand framework, but I didn't exactly know what to do with them.

4:34Um, and I'm the guy who created the framework. I, I mean, I knew, I knew enough to know, okay, they, these have to show up on websites and emails and lead generators and YouTube videos, you know, all that kind of stuff. But as, as, as great as the process was to create those seven categories of sound bites and invite customers into a story with the story of a framework, as great of a process as that was, there was no process to take it and put it into actual marketing collateral that would get a return on the time that you invested in creating those soundbites. And that kind of bothered me. Another thing bothered me.

5:14Hundreds and hundreds of people, it's got to be thousands now, would come through a StoryBrand workshop, or I would go to them and deliver a private workshop, or one of our facilitators would go and deliver a private workshop on the StoryBrand framework. They would get so excited and be so pleased at their new soundbites. And then a month and two months and three months later, their website looked the same. Nothing changed. There was nothing that they shipped that was any different because that clear message got stuck in committee or somebody on the marketing staff decided they didn't like it or the old founder of the company who's still chairman of the board would say, I don't like this.

5:54This is too simple. I like our real thing. It would just get stuck. and teams that had clarified their message had trouble communicating their message and how they came up with it and why they should use it to all the other stakeholders who needed to buy in. That was a problem for nearly a decade. People would invest in StoryBrand, they'd clarify their message, and ultimately it wouldn't get what we call into the end zone. You drop the play, you get to the five-yard line. I'm sorry, you don't get any points for getting to the five-yard line. That always bothered me. It always bothered me. So I sat down to write a book and the book was going to be called Story Brand Your Business.

6:33And it was basically some information about how to clarify your message in case you hadn't read Building a Story Brand, but then how to execute an implementation book. And I got 40 % through that book. I opened up my calendar so that every morning I could spend writing and I'd go to Silver Fox Coffee on Music Row in Nashville, Tennessee, great coffee shop. And I'd sit there for hours and I'd write this book. And I got about 40 % through that book and realized, wait, wait a second, this really needs a worksheet. It needs something that the book, that I can point people to in the book to say, hey, go to the back of the book and put this part of what I'm talking about on this part of the worksheet.

7:17So I stopped writing and I said, okay, let me design the worksheet. And I designed the worksheet. And then as I looked at the worksheet, I realized, oh my word, it's the worksheet. I'm writing a 300-page book and all we need is this one sheet of paper. That's it. You don't need a 300-page book. You need this one sheet of paper. And let me explain what's on the sheet of paper. The top of the paper has the five foundational soundbites. These are derivatives of the original story brand framework. They're the problem soundbite, empathy, answer change, and end result soundbite. Those five soundbites are five of the seven categories of soundbites.

8:01There's actually about 13 soundbites in the framework, but these are the most important ones. So you got those. And then right beneath that on the worksheet, there's your tagline. Now, I have, since I wrote Building a Story Brand, I've fallen in love with the idea of a tagline. And the reason I fall in love with the idea of a tagline is I think a good tagline is as valuable to growing your business as all seven categories of soundbites in the StoryBrand framework. I hate admitting that because taglines existed before I came along and the StoryBrand framework didn't, but your tagline is the most powerful tool you can use to grow your business.

8:36But only if you apply it and you filter it through certain rules. And most taglines for most companies are complete wastes of money. They're ridiculous. They're a joke. They don't do a good job growing your business. But if you use my rules, which are make it zero cognitive load, don't make people think, make it memorable and repeatable so that people can repeat it to their friends, make sure you make the customer the hero, and link it to survival. So it's got it. And then the final rule is this, make it an offer. Your tagline needs to be an offer. You know, you might have heard me talk about Tetris brand.

9:15They sell fish food and aquariums and all that kind of stuff. We asked them to change their tagline to kids love aquariums. I think it was, you know, something like in pursuit of excellence or something like that. I mean, it was something that was like unrelated to fish tanks before we came along. And together with the very, very, very, very ridiculously smart people who are over there at Tetris, came up with Kids Love Aquariums. They saw a 99 % increase in sales in a test market when they used that tagline. No, they put the tagline everywhere. Put it on the end caps of PetSmart and Petco. They put it on their products.

9:50They put it on their aquariums. Put it on their website. Kids Love Aquariums. Well, it makes sense. Think about three words to see a 99 % increase in sales. That's how powerful a tagline is. But only if it's an offer. Only if it's an offer. If it's not an offer, it doesn't work unless you're a multibillion-dollar household name brand. Nike can say just do it, but we all know that they sell athletic shoes and athletic equipment, so just get off your butt and go run. I get that. Have a Coke and a smile. It doesn't have to be an offer, although have a Coke and a smile, by the way, is an offer. You see what I'm saying?

10:28But if your tagline, I remember working with national security, and we changed their tagline to intelligence means victory. Well, that's an offer. It's an offer to Congress. It's an offer to the American people. Intelligence means victory. It's an offer to win wars, right? StoryBrand's tagline is clarify your message so customers engage. Well, clarify your message so customers engaging is an offer. So your tagline needs to be an extremely clear offer. I work with a bunch of brands, and we come up with these taglines, and I just make sure it's an offer. Because if you think about it, if it's a memorable and repeatable offer that you don't have to think to understand, and people are saying it to their friends, your sales pitch in three to seven words is out there in the world, and it's growing your business.

11:18So the tagline has to be in this worksheet, which I'm going to get to in a second. The five soundbites, the tagline, then the elevator pitch. The elevator pitch is the next thing on the worksheet. The elevator pitch is your problem soundbite, your answer soundbite, and your end result soundbite. So do you have a dog that barks every time somebody knocks on the door? That's a problem. Do you have a dog that barks every time somebody knocks on the door? I train your dog not to bark in three easy sessions using only a handful of treats. That's the answer soundbite. What I do to solve your problem, what I sell that solves your problem is I train your dog not to bark.

12:00And then the end result, so that when somebody knocks at the door, your dog sits quietly beside you and you welcome your guests warmly as the master of the house. Do you hear that? That's an elevator pitch. Problem, answer, end result, soundbite. your elevator pitch is, you know, if your brand gets introduced to somebody through your tagline, your elevator pitch is almost like your explanation of the tagline. It's almost like, wow, that sounds really good. Kids love aquariums. You know, we have a kid and we're going to give them a pet. Well, then you would go into your elevator pitch and your elevator pitch would sort of explain the offer in a little bit more detail.

12:40And what science has proven is that people need to be introduced to an idea with a single line before they're interested in hearing even 20 seconds that defends that line. So we're literally, the worksheet is going through the evolution of how the human brain engages an idea or becomes attracted to a product. The next thing on that worksheet is the brand story. And the brand story is five different soundbites that you stitch together. So it's the problem, empathy, answer, change, and result soundbite, all stitched together to kind of tell the story of how this customer's problem can be solved if you buy our product.

13:16This would replace the About Us page on your website, that brand story. So think about this worksheet that I created. It's the five soundbites, tagline, elevator pitch, and brand story. All that is on the left side of the worksheet. Now, here's where it gets exciting. On the right side of the worksheet, I included what we call a campaign map. And the campaign map is every piece of marketing collateral that you're going to create using the text that's on the left side of the page. Every piece of marketing collateral that you're going to create using the text that's on the left side of the page.

13:51We're talking about headers on your website, landing pages, lead generators, social media collateral, keynote pitches, proposals, pitch decks, all that kind of stuff. And they need to go in order of how the customer would encounter them. So from curiosity to enlightenment to commitment, what is the curiosity collateral? How are we pulling people in and attracting them to this product? Then in the enlightenment category, how are we letting them and educating them on what this product does and how it works and how much it costs and how you would onboard it and on-ramp it and all that kind of stuff?

14:24You know, these would be case studies, white papers, you know, YouTube videos, instructional videos, keynote presentations, open houses, things like that. And then in the commitment, it's proposals, pitch decks, buying incentives. So the campaign map on the right side actually forces you to create some curiosity collateral, enlightenment collateral, and commitment collateral. That's it. That's the whole worksheet. And I decided to call this worksheet the StoryBrand Messaging Canvas. And my gosh, we made a free copy available online without explaining what it was. Amazon Web Services got a hold of it.

15:06The marketing vice president at Amazon Web Services called us and said, can you explain this? I explained it. And then he said, can I bring four of my leaders in who are running four different, some of the multi-billion dollar brands, and we just fill this out with you in the room? So we did that. They came to Nashville. And then he said, I've got 95 product marketing managers. Can we put them all in the room and create 95 taglines, 95 elevator pitches, and 95 brand stories for over$100 billion worth of companies? And we went to Seattle and we did with that. And while we were doing that, I realized, I think the book that I've written 40 % of does not need to be written.

15:50I think a new book needs to be written, and it's an instruction manual to fill out this one sheet of paper. And so I started writing a book called The Story Brand Your Business Field Guide. and that book, without me knowing what was happening, I literally thought this is some sort of lead generator or some sort of back-end thing that only nerds would be interested in. That is the fastest I have ever written a book. They say when you're writing, when you're at your best and you're in the flow, it feels like you're channeling God. I'm not saying I channeled God. I'm not starting a cult here, but it's the fastest I've ever written a book.

16:31I think literally from beginning to end, I think it was 45 days. The fastest I'd written a book before that was a little over a year. So 45 days, half days at Silver Fox Coffee, I just wrote this thing. And I am crazy about this book. I think it's the book that everybody who runs a small company needs. I think it's every CMO and every large company needs. This is their marketing system. This is their operating system. And I think it's every freelance marketer or marketing agency. This is the book that you want because it helps you figure out how to write an entire messaging marketing campaign and put it on a single sheet of paper so that you can see it, you can understand it.

17:13Here's the words we're going to use to talk about the product. With incredible discipline, we are going to use these words. We're not getting off message. And here's where we're going to put those words. And here's the deadlines on every piece of collateral that we are going to create. This is what has been missing in the world of marketing. And it's called the StoryBrand messaging canvas. And the book is called the StoryBrand, your business field guide. Do you ever wonder why some marketing instantly grabs your attention while other marketing you just ignore? It's not about luck. It's not about a bigger budget.

17:44It's that the marketing that works actually follows just a few simple principles that actually makes it easier to understand, makes it memorable, and most important, impossible to overlook. That's why StoryBrand has a free guide, the four rules of messaging that will teach you those principles. In just a few minutes, you'll have a simple framework for evaluating every message you create from your website and emails to your ads and sales conversations. Download your free copy of those four rules today by clicking the link in the show notes. Let me tell you the problem that I think this book solves and the reason that I think it's the greatest evolution of StoryBrand.

18:23I sometimes wonder, I think the StoryBrand Your Business field guide is infinitely more helpful in terms of getting practical results. Building StoryBrand has very entertaining stories and it's very entertainingly written, although I think this book is too. But this is an instruction book on how to actually implement good messaging inside of a marketing campaign. What's happening because we don't have this one page is that chief marketing officers at companies are the shortest tenured position in the C-suite. And I'm convinced it's because this book doesn't exist or didn't exist, that that is why the CMO is the shortest tenured person.

19:02I really believe it because I've worked with CMOs and the problem with CMOs is not that most of them aren't intelligent. They're incredibly intelligent. They're incredibly creative. They're incredibly good at their job. The problem is they can't explain to anybody what they're doing. And nobody really understands, especially the CEO, what in the world it is that we've got going on here. So all we do is we watch revenue. And if revenue doesn't come in, we fire the CMO. Therefore, the CMO is the shortest tenured person in the C-suite. Not only that, there was a study that I referenced in the book that said that up to 90 % of CEOs, 90 % do not trust their CMO.

19:42Imagine that. Imagine the CEO of a company. 90 % of CEOs of companies do not trust that their CMO knows what they're doing. And I guarantee you it's not because the CMO doesn't know what they're doing for the most part. It's because they can't see what the CMO is doing. So imagine a CMO going into the CEO's office, handing them one sheet of paper and saying, you know that product that we're launching? This is the problem that that product solves. And we really want to talk a lot about this problem. This is the statement that we're going to use to empathize with the customer. This is how we're going to describe the product with this answer soundbite.

20:19With this change soundbite, we're going to offer the customer an identity transformation, an aspirational identity if they use our product. And with this end result soundbite, we're going to give them a vision of what their life can look like if they buy our product. We're just going to use those five soundbites, boss. That's it. We're going to use those five soundbites over and over. Now, let's summarize that story we're inviting customers into, into one tagline. Three to five to seven words. Preferably three words. You know what we're going to repeat over and over? Kids love aquariums. That's what we're going to repeat.

20:50We're going to repeat it until we're blue in the face. We're going to make sure everybody in the world knows that kids love aquariums. In fact, I would say it's the dominant job of our marketing dollars is to get people to repeat three words, kids love aquariums. That's what we're going to do. Now, if somebody says, tell me more, we're going to use our elevator pitch. So we're going to put this on the back of our products. We're going to put it on the subtitle on websites. We're going to put it in email signatures. We're going to put it on the back of our business cards. We're going to repeat this elevator pitch.

21:19Now, if people, you know, there's going to be some people who just really fall in love with us. Maybe they buy an aquarium. They really love it. In that packaging, when they buy that aquarium, there's going to be a sheet of paper. It's going to say, our story. And then this is the brand story. It's these five sound bites stitched together as a brand story. We're going to put this in these 37 places so that people can see that. And then over here on the right side, boss, we've got, this is how we're going to get people interested. We're going to use these lines in social media. And then we're going to use these lines in our white papers, in our case studies, in our keynote presentations, in our surrogate speakers, and all that kind of stuff.

21:54We're going to use these lines. We call this enlightenment collateral. And then here's the incentives that we're going to give people to go ahead and buy those aquariums and that fish food and that stuff. We're going to give them these incentives. Buy one, get one free. Fish November or whatever. We're going to give people a discount in the month of November. This is the strategy around it. The CEO... looking at a single sheet of paper sitting across from their CMO would say, I have hired the greatest CMO in the history of the world. I've hired the greatest CMO in the history of the world. Nobody for decades has been able to explain what the heck they're doing over there in marketing.

22:33Now, the truth is there's a lot more than what's on that single sheet of paper. The spreadsheet still exists, right? The 700 slide PowerPoint deck still exists for the internal marketing team, But externally, to the sales team, to the CEO, to the customer service team, this is what they're going to get, an overview of how we're going to talk about this new product or this existing product that we're relaunching. That's the power of the StoryBrand messaging canvas. And so I began this podcast by saying the greatest evolution in the history of StoryBrand is about to happen. And that evolution is the StoryBrand messaging canvas explained in a book called The StoryBrand Your Business Field Guide.

23:20And that book is available to pre-order right now. You can pre-order that book right now. Make sure you get one of the first copies that comes out. Another thing that I'm really excited about is not just how I wrote this book and the fact that it feels like I channeled God when I wrote this book, and it was the easiest book I've ever written. Thank God for that. Books are nightmares to write, and this one was just simple. But I actually partnered with James Clear, who wrote Atomic Habits. James Clear has a publishing entity called Authors' Equity. It's a small publishing house that only prints about 20, 25 books a year.

23:57And the average large, one of the top five publishing companies in New York will print an upwards of 200 books a year. So it's a smaller company, and I've had nothing but positive experiences in publishing my entire career. Thomas Nelson, HarperCollins, boy, I've never had a bad publishing experience. I've loved every single bit of it. These guys have been the best experience I've ever had in publishing. And the fact that James is excited about this book is exciting to me as well. What I would do if you run a small business, I would buy this book, I would read it, and I would fill out a messaging canvas using the tools in the back of the book.

24:38You actually get a messaging canvas in the book. You actually get 20 of them, but you can fill one out. If you are the CMO, I would fill one of these out for your overall brand. I would fill one out for every single product, and I would make it. Steve Sloan, by the way, at Amazon Web Services, has thrown out their marketing implementation tool. They're only using the StoryBrand messaging canvas. For all 395 Amazon Web Services companies, all of them, they only use the StoryBrand messaging canvas now. It's a very, very powerful tool. Steve Sloan told me personally that he thinks it's going to make them over a billion dollars, just the canvases themselves.

25:14So if you're a big-time CMO, I would at least read the book and see if you guys want to install this and if it works in your system. That's really, really great. It is a messaging and marketing operating system that you would install into your business. Like EOS is an operating system to run your business. This is an operating system to run your messaging and your marketing. I would also say that if you're a freelance marketer, the same problem that exists with chief marketing officers exists with you as a freelance marketer. And that is you're having trouble explaining the value that you offer to your clients.

25:50Your clients don't know what you're doing. They don't know what you're doing. And to be able to sit down and fill out with them or for them a story brand messaging canvas and sit down and explain, here's how we want to talk about your product. And here's where we want to talk about your product. The left side is how we talk about it. The right side is where we talk about it. Get on the same page with the client, ship that marketing campaign, measure its results. If it's not getting the results you want, come up with a new canvas and ship something different. But the very process of filling out that canvas and getting it on one page is the magic.

26:27It's the magic to keeping your job as a freelancer and getting more clients and getting clients that buy more from you. It's the magic that's going to help you keep your job as a CMO. But ultimately, it's the magic of shipping a disciplined messaging and marketing campaign. Now, what's great about this product is that the world all sounds the same with AI. AI is a terrible writer. I'm not saying it's not going to be a great writer in the future. It's just not a good writer right now. And what's interesting about Claude or ChatGPT is they all write with the same voice. And when you see it, you know that it was AI.

27:06And it's not that it's bad writing. It's just the same. It's like having one writer write everybody's marketing and messaging copy. The reason that we're doing it is because it's just so easy. It takes minutes instead of days. Well, you can use AI to sort of—in fact, StoryBrand AI has a messaging canvas in it that you can actually use. But we take all of that nonsense out. I have 110 single-states pages that make sure that AI does not sound like AI at StoryBrand AI. But you can also use AI to fill out this messaging canvas and come up with ideas. And here's our tagline. Here's this and here's that.

27:42And you stay disciplined and you sound different. Not only that, you sound human. This forces you to invite customers into a story in which they play the hero and you play the guide, helping them win the day. And that is the foundation of StoryBrand. So anybody who fills out a messaging canvas and ships it is going to sound human. They're going to sound different. They're going to sound disciplined. They're going to repeat themselves so the audience memorizes. the message, and they're going to execute that message in curiosity, enlightenment, and commitment collateral. It forces you to create a great campaign.

28:16If you are a business owner or a CEO who has a CMO or a marketing director, consider this. Grab a copy of the book on Amazon. It's also available on Audible. On Audible, by the way, I read the entire field guide, But then I also added an hour of case studies at the end that are not in the regular book. And I talk for an hour about the actual messaging canvases that some of my clients have used to see dramatic results. And I get into some of the best practices of those as an audio bonus. But I would get the book and the audio book, and I would hand it to your marketing director if you like it. If you like it, I would hand it to the marketing director, and I would say everything that we do has to filter through this one page now.

28:59In other words, we're not going to release anything unless you give me a messaging canvas. And then I would actually also say, we're also going to relaunch or repackage all of our main products. So once a month, I want you to hand me a messaging canvas about one of our best-selling products every month. So we're going to do 12 of them a year, and we're just going to keep doing this for the next several years. We're going to keep repackaging our products with discipline, with sharper messages that get the public's attention. I think we've created a great tool for you. Again, it was the easiest book I've ever written, the fastest book I've ever written, and I think the most helpful book I've ever written from a business perspective.

29:39It's called the Storybrainer Business Field Guide, and I'm really, really excited to bring it to you in the market. And I would love for you, by the way, if you buy it and it's helpful, will you please just go on Amazon and say, this is how this book helped me? Because I don't know, the world's just kind of hurting right now. Small businesses are hurting. They don't know how to do marketing and messaging. AI is supposed to make it easier. That was the promise. Definitely made it easier. It just made it less effective. And I hope that we have changed that. That's my announcement. That's the best evolution that has happened to StoryBrand in 10 years.

30:15And I think 2027 is going to be an extremely good year, but only if you clarify your message and create a marketing campaign with great discipline and execute that campaign with discipline. The StoryBrand Your Business Field Guide is available January 12th. So we're in the pre-order stage of the book. But you wanna go ahead and grab a copy, just grab it now and it'll be shipped to you the date that it comes out. A lot of times these books come out a little bit early and so you'll get one of the first copies. I don't want you to miss it. It's available on Amazon, but you can pre-order that book right now.

31:18Thanks again for listening, and we'll see you next week.