Ignore This Self-Sabotaging 'Instinct' If You Want to Tell Your Brand's Story Effectively, Marketing Expert Says Donald Miller wrote the bestselling book 'Building a StoryBrand,' and he believes a good tagline keeps it simple, stupid.

Founders struggle to pitch their brand. How do you distill a complex company into a single sentence that will compel customers to buy?

In 2017, Donald Miller published an answer to that: It's a book called Building a StoryBrand, and it's now sold more than a million copies and has cemented him as the king of brand storytelling. In it, he explains that brands must tell stories the same way that movies do: Your story must center on a hero (your customer) who needs a guide (your company), and the guide provides a plan, a call to action, and helps them avoid high-stakes failure. The story must engage emotional and philosophical elements. And it must do so simply and clearly.

Miller recently released an updated version of his book, along with an AI tool called StoryBrand AI, which can craft taglines, marketing plans, and more. In this conversation, he explains the most important part of brand storytelling — being a guide! — and how to communicate your value in a single, powerful sentence.

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Your framework begins with this important idea: The customer is always the hero of the story. Why is that?

Many people come to me and say, "We've got such a great story." But the place to tell your story is sort of like the third date in a relationship. What you really want to do on the first date is find out their story. Once the person senses that you're interested in knowing them, they start to really like you. They have no idea who you are, but they know that you are for them.

So when we take the time to say, "Hey, what is our customer's problem? How can our product help them solve that problem?" their subconscious realizes that you are their guide. The guide is a very strong and powerful character who helps the hero out of a hole. They exist in almost every story.

So if we want to grow a business, we have to say, "We're in this business because our customers are in a hole, and we have products that can help them out." And customers know they're in a hole. But if they encounter you as another hero — as a business saying, "Our brand has existed for 75 years, and we're trying to increase our great-place-to-work metric" — they may admire you, but they don't want to do business with you. The reason for that 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 that, they're gonna be very, very interested.

So how do you help them make that realization?

Extremely clear, repeatable, and memorable sound bites. One kind is: What problem do you solve? As a business leader, you want to own a problem. Other companies may solve that problem, but I guarantee you they don't own it. The only way you can own a problem is if you're constantly out there saying, "If you struggle with X, you should buy Y." And it's gotta be exactly the same, over and over. You've gotta be so sick of saying it. And once you're sick of saying it, you just gotta keep saying it.

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What's an example of a sound bite that shows how powerful they can be?

There's a brand called Spectrum Brands. It's run by a guy named David Maura. David is really good at finding distressed companies that he can buy for cheap, then fixing them and scaling them. So he bought a company that was dominating the fish food, fish aquarium, fish filters market at PetSmart, Petco. They're doing about $100 million in things like that. So I went to Florida to meet with their executives. They'd flown in from all over the world, and they told me, "Look, we've got the hobbyists. We want families, and we're not getting families."

So I remembered my wife and daughter. We went to London, and in the apartment complex we stayed in, there was a fish tank in the lobby. We couldn't pass by that fish tank without me rolling the stroller up to it for five minutes and trying to find Nemo. And I had a blast. So I said, "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 inside the aquariums, on the signage, on the fish themselves. Put 'Kids love aquariums' everywhere." And these guys looked at me — there was zero interest.

Like, "We're paying you way too much money for 'Kids love aquariums.'"

And I'm like, "Look, I'm just telling you, if you put 'Kids love aquariums' on things, you're gonna sell a lot." And it was very obvious they weren't gonna do it. Because they get paid a ton of money, and they want to do A/B testing and market research.

I said in front of the group, "David, will you just put it in one test market? And then will you give all these people a raise if they don't do anything else — if they just defend 'Kids love aquariums'?" Because it's really hard to keep a message simple. About three months later, David tells me, "In our test market, [we saw a] 99% increase in sales."

Wow.

If they roll that out over a national release, that is a $100 million increase in sales with three freaking words. That's how powerful this is.

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I'd love to see you think through this process in real time. So I'll use an example. I work with a founder named Jana Goodbaum, whose brand, Happy Wolf, makes kids' snack bars made from real, whole foods — so it needs to be refrigerated, instead of in the pantry. What would you do with that?

Well, just off the top of my head, "Real food can't live in a pantry" — or, "Real food has to live in the fridge." It's 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 it's saying: Why buy our stuff? Because real food has to live in the fridge.

That takes a challenging aspect of the brand, and turns it into a selling point.

A line like that should make immediate sense. It's a massive differentiator. And it's a warning — about a villain. People are much more motivated to avoid negativity than they are to achieve positivity. You're basically shutting out all the competition.

So you've got the line. What next?

It's got to be on every package, on the header of your website, on every business card. Good marketing and messaging is an exercise in memorization. You are causing people to memorize that idea. Repeat it over and over and over and over. Get it into the mind of your customer.

Our instinct is to make things very complicated, and they're not complicated. Distill ideas into very basic fundamental concepts that make things come alive in your head when you say them. Customers do not nuance their thinking on the first pass. Now on the second or third or fourth pass, that's where you get into lead generators and product copy and product descriptions.

Most of us — especially startup companies — are so deep in the trenches in what we sell and the nuances of the product that we haven't got our head around that one basic idea that makes people attracted to us, so they want to know more. That's the sound bite that you want to get.

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