on 28-Jan-2019 (Mon)

The more simple and predictable the communication, the easier it is for the brain to digest.

Human beings are constantly scanning their environment (even advertising) for information that is going to help them meet their primitive need to survive. All great stories are about survival—either physical, emotional, relational, or spiritual. The key is to make your company’s message about something that helps the customer survive and to do so in such a way that they can understand it without burning too many calories.

Human beings are constantly scanning their environment (even advertising) for information that is going to help them meet their primitive need to survive. All great stories are about survival—either physical, emotional, relational, or spiritual. The key is to make your company’s message about something that helps the customer survive and to do so in such a way that they can understand it without burning too many calories.

In a story, audiences must always know who the hero is, what the hero wants, who the hero has to defeat to get what they want, what tragic thing will happen if the hero doesn’t win, and what wonderful thing will happen if they do.

When marketing is too complicated. The brain doesn’t know how to process the information. The more simple and predictable the communication, the easier it is for the brain to digest.

The first mistake brands make is they fail to focus on the aspects of their offer that will help people survive and thrive. All great stories are about survival—either physical, emotional, relational, or spiritual. The key is to make your company’s message about something that helps the customer survive and to do so in such a way that they can understand it without burning too many calories.

When storytellers bombard people with too much information, the audience is forced to burn too many calories organizing the data.

Here is nearly every story you see or hear in a nutshell: A CHARACTER who wants something encounters a PROBLEM before they can get it. At the peak of their despair, a GUIDE steps into their lives, gives them a PLAN, and CALLS THEM TO ACTION. That action helps them avoid FAILURE and ends in a SUCCESS.

Remember, the greatest enemy our business faces is the same enemy that good stories face: noise.

At no point should we be able to pause a movie and be unable to answer three questions:

1. What does the hero want?

2. Who or what is opposing the hero getting what she wants?

3. What will the hero’s life look like if she does (or does not) get what she wants?

Remember: anything that doesn’t serve the plot has to go.

Just because a tagline sounds great or a picture on a website grabs the eye, that doesn’t mean it helps us enter into our customers’ story. In every line of copy we write, we’re either serving the customer’s story or descending into confusion; we’re either making music or making noise.

There are three questions potential customers must be able to answer within five seconds of looking at our website or marketing material:

1. What do you offer?

2. How will it make my life better?

3. What do I need to do to buy it?

STORYBRAND PRINCIPLE ONE: THE CUSTOMER IS THE HERO, NOT YOUR BRAND.

STORYBRAND PRINCIPLE TWO: COMPANIES TEND TO SELL SOLUTIONS TO EXTERNAL PROBLEMS, BUT CUSTOMERS BUY SOLUTIONS TO INTERNAL PROBLEMS.

STORYBRAND PRINCIPLE THREE: CUSTOMERS AREN’T LOOKING FOR ANOTHER HERO; THEY’RE LOOKING FOR A GUIDE.

STORYBRAND PRINCIPLE FOUR: CUSTOMERS TRUST A GUIDE WHO HAS A PLAN.

STORYBRAND PRINCIPLE FIVE: CUSTOMERS DO NOT TAKE ACTION UNLESS THEY ARE CHALLENGED TO TAKE ACTION.

STORYBRAND PRINCIPLE SIX: EVERY HUMAN BEING IS TRYING TO AVOID A TRAGIC ENDING.

STORYBRAND PRINCIPLE SEVEN: NEVER ASSUME PEOPLE UNDERSTAND HOW YOUR BRAND CAN CHANGE THEIR LIVES. TELL THEM.

When giving a speech, position yourself as Yoda and your audience as Luke Skywalker.

The catalyst for any story is that the hero wants something. The rest of the story is a journey about discovering whether the hero will get what they want. Unless we identify something our customer wants, they will never feel invited into the story we are telling.

If we sell financial advice, they’re coming to us because they’re worried about their retirement plan.

Our customers are in trouble and they need help.

Define The problem that customers face and you will succeed.

Nearly every human being is looking for a guide (or guides) to help them win the day. Every human being wakes up each morning and sees the world through the lens of a protagonist.

I you position your brand as a hero, customers subconscious thought pattern goes like this: Oh, this is another hero, like me. I wish I had more time to hear their story, but right now I’m busy looking for a guide.

Make customers see you as the guide, but they still aren’t going to make a purchase. Why? Because we haven’t laid out a simple plan of action they can take. People are looking for a philosophy they can embody or a series of steps they can take to solve their problems.

There are two kinds of plans: the agreement plan and the process plan.

Characters only take action after they are challenged by an outside force. This principle is true in story because it’s true in life. A call to action involves communicating a clear and direct step our customer can take to overcome their challenge and return to a peaceful life.

There are two kinds of Call-to-Action

One call to action is direct, asking the customer for a purchase or to schedule an appointment. The other is a transitional call to action, furthering our relationship with the customer.

Stories live and die on a single question: What’s at stake? If nothing can be gained or lost, nobody cares. Will the guy get the girl, or will he be lonely and filled with self-doubt? These are the kinds of questions in the minds of a story-hungry audience.

If there’s nothing at stake in whether or not I buy your product, I’m not going to buy your product. After all, why should I?

Simply put, we must show people the cost of not doing business with us.

If we don’t tell people where we’re taking them, they’ll engage another brand. This is perhaps the most important element of your messaging strategy: offering a vision for how great a customer’s life could be if they engage your products or services.

Remember: simple, clear messages that are relevant to your customers result in sales.

A story starts with a hero who wants something. And then the question becomes: Will the hero get what he wants?

Does Gödel’s incompleteness theorem have implications beyond mathematics? Is it a worm in the apple of rationality?

No. Absolutely no one should have ever been surprised that mathematical truth cannot be equated with theoremhood in some finite axiomatic system. An infinitude of mathematical truths are uninteresting trivia, with no obvious route to being proved. Example: let’s say that the decimal expressions of the square root of 17 and pi to the 27th power “match” just in case either they have the same digit in the tenths place, or the same two digits in the next two places, or the same three digits in the next three places, etc. If we treat these decimal expressions as essentially random sequences of digits, then the a priori chance that these two numbers match is one out of nine.

Now: how do we tell if they match or not? Well, we can just calculate out the sequences of digits and check. And if they match we will eventually find the match and prove that they match. But what if, as is likely, they don’t match? No amount of just grinding out the digits and checking will ever prove it: there are always more digits to check. And I see zero prospect of any other way to prove that they don’t match. So if they don’t match, that is an unprovable mathematical fact. It is also a very, very, very uninteresting one. All Gödel did was find a clever way to construct a provably unprovable mathematical fact, given any consistent and finite set of axioms to work with. The work is clever but in no way profound. It should have come as no surprise at all.