Marketing Happy Hour - How Storytelling will Transform Your Brand Marketing Strategy | Dr. J.J. Peterson of StoryBrand

Episode Date: January 16, 2025

Dr. J.J. Peterson, Head of StoryBrand, joins me to discuss the power of storytelling in brand strategy. Dr. Peterson unpacks the StoryBrand framework, a proven method that has helped organizations simplify their messaging and grow their businesses. We dive into why humans are hardwired to respond to stories, how clarity in messaging drives customer engagement, and the critical elements of a website that tell a clear, compelling story.  Key Takeaways: // Understand why stories resonate deeply with customers. // Learn how clear messaging increases engagement and sales. // Discover the key elements of a website that drive action. // Identify and avoid common pitfalls in brand messaging. Connect with Dr. J.J. Peterson: LinkedIn Learn more about StoryBrand: Website Read Building a StoryBrand: Amazon ____ Say hi! DM me on Instagram and let us know what content you want to hear on the show - I can't wait to hear from you! Please also consider rating the show and leaving a review, as that helps us tremendously as we move forward in this Marketing Happy Hour journey and create more content for all of you. ⁠ Join our FREE Open Jobs group on LinkedIn: ⁠Join now⁠ Get the latest from MHH, straight to your inbox: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Join our email list!⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Follow MHH on Social: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Instagram⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ | ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠LinkedIn⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ |⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠TikTok⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ | ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Facebook⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠

Welcome to Marketing Happy Hour. rules, you actually create a powerful story that moves people to action. Welcome to Marketing Happy Hour. I'm Cassie, consultant, podcaster, and your host. Every Thursday, you'll hear episodes packed with insights from brand leaders on an array of topics, from crafting effective marketing strategies and hitting career goals, to building leadership skills and launching your own business. Inspired by those unfiltered happy hour convos with peers, this show is all about practical, empowering chats to support your professional journey. So grab your favorite drink and let's get to the episode. If you have listened to even two episodes of Marketing Happy Hour, chances are I have either talked about storytelling or the

story brand framework on an episode. And so this episode is a long time coming. I have Dr. J.J. Peterson here today with me, and I'm so honored to have him joining us and to share a little bit more about the framework, how you can use storytelling in your marketing and beyond. Dr. J.J., welcome to the show. Thank you so much for having me. Very excited to be here. Absolutely. So first, I have to know what sparked your personal interest just in storytelling in general, and how did you come to lead the StoryBrand framework? Yeah, so truthfully, and I've told this story before, but it really does all go back to my childhood. My dad was an incredible storyteller and I, he was a pastor, but also just like would captivate a room with story very honestly. And when we would go on

road trips, we would listen to, we wouldn't listen to music. We'd listen to storytellers like Garrison Keillor and we'd listen to books on tape and we would just hear stories. That was kind of how my childhood was. So everybody in my family, honestly, are really good storytellers. And so growing up, I was always fascinated with movies and Broadway and, you know, books. And, you know, my parents would read us Chronicles of Narnia every time at night when we'd go to bed. And so I just kind of grew up in that world. And that's really where I thought my career trajectory was going to go early on. So I studied television and film. I did my master's in theology and the arts, which is a study of kind of how the world like basically talking about relationship

with the other like God and the other and each other through television and film and music. And, and I thought that's what I was going to teach. I was a professor. So I started, but you can't really get hired teaching the arts very many places. So I had to develop more in like the communication space. So I taught speech and debate and I started getting into marketing because I also, my undergrad degree was in public relations and telling stories for people in that space. And my first job out of college was doing marketing for a nonprofit. So I kind of had always been drawn to the story world first, but then figured the way that I could make a living was through the marketing side and communication side. And so as I kind of

got up in my career, I became a professor and I started teaching more. I became dean of students in university, but I always had my foot also in that Hollywood world. And at one point, I had been a marketer for a number of years. I'd been a professor for a number of years. I was dean of students. And I was living in Southern California. And as you do in Southern California, I sold a reality television show to a production company because I did some television and production. And at the exact same time, I invited Donald Miller to come speak to my students at the college where I was dean of students. I had him come speak on story to them. And we just connected because I'm going off to do stories in the television world.

He was teaching people how to tell great stories. And we just kind of really connected in that space. And he's like, Oh, I help people with marketing. I'm like, I used to do marketing. Oh, I also but I do it more with the television film space. And I'm like, that's what I studied. And he said, I'm just starting this thing called story brand. Would you be willing to come out and go to this workshop? Like this will be like the first workshop we're going to put on. This is 10 years ago. And I said, sure, why not? You know, I've, this will be fun. And I came out to go through the process, go through the StoryBrand framework. And I realized it's what I had been trying to do and teach for the past 20 years, truthfully. Because what the StoryBrand framework does is it takes the idea that story is the most powerful way to move people to action. It's just kind of been that my PhD is

in narrative theory and specifically narrative marketing and narrative frameworks and using narrative structures are the most powerful ways, just research-based, even going all the way back to Aristotle and Plato. It's been proven over and over. Story is powerful. So that's true. Everybody can agree with that, especially marketing. They're like, yeah, you need to tell a good story. You need to live a good story. We know that. But what the story brand framework did was it made that idea very accessible to everybody because what it does is it says there's actually rules to telling good stories. And when you follow those rules, you actually create a powerful story that moves people to action.

And the framework really says there are seven elements of any good story. And those elements are, just to kind of high level quick introduce it, and then I'll stop talking. But there's really seven elements of every good story. And that is that there is a character who wants something. Number one, character who wants something. In the beginning of a movie, story, film, anything,

you have to have a, usually it's singular, sometimes it's a group, but it's one character who wants something. And that thing is very clear. It's very obvious what that character wants. And that usually in a film happens within the first nine minutes. We understand what a character wants. The second element is that that character then has to encounter a problem. And this is when the story gets interesting because if the character never

encounters a problem, nobody cares. If the character is literally just walking around a forest happy the whole movie, it's not a good interesting movie. So the character has to encounter a problem. Then the third thing is that character has to meet a guide, somebody who's older and wiser like Yoda, Obi-Wan Kenobi, somebody who comes along and helps them win. Then fourth element is that guide has to give the hero a plan, a way forward to win the day. You'll hear the phrase, what's the plan? Or here's the plan in almost every movie. Then the fifth element is that the main character has to have a moment where they're called to action. Something forces them to act.

There's a bomb that's going to go off. There's a ticking clock that's like a deadline that they have to rescue their daughter before seven days or they disappear forever kind of thing. Asteroids are going to hit the earth in 48 hours. Something that forces the hero to act. And then there has to be stakes in the story, which means that we need to have been foreshadowed throughout the story that this can have a happy ending that we're rooting for. Or if they don't succeed, there is tragedy and pain that can happen. So that's six and seven. So those are the seven elements. A hero who wants something that encounters a problem, who meets a guide that gives them a plan, calls them to action that results in either success or failure.

That's every movie you've ever seen. It's all the good stories out there. What we have done at StoryBrand is taken those principles and then said if this is the most effective way to tell a story, then we can take those principles and apply it to marketing. And if you position your customer as the hero of the story and then create talking points around each of those elements, what you're going to do is actually invite your customer into a story where they use your product and think of you as the guide and win the day. So the story, marketing story, is not about you. You are not the hero of the story. Your customer is the hero.

And we teach people to use that framework to create talking points to then put in your website, social media, emails, and everything to make a powerful story that your customer is the hero of. And I think traditionally, you know, we think about how brands write copy and build out their websites and talk about themselves online. A lot of times it's us, us, we did this and we've achieved this and, you know, look at us and all of that. So why do you feel that the other way around and not focusing solely on your personal story as a brand, but creating this story that a consumer is invited into? Why do you feel that works specifically? I think there's two main reasons. One will be nerdy,

the other is practical. So let me, again, I'll give you a little bit of nerdy is when you go from a research and communication theory side of things, what it's actually called is narrative transportation. So there's a bunch of research around this idea that when we experience a good story that we can relate to, we experience narrative transportation. So if you've ever been in a movie and jumped, or you've been in a movie and cried or laughed, you've experienced narrative transportation. What the research says is the better the story, the higher and the more you can relate with the story the higher level of narrative transportation that you experience but then it says the higher level of narrative transportation you experience the more influence that story has on your thoughts

and your actions so the better the story the more you see yourself in the story, the more you change because of the story. So that's kind of the communication side. And they've proven that that's true in movies and books, but it's also true in marketing. That when people can experience narrative transportation on a website or in emails or in a sales pitch or in social media, they have a higher influence. Those stories have a higher influence on the customer's thoughts or actions. So that's the first piece of just kind of the nerdy research side. The other side of it is that if you think about it, we all wake up every day as the hero of our own story. We are the main character in our movie, right? Whether, you know, a lot of us pretend

we're the sidekicks, but we're really the main characters of our movies. And so if I wake up and I'm the main character of my movie and you as a business are the main character of your movie, we're actually in competing stories because I walk into a situation and I go, oh, you're the hero of your story, which means you have to win, which means you're trying to get more money from me. And I'm going, I'm the hero of my story, so I'm trying to hold back my money because I have to win. So I have to get a better deal. I have to get a discount. I have to get more value.

So you actually are creating, when you're both heroes of the story, you're creating an adversarial relationship. But when you position yourself as a guide in your customer story, now you're actually in the same story. Your job is to help the hero win. And if they see that, that your job as a business that's offering either a product or a service, that they see you as on their side and are providing a service or product that helps them win, now you both win in the process. And then it's also not about price, right? I don't have to feel like I'm not going to have to pay the lowest price so I win. I'm actually even willing to pay a little bit more because I go, oh, you're in it for me. And if I pay a little bit more, I'm even more likely to win. Great. Let's do this together.

So those are the reasons why if you position yourself as the hero of your marketing story, you're actually going to lose. And so is your customer. I want to mention too, that the story brand book is an excellent, I think first resource in my opinion, for just learning about this framework and everything. And of course you all offer a number of different other resources, which we'll talk about at the end of the show here for just going through this at any level, or if you want to become a certified guide and learn how this works and offer this to your clients or brands. But I do want to ask you to a little bit about one specific element here. So again, we won't dive too deep on each of these seven pieces of the framework. But

if a brand is hearing this, and they say, Okay, this sounds awesome. But I do have some awesome stuff to share about my brand, or I do have some really great authority and experience in my space. How can I talk about that while also, you know, matching the needs of this framework. And so I know there's a couple elements within the guide space that you all talk about making sure to infuse in your messaging. Is there anything that you would want to share on that of just things to be thinking about that is StoryBrand approved, for example? Yes, absolutely. Because I do think this is an area that a lot of brands make mistakes before they come to StoryBrand. and then some of them even make this mistake after, and I'll tell you why. In the story, you're positioning yourself as the guide to the customer's hero. So it is about their story. What that means as a guide is that the only thing that

you talk about yourself in this context is in relationship to your customer's story. And let me pull out of marketing and go back into movies for a second. So Hunger Games, right? In Hunger Games, Katniss is the hero and the guide is Hamish. Now, what do we know? Have you seen Hunger Games? You've seen Hunger Games, right? I think even I teach at Vanderbbilt um university and i have to ask my students every year like how many of you've seen star wars how many because i use a lot of examples and like nobody even now has seen stars wars but everybody's hunger games it's kind of crazy so anyway so with hunger games katniss is the hero hamish the guide. Katniss wants to win the Hunger Games. So she's looking for a

guide to help her in her story. So what do we know about Haymitch? We know he was in the Hunger Games. So he knows what it's like to be like her. And that's why he's a drunk, because he can't live with that pain, right? Because he really, like that even is an amplification of the fact that he knows her pain. So he has empathy for her. And then the other thing is he won the Hunger Games. So he has some authority. He has some proof that he knows what he's doing. We don't know if he's ever been married.

We don't know what his parents went through when he went through the Hunger Games. We don't know if he had any other jobs. We don't know anything about him other than he was in the Hunger Games and he still suffers from it. And he won the Hunger Games. He has empathy and authority. If Katniss was trying to become a baker, Hamish is just a drunk in the town. He's actually not a part of her story. So now let's kind of, again, step out of the movies back into marketing. Your job as a business, as a brand, is to talk about the things that only position you with empathy and authority for your customer. So if let's say you are a parenting coach, the things you say is, I understand how hard it is to be a parent, or I understand that most of us get handed a baby and we're supposed to try to

be parents on intuition alone. That's empathy. All you're saying is I get you. And then you have to show some proof that you actually can help them win. So you're saying, I am a board certified child psychologist, or after raising seven children of my own and becoming a professor at the University of, right, that's it. All you're dropping in is a little bit of information that says, I am like you and I understand you, empathy, and I can help you. And here's some proof. It actually, you don't just say I can help you. You have to show some proof, which includes testimonies, before and after pictures, case studies, statistics, but only in your customer story. So for instance, just kind of

backing up again, pulling back the curtain, when you asked me how I got into story, the parts of my story that I told you really were the only parts that gave me, that positioned me as a guide to your audience. I talked about that I was a marketer. I talked about that I was a professor. I've talked that I worked in Hollywood. I've studied these things. I gave some research. What I didn't mention in talking about myself is I danced in a Missy Elliott music video.

That's a real thing that happened in my life. I lived in Kenya from when I was six to 10. That's my story. So if you're asking me my story, and I'm on here and you and I are becoming friends, and we're just chit chatting, those pieces are interesting. They're fun. I may share those. When I'm positioning myself as a guide for your audience, I don't mention any of those. I mentioned I studied, I was in movies, I was a marketer, I brought those two things together, I've been doing it for 10 years, I'm a professor at Vanderbilt. Those are the things that give me authority and empathy in the space to help your audience. So that's all I talk about. So what I said, what happens when people, the mistake

they make, one, before StoryBrand is they talk about themselves too much. They talk about things that have nothing to do with their customer story. But sometimes the mistake they make after they come to StoryBrand is then they don't talk about themselves at all. They go, oh, you told me not to talk about myself. No, no, no. I told you not to talk about yourself in anything that is not related to your customer's story, which means the only time you should be talking about yourself is with empathy and authority. Oh, and I love this idea of even using it in conversations or if you're a guest on the podcast

like this, like how are you telling your own personal story in that way too? And that just goes to show that this framework is an excellent thing to go through for website copy. Social media really identifies how should we be talking about our brand on a number of different channels, in conversations, etc. And I want to just touch on clarity for a little bit, too. So this is another point that is heavily discussed within the framework and just how do you make it super clear, concise, straightforward. If you confuse, you lose is one of those statements that we hear a lot when we talk about a story brand. So what does clarity mean to you just in a brand messaging sense and what impact does it have on customer engagement just overall, or when you're crafting this story

brand framework for your brand? Yeah. So this isn't the latest research, but one of the statistics that often gets thrown out is that we as consumers receive between three and five thousand commercial messages a day, which means there is a lot of noise coming at us all the time. And most brands are actually just contributing to that noise. It's just they're sending more emails, more billboards, more things out there all the time that are just noise. Like I was driving to Atlanta to work with a company and going into Atlanta, I saw three different billboards that all said what I thought it said actually was before he turned pro he trusted children what does that company do no clue right no clue and so that I what I found out later was it actually said before he turned pro he trusted children's still not more clear. But what it actually was,

I asked around because I really was very curious because it was a creepy it felt creepy to me when there's this man with surrounded by children. And I was like, and what it was was it is a professional athlete in Atlanta who played for the Braves, who at one point in his childhood went to the Children's Hospital. Okay, so this company spent, I don't know how many tens of thousands of dollars on at least three billboards that I saw that were not clear, not clear. They might have been clever. It might have been heartfelt, especially if you know that this is a professional baseball player and you know there's a place called the Children's Hospital,

which neither of those things were on the billboard. But it was not clear. And so a lot of people are putting out things like that that are very clever. They might be beautiful. They think they're heartwarming, but they're not actually clear. In order to break through the noise of the 3,000 to 5,000 commercial messages a day, you have to be clear. Our brains are always looking for information that helps us survive and thrive. At any given moment, we're always scouting around, subconsciously even, for information that helps us survive and thrive. Like if I'm in a stadium full of people,

I can say to that stadium, how many people here know how many chairs are in this stadium? Nobody would raise their hand. If I said, how many people here know where the exits are? Every single person would raise their hand. They didn't consciously think about it, but their brain clocked that information. So I kind of bring – to bring all this back to your question, what happens when all of this noise is coming at us is people are looking for information very quickly that directly contributes to our survival and thriving because that's what our brain pays attention to. If your message is unclear, like before he turned pro, he trusted children, I don't know how that contributes to my survival and thriving. I don't know how it has anything to do with my story. And the only reason I pay attention to it is because I needed a bad example for speaking the next day. So it contributed to my personal, but everybody else is ignoring that. They're letting go of it. What the story brand framework does and what using the story framework

does is it forces you to follow the rules to make your story about your customer so that you're directly contributing to their survival and thriving versus just adding noise to the marketplace. You're actually what I would say, making music at that point, making something understandable instead of just throwing rhythms and music and noise out there with all this, you know, trust children thing. You're saying, no, we're going to make a little bit of music. So it actually makes sense and is pleasant to the ear. Oh yeah. Fantastic. I can't tell you how many times. Same thing. Like I'll be driving or I'll land on a website or see a social media post and I say, hey, that looks fun, but I don't actually know what this brand does or who they serve or whatever. So to your point,

people don't want to have to do extra work to figure that out. So one thing too, is that I think you bring up a really good point is we often look at companies like Apple, or Coca Cola, or Nike, that have these beautiful ads that are fun, they make us cry, they move us. And they're beautiful. And they've spent millions on these ads. And we think, oh, we need to be creative like that. We need to be beautiful like that in order to compete in the marketplace. I would argue that there really are two different approaches to being known in the marketplace. And I think people conflate those two. There's branding and there's marketing. Branding really, to me, is how you make people feel and that's often your colors your logo the feel of belonging to this type of tribe like if you are a gucci girl like that has a feel to that versus

like somebody who is even prada or beyond that like who does crocs you, there's a different feel. That's branding. The look, the style, the vibe, the taglines even. Marketing really is about clarity. And it's really about answering those three questions. The three questions, what do you do? How does it make my life better? And how do I get it? Most of us try to live in the branding space because we have to compete. We think we have to compete with Nike and Gucci and BMW and all these Coca-Cola, these huge brands. They don't

need marketing, to be very honest. They don't need emails that go out to people or a website that explains what Coca-Cola is about or what Nike is about. They're so big. And frankly, that costs more money. That costs way more money to get people on board with branding than it does marketing. Branding is not bad. Don't hear that. I'm not vilifying branding. Can you be cool? Can you be clever? Can you be fun? Can you be beautiful? beautiful absolutely but especially for the smaller businesses not at the expense of clarity and so if you're if you throw out some beautiful and and gorgeous ad and everybody goes oh that's pretty but have no idea what you do you've wasted a ton of money so really in in and that's again what the story brand framework does is forces you to really

answer those three questions. So what do you do? How does it make my life better and how do I get it? And that's marketing. People need to live there first. Then I would argue add branding on top of that that goes with it. But if you start with branding, I think a lot of times you lose the clarity of marketing. And with clarity too, I want to speak directly about just websites here for a minute, because I feel like this is one area that frustrates me to know it. I'll land on a website.

Again, what do you do? I don't understand how I buy or how I start working with a company. So clarity, in my opinion, and correct me if I'm wrong, not only is with the messaging, right? But it's like, how do I actually start to engage with the business you mentioned the plan like what are the three steps it takes for someone to face this transformation get on to the other side of the problem that they're facing and so with websites specifically let's say a brand goes through this framework they kind of know what their different key points are things they're going to talk about they have this clear message they're ready to engage on so they they go to their website. What do you feel are some key components we shouldn't miss when applying this framework to our site, ensuring that we are

communicating that message clearly to our audience and also making that user experience as straightforward as possible? Yeah, let me get super practical here. So the header of your website, this is the thing that I think most people mess up. So the header is the top section of the website. The first thing people see when they land there, that section needs to answer those three questions I just mentioned. What do you do? How does it make my life better? And how do I get it? Which means you need to say what it is that you do. Do not be vague. So if somebody, if you are a business coach, don't just say we lead people to the highest mountaintops or grow your business better than ever. That's more of a tagline branding thing, which isn't bad. You can say that sentence, but then you have to say

business coaching or one-on-one coaching or mastermind that does something for you. Like, so give me what it is that you're actually selling. So if I come to your website and you just have a good tagline in there, like just do it. I don't know what you do. You need to tell me just do it. Athletic gear that helps you achieve your, become your best athlete. Something like that. Like tell me it's athletic gear. Tell me it's your business coach. Tell me what it is. That's the first. The second is how does it make my life better? Give me some kind of aspirational language around it. So whether you say become the best adventurer or, you know, lead the pack or, you know, give some quick little bullet pointed benefits of like save time, save money, grow your

business, just something, just a few words that show me how this makes my life better. And then the one of the biggest things is then you need to answer the question, how do I get it? Which means you need a clear call to action. This should not be learn more. This should not be any questions, question mark. It should be very, very clear. Forbes released a study this past year that said that 70% of businesses in America do not have a clear call to action on their website. 70%, which is insane to me because that's your cash register.

So have shop now, buy now, schedule a call, fill out this form. Give me exactly what the next step I need to take in order to buy. So if your header of your website answers those three questions, what do you do? How does it make my life better? How do I get it? You're starting with clarity. The next thing, the next section on your website for most people should be the problems your customer is experiencing. Identify the problem your customer is experiencing.

So talk about it. Do you struggle with this? Are you worried about this? Stop feeling this, right? When you begin to talk about your customer problem, you make the story interesting. And also you begin to position your product as a solution to the problem. That's the only reason people are buying from you is because they have a problem that you have something that can solve that problem for them. That's it. That's how we think of brands in our brains is as problem solvers, right? Like for you, let me ask you a question, Cassie. Let me ask

if I said I have a headache right now, what would you offer me? Yeah. Headache medicine, ibuprofen. You have two brands at the top of your brain, right? I said, hey, I ate some bad Mexican food for lunch and I'm not feeling great. What would you offer me? Tums. Yeah, tums, right? We have those. So when I say headache, you don't go, let me look here. Well, I have some tums.

No, you have already filed in your brain those brands as problem solvers. We just do that naturally. If I need to save money on car insurance, if I specifically want to save 15% on car insurance, I call Geico, right? Those brands are in our brain because they solve a problem. Well, the reason they're there is because all of those companies are really good at telling us that's the problem. Excedrin is the headache medicine. Tylenol, aspirin, Advil. We know those are pain relievers. But it's because they've told us that over and over.

So on your website, the second section should talk about your customer problem. Agitate that. Talk about what they're feeling. Talk about what they're struggling with. And then position your product as a solution to that. If you can have those two sections on your website, you can have, I mean, I could go into all the others as well, but really to me, those are the two most important that offer clarity, that cuts through all the noise, that tells what you do, how it makes your life better, how to get it and what problem you solve. When you can do that, you're going to have a good website. Yeah. And I recommend to, to go check out, I think it's the business made simple website, but really all of your guys's sites, uh, employ this framework.

And so if you want to see this example in play, that's a really good place to check out and just kind of see what this applied looks like. Um. But it's incredibly important and it's way simpler than I think we as marketers think about a website and we're like, we need to pack all this information and too much content and too much copy. I feel like that's another thing you all talk about too, is just packing too much information in a site. Because again, that goes back to the clarity piece, right? Like too much information, people's brains go into overdrive and we just decide to jump off and not do anything. And I get it because we're all so

close to our products. We know, we know there's a thing called curse of knowledge. This guy named Lili Fever, he, he, he writes about this idea called curse of knowledge. The curse of knowledge idea is that on a scale of one to 10 about our products, we are at a nine or a 10. Most of us are at 10, especially if we've created it. We think, and we intuitively know we have to kind of dumb it down and simplify it. So we dumb it down to a five or a six. What he says is people make buying decisions around one or two. They don't actually need as much information as you're going to give them, especially on the What he says is people make buying decisions around one or two. They don't actually need as much information as you're going to give them, especially on the first couple dates. Yes, if you have a $10,000, $20,000 product, you may need more information, hour-long conversation, 100% understand that.

But the majority of us are really making buying decisions in that one to two phase on the scale of 10. We've done things down to six, and it's still actually too complicated for people. We're overwhelming them. We're making things too confusing. We're just adding to the noise. And it's actually, you're right, it's so much more simple than we make it. And that's really what drew me to the StoryBrand framework. It forces you to be simple and clear. When you start with that, then you can be clever and creative and fun. But if

you, if you don't start with clarity, you actually end up losing both in the process. Absolutely. So again, a brand listening or a marketing professionals listening, we have marketers within corporate brands. And then we also have some entrepreneurs here too who maybe service clients in the marketing space. And so someone is listening. They say, this sounds awesome. How do I learn more? What are some steps I can take to either get this prepared for my brand or learn how to provide this as a service, for example? What are some different steps that we can take to do that?

Yeah, there's a couple different ways to engage with us specifically. The easiest and most accessible, honestly, is just reading Building a Story Brand. That's the book that really walks through the whole framework and really outlines it all. So at a very simple level, buy the book. It's changed my life, and it has sold over a million copies. So buy the Building a Story Brand book. Second is we do specific engagements of where we can come in and work with you as a company, do private workshops. And so you can find all that at storybrand.com. And then if you're interested in using this framework and

actually teaching people how to use it and using it in your own marketing business, we actually certify people in this space. So we actually create story brand certified guides that we train and teach how to use this and then kind of stamp with a story brand approval that can go use that. And you can find information about that at marketingmadesimple.com. And then just with my own stuff, if you're interested in having me come in and work with a company, then you can actually just reach out directly to me with drjj at drjjpeterson.com. Fantastic. Thank you so much. I'm'm curious too if you were to leave us off with just one piece of advice as we're thinking about story for our brands and just cultivating a better clear

picture and how we can communicate with consumers one piece of advice one word of encouragement what would you share as we close out today the thing i would say is um as you're thinking about your brand i think a lot of us get insecure, to be very honest about our brand, even though we know we have a great product, we have a great service, we start to become insecure about it. And we feel like we have to sell people and we have to convince people that they need to hire us or work with us or buy our product. And so what happens in that moment is we start to almost become apologetic about things, and we try to hype things up and get louder and bigger.

We become the hero of our own story, because we think that's what we have to do. But if you really think about stories, heroes in many ways are weak. They're very weak in stories. They're insecure. They're overwhelmed. They're up and down in the story. They fall on their face a lot. In fact, many of them just get beat up through the entire movie. Even really strong characters like Jason Bourne is literally getting beat up the entire movie. They are the weak characters in the story. They're not really the strong hero till the end, till they've transformed. The strongest character in the story is the guide. They're the steady one. They don't have anything to prove.

They've been there, done that, and they exist in the story to help the hero win. When you position yourself as a guide in your marketing, you actually are positioning yourself as the strongest character in the story. You're helping the weak hero win. And that to me was a huge weight off my shoulders in many ways. When I go out and talk about our brand, when I talk, I don't have to sell anything to people. It's not my job. My job is to show you if I am, if you're living this story, your marketing is confusing, it's overwhelming, you're not feeling like you're getting what you want out of it, I'm here to help. That's it. I don't have to be the greatest or the best.

I'm here to position myself as the person who can help you win. Took so much weight off my shoulders, allowed me to drop them a little bit and enter into conversations that actually were more genuine relationship versus me trying to get things from people. So if you've been listening to this, I think truthfully the best way to walk through this world is to view yourself as a guide, both in business and in real life. You will be happier, you will feel stronger, and you will actually help more people succeed, which really ultimately fulfills you in ways that being the hero can't, to be very honest. So don't be afraid to be the guide. The guide is the best character for your story. They're the strongest and it's actually the most fulfilling. Yeah, the guide really is. If you look back to some of those amazing stories that you mentioned,

I mean, they're some of our favorite characters in those stories. So how could you not? That's a great way to look at it. And just want to thank you so much for sharing this. Again, this is such a deep, amazing framework that I highly recommend learning more about. So thank you for shedding light. I feel like every time I listen to one of your podcast episodes or hear you speak, I learn something new about this. So grateful that you were here today. Thank you. Thanks for having me. Thank you so much for tuning into this week's episode. If you enjoyed this conversation, I would love your feedback. And if you're ready to take things to the next level, sign up for my weekly newsletter in the show notes. You'll get weekly career and marketing

insights straight to your inbox. And if you have an idea for a future Marketing Happy Hour episode, shoot me an email. Hello at marketinghappyhr.com. Thank you again. And I'll see you next Thursday.