Park Howell

#430: Ch. 8, Victory: How to Celebrate Wins on the Customer Journey From Brand Awareness to Appreciation

#430: Ch. 8, Victory: How to Celebrate Wins on the Customer Journey From Brand Awareness to Appreciation

When I teach the Story Cycle System™ through my Business of Story mastery course, I ask my participants to define their ideal outcome from a sale presentation, ad campaign, social post, podcast, etc.

Their answers are always the same. They want to hit home runs in the form of a signed purchase order, new customer, viral engagement, etc.

I agree. These are awesome outcomes.

But not realistic most of the time because people are often not ready to buy immediately unless you show up selling a fire extinguisher to a driver whose RV is on fire alongside the road.

My recommendation is to focus on the singles; those small victories that you can celebrate with your prospect along the customer journey of…

1. Brand Awareness
2. Brand Adoption
3. Brand Appreciation

In our last show, Chapter 7 of Brand Bewitchery called “Journey,” you learned how to use our AAA (Awareness, Adoption, Appreciation) customer journey map and more importantly, what stories to tell in each act based on your nine one-word descriptors from Chapter 6 called “Mentor”.

Now, how do you design in small milestones of success along your audience’s journey so that you can celebrate these small victories with them along the way?

It’s important because this is where true trust is built and brand bonding truly takes off.

In this episode on Chapter 8, Victory, will show you how to design customer victories to payoff your stories big time.

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Park Howell

#429: Ch. 7, Journey: How to Increase Customer Engagement Through the Stories You Tell

#429: Ch. 7, Journey: How to Increase Customer Engagement Through the Stories You Tell

You can find a number of customer journey maps that outline several important steps to help you turn prospects into life-long customers.

It’s critical to understand what stories to tell at each of the common customer journey steps including awareness, consideration, decision, purchase, retention, advocacy, etc.

But it’s complicated because there are many chapters to consider as your customer buys into your brand narrative and becomes part of your story. And every step requires its own story strategy.

We’ve made it easy by breaking your customer journey down to just three acts (you know, like a story).

1. Brand Awareness
2. Brand Adoption
3. Brand Appreciation

We felt the need to simplify a truly effective customer journey strategy.

In Chapter 7 of Brand Bewitchery called “Journey,” you’ll learn how to use our AAA (Awareness, Adoption, Appreciation) customer journey map and more importantly, what stories to tell in each act based on your nine one-word descriptors from Chapter 6 called “Mentor”.

What stories do you tell when your prospect is just learning about your brand offering to invite them into experiencing your brand?

Or what stories do you tell to help them overcome the stories they are already telling themselves about your brand, your industry, or your competition? These may be anti-stories that you will have to overcome with a better story.

Jef Bezos is famous for saying your brand is what people say about you when you’re not in the room.

To be more specific, I believe that your brand is the story people tell about you when you’re not in the room.

What stories do you tell and invite them into once they are in ACT II of Brand Adoption?

They are now active participants in your brand story. You want to be certain that you are not only delivering on the promises you make with your stories but also helping them recognize the progress they are making by investing time, money and effort in your offering.

A great story is always shareable and scaleable. So what stories do you tell in ACT III of Brand Appreciation that encourages your customers to share your story with their world?

This, of course, leads to the most powerful form of advertising: FREE word-of-mouth marketing.

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Emmanuel Probst

#428: How to Use Storytelling to Assemble Your Transformative Brand

#428: How to Use Storytelling to Assemble Your Transformative Brand

So how do you assemble your brand story that truly helps you stand out in the crowd?

Park Howell

#427: Ch. 6, Mentor: How to Humanize Your Brand With its Promise, Gift and Personality

#427: Ch. 6, Mentor: How to Humanize Your Brand With its Promise, Gift, and Personality

As founders/co-creators/owners of our brand, we love to share stories about the wonders of our product or service offering.

It’s understandable.

We created an offering that solves a real problem our customers care about so why not show our provide to the world?

They only care about the outcome: what’s in it for them!

That’s why the first five chapters of the 10-step Story Cycle System™ are pretty much all about your audience.

Sure, you focused on your core brand story in Chapter 1 called “Backstory,” when you determined your #1 position in the marketplace: what you do differently and more distinctively than your competition.

But this is written from your audience’s perspective. Again, what’s in it for them?

In chapters 2 through 5 you prioritized your top three audiences. Clarified their emotional “wishes” and physical “wants” that fulfill their wishes.

You crafted your unique value proposition that connects with their view of the world.

You determined what is disrupting their world that shakes them out of the status quo, and how you answer that disruption to make you the most timely, relevant and urgent offering to help them get what they want.

And you increased the brand story tension by embracing the obstacles and antagonists in the forms of villains, fog and crevasses using the energy of these competitive forces to propel your brand forward to faster success.

Now, in chapter 6 of Brand Bewitchery called “Mentor,”  it is ALL about you. This is where you formulate your brand personality, the themes of your brand storytelling, and essentially the character of your mentor/guide character that your customers will seek out to help them on their journey.

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Park Howell

#426: Ch. 5, Antagonists: How to Capitalize on Competitive Forces

#426: Ch. 5, Antagonists: How to Capitalize on Competitive Forces

You know what it’s like.

When you want something, the universe tends to punch you in the nose just to see how badly you really want it.

You can fear and flee the antagonistic forces that are out to thwart your brand, like aggressive competition, your blind spots, and gaps in your performance.

I call these your villains, fog and crevasses.

In chapter 5 of Brand Bewitchery, we put your unique value proposition to the test by showing you how to embrace your obstacles and antagonists and turn their energy in your favor.

You will not only identify these competitive forces that you help your customers overcome but you will also apply the same outing process to the villains, fog and crevasses that confront you personally and your brand professionally.

I’ll show you how…

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Grace Emmons

#425: What Reiki Energy Healing and Leadership Storytelling Have in Common

#425: What Reiki Energy Healing and Leadership Storytelling Have in Common

Being embodied in her highest calling as an energy healer and guide was not always Grace’s reality.

Years ago, Grace was at her lowest point – burnt out in her career, trapped in a toxic relationship, and facing anxiety and chronic shoulder pain. Energy healing allowed her, as she says, “to take a deep breath of fresh air after being suffocated.”

As she healed herself, she left her job and toxic relationship, called in her soulmate, and followed her highest calling to treat individuals through Reiki and transformational energy healing.

Grace is the founder of Forward With Grace, the first spiritual consultancy of its kind facilitating transformations for CEOs, celebrities, and high-powered individuals from Silicon Beach to Malibu along with leading companies such as the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences, Toms, Talkspace, Revolve, Dermalogica, and LiquidIV.

Her Reiki process focuses on self-reflection and helps you uncover the core moments and values that have shaped your journey.

Through storytelling techniques like crafting compelling narratives and using emotion and vivid imagery, Grace can make your stories memorable and impactful. Additionally, she emphasizes the importance of simplicity, distilling complex ideas into clear and concise messages.

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Park Howell

#424: Ch. 4, Disruption: How Your Unique Value Proposition Will Win the Day

#424: Ch. 4, Disruption: How Your Unique Value Proposition Will Win the Day

In the first three episodes of the Brand Bewitchery series, we covered what is essentially Act 1 of the 10-step Story Cycle System.

In Chapter 1 called “Backstory,” you declared your #1 position in the marketplace: what you do differently and more distinctively than your competition.

In Chapter 2, Heroes, you prioritized your top three audiences and focused on your #1 customer as the central character or hero in your brand story.

In Chapter 3, you identified what’s at stake for your prospects and customers; what they emotionally wish to achieve, and what they physically want to invest in to fulfill their wish.

In today’s episode, we transition into ACT 2 starting in chapter four called Disruption.

You will identify what is changing in your customer’s world and how you are the most timely, relevant and urgent offering to help them navigate that change.

You will learn how to craft your unique value proposition (UVP) to find a clear theme for your brand narrative.

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Park Howell

#423: Ch. 3, Stakes: How to Connect With the Wishes and Wants of Your Customers

#423: Ch. 3, Stakes: How to Connect With the Wishes and Wants of Your Customers

In the first three steps of the Story Cycle System™ to develop your brand narrative strategy, you started where every good story begins, sharing your backstory.

Your backstory is when you declare your #1 position in the market. What you do differently and more distinctively than anyone else.

Your backstory sets the stage to build your brand narrative.

Then you moved to chapter 2 of Brand Bewitchery called Hero’s. This is when you prioritized your top three audiences, the prospects and customers who are at the center of your brand story.

Now in chapter 3, Stakes, you’ll learn how to identify what your audiences truly want relative to your offering

We break the stakes down to what your customer emotionally want to achieve with your brand and what physically they want to do in order to fulfill their wishes.

It’s important to understand the difference between their wishes and wants because these two storytelling ingredients help you determine what stories to tell and when depending upon where they are on their journey with you.

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Rener Gracie

#422: How to Win Over Audiences With the Jiu-jitsu of Business Communications: Storytelling

#422: How to Win Over Audiences With the Jiu-Jitsu of Business Communications: Storytelling

I’ve often said that storytelling is the Jiu-jitsu of business communications because when done well, you can persuade even the most adversarial audiences and win them over to your way of thinking and doing.

But if you roll into these kinds of awkward and difficult conversations with a zero-sum, winner-take-all mindset through the brute force of your intellect and voraciousness of your argument, you will take a pounding.

After reading Rener Gracies’s new book, The 32 Principles: Harness the Power of Jiu-Jitsu to Succeed in Business, Relationships, and Life, which he co-wrote with Paul Volponi, I realized that every one of these principles can be applied to your approach to persuasive and influential leadership storytelling.

You can roll with my 32 principles of effective leadership storytelling inspired by Rener’s insights in a blog I just shared on businessofstory.com.

Given that I have never taken Jiu-Jitsu, I invited our son and fellow storyteller Parker Howell to co-host with me today. Parker is a purple belt in Jiu-Jitsu and like me was excited to meet today’s guest from the legendary Gracie family, Rener Gracie.

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Park Howell

#421: Heroes: How to Understand Your Customers to Build a Tribe

#421: Ch. 2, Heroes: How to Understand Your Customers to Build a Tribe

If you’ve ever attended one of my ABTs of Business Storytelling mastery courses, then you know the two major audience paradigm shifts I preach to connect deeply with the people you want to move to action.

1. Your brand story is not about what you *make* but what you make happen in your customer’s life. Outcomes trump offerings in your stories every time.
2. Your brand story is not about *you* but about your customer, they are the center of your story. You play the more important role of their mentor or guide.

But many people – even seasoned marketers – get this wrong because they are so enamored with their product or offering that their navel-gazing stories all about themselves and their product or service lead to their demise.

It reminds me of the cautionary tale of Narcissus. His story is the lead paragraph in chapter 2 of Brand Bewitchery, which is all about prioritizing your audiences and what it is they wish for and want from you.

Do you know it?

Narcissus was a brave hunter and unabashedly handsome. One day he was walking in the forest when the mountain nymph Echo saw him and fell deeply in love with him. Narcissus felt the presence of Echo and called out, “Who’s there?” Echo, in hiding, repeated, “Who’s there?” This exchange went on for days, which intrigued and, as you might imagine, slightly annoyed Narcissus.

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