Your brand’s story is instantly more engaging when you make the customer the hero. We explore different ways to bring the hero’s character to life. Read this for inspiration on how to create and craft compelling customer heroes.
Have you ever wondered why some stories draw you in and others leave you cold? Research into what happens in the brain when we hear a story helps explain why some stories work and others don’t.
Neuroscience researchers at the University of Parma in the 1980s and 1990s discovered the existence of what are known as mirror neurons in the brain.
It suggests that the same areas of our brain light up when we perform an action as when we observe someone else doing it.
For example, it’s why we wince when we see the hero get punched in the action movie. No one has punched us, but our brain reacts as if we had been.
Applying this to storytelling means that to be compelling, the story has to put us into the hero’s head. The more we empathise with the hero, the more the mirror neurons in our heads fire. Great stories help us live vicariously through the hero’s thoughts, feelings and actions.
This idea gets especially interesting is when applied to marketing. Brands use storytelling to draw in customers. However, for these stories to work, customers must be able to see themselves as the hero of the story. They need their mirror neurons to fire, so that they empathise with the hero and root for them to resolve the problem at hand.
This doesn’t mean the customer feels exactly the same as the hero in the story. But they recognise enough of what drives them to empathise with it.
For example, we might not all be champion athletes like those who feature in Nike adverts.
But if you’re into sport, you empathise with the need to train and practise. You feel the challenge of playing the game. And you sense what both winning feels like (good) and what losing means (you pick yourself up and try again).
Brand stories aren’t about listing a brand’s features. Instead, they bring the details of the brand to life in a more emotional and creative way. They’re about understanding what drives the hero, and then showing how the brand helps solve their problems. Using story this way helps make your brand more memorable.
The first step, then, as you build your brand’s story, is to understand the customer.
You use qualitative research to understand their thoughts, feelings and actions, so that you get a strong insight into what motivates them.
However, this goes beyond just commissioning a research report from a market research company. You also need to be able to translate that thinking into an accurate and compelling picture of that customer you can build into your brand’s story.
The most common place this happens in marketing planning is in the area of customer experience development. One of the most frequently used tools in that area is the customer profile.
This maps out on a page key elements of the target audience in the form of a description of a typical “ideal” customer. It’s a particularly helpful tool for copywriters, designers, and advertising strategists.
When you create something, it’s easier to do it for a specific single person (as described in the profile) than it is to do for a more general group of people.
You get a richer picture of that target when you imagine them as a real living person than as a character “type”.
This profile collates research and insights and turns them into meaningful outlines of your customer heroes. It gives them a name and some demographic background information. It talks about the main goals and habits. What causes them pain (related to your category and what influences them). The profile describes the main activities they get up to, both online and offline.
Understanding the customer at this level of depth helps you set them up properly as the hero of your brand’s story.
As a rule of thumb, the longer you spend crafting this profile, the more value it delivers in the long term.
Many brands fall into the trap of rushing through this stage, seeing it as a box to tick at some customer journey workshop with their agency.
The problem with rushing is that you end up with fairly obvious and generic customer insights. This makes your idea of the customer less distinctive and more one-dimensional, so there’s a much greater chance you produce brand activation that looks and sounds your competitors.
So dig deeper. Think about what thoughts might be going through the customer’s head when they realise they’ve got a problem. Look for less obvious insights. Look for things in the customer’s life that are very specific and that might even surprise the customer. Things they don’t even realise are an issue, until you point them out. That’s usually where you find the storytelling gold in building your customer heroes’ profiles.
The other way to work your customer heroes’ profiles harder is to dig into the problem. Often in storytelling, this appears in the form of a villain. That could be an actual person who gets in the hero’s way. But it could also be a higher-level societal type problem (e.g. companies that don’t look after the environment) or an internal problem (e.g. the customer’s lack of confidence about making a decision).
It’s easy to think that you need to make your customer heroes’ profiles all positive. You want to appeal to customers, and talking positively about them is appealing. However, the point of your story isn’t to make them like your brand. It’s to help them understand that your brand can help them with the problem that they face.
Some brands make the mistake of thinking they’re the hero of their story.
But there can only really be one hero in any story. If your customer doesn’t feel that it’s them, they’re less likely to want to hear your story.
Instead, your brand’s role in the story is to act as a guide that helps the hero plan how to respond to the problem they face. The guide role is a key story element, as if the hero can solve the problem easily and on their own, the story becomes less interesting. In great brand stories, the customer faces a meaningful challenge.
Ideally, your brand partners with customer heroes in the challenges they face. It offers wisdom and advice on different options, without “telling” the customer what to do. Stories are much more compelling when the hero (and audience) work it out for themselves.
For brands, this is about planning the customer journey. The ups and downs of the brand’s story should be mirrored in the development of key messages and touchpoints. These should follow customers as they move from awareness of the problem to trial of your brand as the answer to that problem.
This thinking about how to guide your customer heroes towards solving their problems should underpin how you build your brand’s identity.
The challenge here is to do this in such a way that the customer understands how your brand can help them. But to do it in such a way that they still have to do some of the work themselves.
The customer still has to feel some sort of involvement in the decision-making process, even if your brand’s answer to their problem seems obvious. If you make it too easy, customer heroes feel superfluous to the story.
For example, there’s a commonly told marketing story about the launch of instant cake mixes in 1950s America. These mixes just required the addition of water, but struggled with initial sales. Research suggested that housewives felt left out of the process. When food companies changed the mix so that the housewife had to add an egg to the mix, sales started to take off.
In reality, this was most likely because cakes made with fresh eggs taste better. It still suggests, however, that customers need to feel some sort of involvement in the “story” that solves their problem.
This is most likely to come out in how you develop your brand’s tone of voice. What your brand says and how it says it should make your customer heroes feel like the brand’s there to help them along their way.
So, you want to show empathy – that your brand understands the problem the customer faces. You’ve been there, you recognise their fears or frustrations, and you’ve got a way to help.
You also want to give the customer confidence that you have experience in coming up with ways to solve their problem, without making it sound like you’re boastful or arrogant. There’s a tricky sales copy job to be done here.
For example, you could use case studies and examples of other customers you’ve helped with similar problems. Most customers have a healthy degree of scepticism for what brands claim (“well, they would say that, wouldn’t they?”), However, if you can share stories of other customers you’ve helped, those usually carry more credibility.
The ideal outcome (or the fairytale ending) is that the customer reads your brand’s story, and feels like it’s a story that they could experience themselves. That it’s relevant to them, and that it compels them to do something to fix their problem using your brand.
The idea of customer heroes as part of your marketing plan weaves together ideas from market research, customer experience development and brand storytelling. It’s a way to bring your customer to life using more creative thinking.
First, you really get under their skin by building an insight profile of them. These customer heroes’ profiles should be rich and multi-dimensional, pulling out meaningful insights that go beyond the obvious ideas of your competitors.
Then you use this profile to make all your brand activation touchpoints in the customer’s journey more relevant and engaging to that specific type of customer.
This helps you avoid generic executions and helps your brand stand out more and create deeper connections with the customer. They see themselves as the hero of the story, with your brand acting a a guide to help them solve their problem.
By using the ideas from brand storytelling to do this, by placing your customer heroes alongside other key story elements such as the customer’s problem, you tap into the power of story as a communication medium. Great stories pull customers in, engage them for longer and are more likely to be remembered. And most of all, they’re most likely to make them choose you as the brand that solves their problem.
We believe storytelling is a powerful creative skill that you can use to connect with customers and build your brand identity. With our coaching and consulting services, we can support you with knowledge, ideas and processes to help your brand tell a more engaging story.
Get in touch to learn how we can help your brand’s story end happily ever after.
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