Customer problems are at the heart of the most engaging and successful brand stories. We explore how you uncover and use what’s troubling customers in your brand’s story. Read this for ideas on positioning your brand as the guide to solving customer problems.
Put simply, problems make stories more interesting. If the hero faces no problems, then their life is easy, but their story is dull. Pointless. Predictable.
The hero’s struggles to overcome their problems as they journey towards their goal move the story forward. It’s how they learn and show their character. Problems incite actions and moments of drama that draw audiences in.
Look at the stories you hear every day. From your family. Your workmates. On TV shows and in movies. Life’s a struggle, and stories help us deal with that. What people do to overcome problems lies at the heart of most stories.
In brand storytelling, the customer is the hero with the problem. Poor health. Bad breath. Dodgy finances. Whatever it is. To win, your brand has to understand that customer and the challenges they face. That’s how you build a story they feel connected to. You build a story that addresses meaningful customer problems.
Customer problems can work at multiple levels.
Some of them can be immediate and specific. I’m hungry. I’m cold. The solutions to these are usually quick and obvious. Find food. Find a heat source.
However, other customer problems can be more long-term and abstract. Concerns about global warming, for example. Fears about the impact of genetic modification on our food ecosystem. The solutions to these problems are more complex and usually take much longer.
Most customer problems, though, sit somewhere between these extremes of immediate gratification and world-changing events. So, when starting to build your brand’s story, it’s important to understand the nature of the customer’s problem and what’s driving it.
In most cases, this means market research. You read or commission research and talk directly to customers to understand what their challenges are.
This can be trickier than it sounds, however. It may be that customers don’t even realise they have a problem, for example. They’ve got into a habit of buying a particular product or brand, and aren’t aware that there are better solutions on the market.
It could be that the problem isn’t what the customer thinks it is. They might say their car is unreliable. But when you ask, you find out that they rarely get it serviced, and they’re slow to replace worn-out parts.
It might even be that the problem’s with them, and they don’t want to admit it. They might blame their bad health on genetics when in fact, it’s just that they’re too lazy to go to the gym. They might believe a blowhard influencer on X who says you can learn more from reading tweets than by studying for years at university.
Qualitative research helps you uncover the true nature of these deep underlying customer problems. That means asking customers probing, open-ended questions. Listening and asking more questions. Observing how they act and interact with your product. Getting under their skin to find out the real issue. This is how you get to the heart of the customer’s problem.
Once you have an idea of what the customer problems are, you need to plan how to build this key story element into your brand’s story.
The whole goal of telling your brand’s story is for the customer hero to recognise that your brand can act as a guide to help them solve their problem.
So it’s important early in your brand’s story that you share a picture of what this customer looks like.
This usually isn’t about a specific person, but more a type of person and situation that customers can relate to.
A younger driver struggling to pay for expensive car insurance. An older man worrying about hair loss. A family wondering what to do at the weekend.
You’ll note that in all these cases, it’s the situation the customer (hero) finds themselves in which raises the problem. The car insurance demand. Hair clogging up the shower drain. Bored kids who need something to do.
Understanding and being able to describe this situation is a key part of telling your brand’s story. This has two benefits for your story.
First, it makes it much easier for customers to see the relevance of the story you’re about to tell. If they recognise the situation / problem as something they always experience, your story will capture their attention. It’ll hook them in with the promise that it might show them a potential solution.
Then, by reflecting that you understand their problem. You also inherently imply that you understand them. This creates a sense of empathy and connection. Customers are much more likely to buy brands that “get” them, than ones which don’t. So, painting a picture of customer problems is a key step in showing them that you can help solve those problems.
Professional storytellers often call the revealing of the problem the inciting incident. This is usually attributed to Robert McKee’s book Story, where he talks about storytelling as part of screenwriting for movies. He talks about this moment in the story where the hero’s situation suddenly changes. They may have thought everything was fine, but something happens to show them that it isn’t.
It’s an important concept for brand storytellers to think about when building their story. When showing customer problems, you need to think about how you’ll bring them to life. How you’ll dramatise them, so that the audience feels compelled to pay attention.
You see this “drama” play out a lot in advertising. The housewife who finds a bug in the kitchen and suddenly needs insecticide. The motorist who’s just had a bump and needs help from their insurance company. Even the tired business traveller who’s just got off a long-haul flight and just needs a comfy bed for the night.
These are all examples of customer problems dramatised as part of that brand’s story. They bring to life relatable customer hero types – the houseproud mum, the reckless motorist, the frequent flyer – and the types of customer problems they might face. The inciting incident that sparks them to need a solution to their problem.
No one likes having problems. And while some might be predictable (filling in your annual tax return), most are not (fixing a broken toilet).
But even the predictable ones, our brains don’t like to think about in case they absolutely have to.
So, in terms of how you bring attention to customer problems, you often need to bring some element of surprise or drama to them.
Customers need to pay attention and recognise that there’s a problem.
This is why many advertising headlines start with a question. A question is a great way to quickly identify a problem and grab attention. Need help with filling out your taxes? Fixing that broken toilet?
It doesn’t have to be dramatic (though that helps). But it does have to be relevant. These types of problem questions start the story for the audience. Customers follow the story because they want to find out the answer. And that’s where your brand makes its entrance into the story.
Once customers recognise the problem, your brand is then in an ideal situation to step into the story as part of the answer to that problem.
Your brand’s role in the story is to act as a guide. As Ben Kenobi to their Luke Skywalker. As Gandalf to their Frodo. Even as Doc Brown to their Marty McFly.
The customer hero character still needs to act to solve the problem. You can’t do it for them. But your brand can supply all the advice, wisdom and support they need to solve that problem. It points the way and nudges the hero towards their goal, whatever that is.
This role shapes your brand’s tone of voice and how it helps the customer work out how to solve their problem. You should be looking at the desired customer journey and working out when to use questions to prompt their thinking, and when to provide answers when they get stuck. Your brand story and your customer experience should mirror each other in the key action points.
For example, discovering that there’s a problem. Exploring options for solving that problem. Making a decision. Trying out a possible solution. These are both action points in the brand story and key touchpoints in the customer journey.
There’s a fine balancing act when it comes to how easy you make the answer to the customer’s problem.
It seems obvious that you want your brand to be an easy answer to the customer hero’s problem.
Customers aren’t known for their patience when it comes to problem-solving after all. If your brand’s solution seems like too much effort, customers will go elsewhere.
Here’s the real challenge, though. If you make the answer to the problem too easy, then you’re not really telling a story.
I was hungry, I ate a burger isn’t much of a story. So, stronger brand stories that ask the audience to do a little bit of work for themselves tend to work better.
You can do this by dangling questions and benefits over the story, and letting the customer work them out. Which burger is healthier because it has x% less fat, for example. It’s more plausible and credible when the customer has to work out the answer from something you’ve shown them than when you simply tell them the answer. It’s a stronger story if the customer has to do a little bit of work themselves.
How you do this combines a mix of different skills. It’s the understanding of the customer’s underlying psychology from your market research. It’s the writing skills that bring to life messages that are clear and compelling. And it’s the application of advertising and sales copy techniques that move customers towards decisions and actions.
Stories allow us to live out problems vicariously and hypothesise and safely explore (in our heads) what we would do in a challenging situation. They mean that when that challenging situation arises, we’re better prepared to deal with it. That’s why the customer problems are such a key element in telling your brand’s story. They bring to life your brand’s benefits in engaging and memorable ways.
How you show these customer problems and how they can be solved lights up the customer’s brain. They can see themselves going through that same experience and coming out as happy (and satisfied) as the hero customer in the story.
So, do your research. Dig deep into what problems customers really face. Think hard about what your brand offers as a guide to help customers solve their problems. Then use all your creative and storytelling skills to turn these insights into a compelling brand story. Making the effort to craft your story makes customers much more likely to buy your brand. And that’s the happy ending for both of you that you want.
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.
We explore where to start with marketing psychology. Learn the key marketing areas where psychology gives you a head start. Read this to learn how psychology can smarten up your marketing.
We explore how to be a good underdog brand. Learn the 3 defining characteristics of a good underdog. Read this for ideas on building a better underdog story.
We explore how to find your creative place. Learn how to shape where creativity happens mentally, physically and with your audience. Read this for ideas on finding a better place to be creative.
To hear our latest ideas first, enter your email details below to receive email updates. Be among the first to hear our new marketing, creative and e-Commerce ideas.
Brands that consistently bring the brightest ideas to life build great creative habits and processes.
Check how bright your brand’s creative habits are with our free Creative habits and ideas Quotient (ChiQ) test.
10 questions to learn whether your brand’s ideas are more likely to be “no” or more likely to be “woah”.
Take the test to find out more.
Our mission is to build better brands with brighter ideas.
Get in touch to discover how we can help you create, craft and commercialise better ideas.
