I still remember that first day when I joined my family business. That day I was curious about our origin story and the products we used to sell and had a lot of questions.

But whenever I saw my competitors, at the end it was just another clothing brand. I saw no difference between their brand and ours.

Until I decided to read the book “Building a StoryBrand” by Donald Miller.

I felt like I finally got to know what was missing all along; it was our “story.”

Let me tell you how this book helped me build a brand that stayed in buyers’ minds for days.

Storytelling framework

In chapter 3 of the book, I saw The Simple storytelling Framework where he talks about brand is not the hero of the story, the customer is the hero

The StoryBrand framework:

“A Hero has a problem. They meet a guide who gives them a plan and calls them to action. This helps them avoid failure and succeed.”

See? It’s a simple storytelling framework. which is inspired by the classic hero’s journey. It was first mentioned in Joseph Campbell’s book, The Hero’s Journey.

But something is wrong with this framework. If solving a buyer’s problem causes a revolution, then why do some brands stay in the mind for days while others not?

Think about it what makes Nike different from other shoe brands like Adidas?

It’s not about their product or logo. It’s about their brand identity. That’s what makes them different from other shoe brands.

and that distinction does not come just by helping the customer We need to change our approach to solving customer pain points.

Get found instead of interrupting

“if you need to be found you need to be fundable”-Austin Kleon

One of the biggest problems is there is so much unwanted marketing messages we see everyday to solve this so to solve this problem brands do need to have a remarkable value proposition so that brand can position in the prospective mind.

Brands need to stop interrupting people in the target market instead they should try to “be found” by having a value proposition that is remarkable.

So how we can create a remarkable value proposition so we can attract?

In one of the marketing book Marketing Warfare by Al Ries and Jack Trout, they shared a different strategy where rather than just solving buyer pain points we need to become “competitor oriented”

Once Hubspot founders Brian Halligan and Dharmesh Shah said: We had a brilliant strategy professor at MIT named Arnold Hax who used to frequently repeat the following phrase:

“Watch your competitors, but don’t follow them”-Arnold Hax

We can become competitor-oriented by looking for weak points in our competitors and then we can launch a marketing strategy against those points.

That’s why I created a dedicated page in my marketing plan, which includes a specific section for the brand’s competitors.

Which is “competitive analysis”

The missing puzzle piece all along was that the brand did not have a clear identity, leaving people unsure of what it was about

If you want to grow a brand, you need a strategy, which can’t be created unless you’re aware of the problem that’s stopping you from achieving your goal.

In my case, it was not having a clear understanding of what the brand is about.

• There was no brand identity.
• The marketing messages used to sound so inhuman.
• There was no clear vision for the brand’s future direction.

But as time passed and I started posting more content, the brand began to develop a voice, which I later used as a compass to navigate toward the goal.

If I look back at the past, there wasn’t just one book that helped me solve my problem; rather, there were multiple books. And how could I forget all the trial and error along the way to see what worked