Brand Stories & the Hero's Journey
Brand Stories & the Hero's Journey
How B2B Tech Stories Follow the Quest Story Structure
Image courtesy of Reena Kapoor (Instagram: @1stardusty)
A blog series on B2B tech branding - This is Part 4 [Structure].
Part 1 [Theme]: Building A Tech Brand for Business. Part 2 [Elements]: Elements of a Tech Brand Story. Part 3 [Process]: Creating an Authentic Brand Story. Part 5 [Case Study]: Building a Brand with a Collective Soul [Google Cloud interview]
Most tech companies marketing to businesses follow a common story structure. This pattern is universal in the sense that every technology product company selling to businesses ends up with some version of this structure, either simplified or in full expression.
This blog post delves into this story structure, with examples drawn from an interview with John Zissimos, Vice President of Creative, Brand, Media and Customer Programs at Google, about his work on Google Cloud’s Solving Campaign.
The Hero (Customer), the Mentor (Tech Brand) & the Quest
Applying the structure of the mythological Hero’s Journey by Joseph Campbell to tech branding, we see that the customer has the archetype of the hero and the brand (the tech company and its product) has that of the mentor.
These two archetypes — the hero (customer) and mentor (tech brand) — engage in a journey triggered by technology.
The journey is a quest with the following characteristics:
The current world of the customer is broken, limited, or otherwise stuck with business problems; the current technologies, and their trajectories, will not solve these problems.
The tech brand offers a new product, know-how, and a technology that promises a new way forward to solve one of the critical problems and unleash a lot of business value.
The tech brand acts as a guide to the use of this technology.
But the customer shall have let go of the old way and take a journey into the uncharted world promised by the new tech.
To reach the promised land, the customer shall face dangers posed by the new tech and shall have to give up the old way of doing things.
The tech brand helps the customer navigate this journey to the promised land.
In short, the tech journey story is one of the oldest stories: the story of a hero (the customer) leading its people through uncharted and dangerous waters to reach a new promised land with the help of a mentor (the tech brand).
As an aside, note that the business tech company internally follows a similar story. As the founders build and bring innovative technology to market, they take their employees and investors on a similar journey. This is what makes the tech company credible as a mentor to the customers.
Many of the specific people among the customers (e.g., users, buyers, and developers) may not need to be aware of their heroic role in the story. However, a tech company building the brand story should be aware of the power of this structure and use it in managing customer and market perceptions.
Why the Tech Journey Matters
In business, all significant tech products are disruptive to a customer; therefore, not all customers are ready to accept the journey triggered by a new tech. Even if they are, customers look for a mentor (the tech brand) to take them through the journey. Based on their aptitude towards risk, customers fall in three groups [Crossing the Chasm, Geoffrey Moore]:
Innovators & Early Adopters: They are ready and willing to be pioneers in the journey, but with an intrepid mentor who helps them find the path.
Early to Late Majority: They are willing, but don’t want to be the first. They need an experienced mentor who knows the path.
Laggards: They are reluctant to take the journey. They will follow others only after a path has been paved and will go with their existing mentor.
Most tech companies focus their story only on the promised land: the bright future created by their product. They downplay the risks of the journey to their customer or ignore the perils of their technology. This is a mistake. This does not compel businesses to adopt new technologies. They are looking for your brand to mentor them through the risks of the journey, rather than come across as ignorant of the risks. Therefore, knowing the tech journey story and where a customer fits in the risk profile can help a brand set proper expectations of relationship and tech outcomes for each customer segment. All significant tech products have a dark side; some of it is inherent in its inception and known early, and some of it is discovered in use over time. The tech journey story helps a brand recognize the importance of these risks for their brand story.
All significant tech products need to attract and build an ecosystem/network of partners that support them. The tech journey story can help glue the network with a shared purpose of how customers shall navigate the technology through its lifecycle.
In summary, in order to build a credible brand story of a tech company selling to businesses, executives need to anticipate the tech journey and manage the story of disruption and potential downsides.
The Tech Journey — Stages
The reason the tech-to-business journey is universal is because any sufficiently novel tech (especially software) affects information creation, production, or distribution and hence affects how work gets done by knowledge workers — and increasingly by even frontline workers. The stronger the tech is, such as AI, the more it changes the user productivity, business processes, and ultimately business metrics and outcomes. Businesses care not just about the tech but about how to absorb the disruptions wrought by the tech, hence the need for a story centered around the customer journey in absorbing the tech.
“When a B2B marketer is sitting with a business customer who has risked everything on your technology or solution, and they tell you about the time when their business was about to go under, but then they chose your company. And that was their hope — that by partnering with you, they would get somewhere. And they’re telling you about that time when they almost went under, and they’re emotional about it. That’s the story someone wants to hear,” says John Zissimos.
A common way to express this journey in storytelling is with Freytag’s pyramid structure, which has seven stages. Let’s apply the pyramid to map out the most common beats of the story as perceived by the customer and the company.
Exposition
Customers have a problem about which they do not know or that they do not care to solve. Their current approaches and technologies are good enough but inadequate to generate more value.
Customer: Exposition describes the customer world as it exists prior to the new product of the tech company. This lays out the context of business problems, the challenges faced by the customer, their past attempts to solve the problem, and why the situation remains intractable so far.
Tech Co: In this stage, the company is not on the customer’s radar yet.
Inciting incident
The hero (customer) becomes aware of a new way to solve a persistent problem or achieve a critical goal and begins to investigate.
Customer: The customer becomes aware of the new product and the company behind it. In the case of user-driven products, a pool of business users within a company discover the product and begin trying it themselves and discussing it with peer users. The buyers become aware of the value of a new product category for the first time, and they discover the brand promise of the company and its product.
Tech Co: This is the beginning of the marketing engagement between the customer and the company. Engagement could be through word of mouth or through top-of-the-funnel awareness programs by the tech company, where they are reaching as many users and buyers to plant the brand story through paid, social, and other channels.
Rising action
There are two dramatic stages of rising action separated by a midpoint. In the first stage, the customer evaluates the product to see whether it will solve its problem and deliver value (pre-purchase discovery). At the midpoint, the customer commits to a specific goal and purchases the product to achieve the goal. Thereafter, in the second stage, the customer deploys and uses the technology to solve the problem, achieve its goal, and realize the value.
Stage 1: The customer starts evaluating how the product might address their problem or stated internal purpose, often unbeknownst to the tech company and other vendors. As the customer interest rises, so does the action between the tech products and vendors. At a critical decision point of the story, the buyer orchestrates either a formal procurement process or an informal selection process to purchase the product. If the product is low priced and user driven, then the user group (a department or team) makes the purchase without a complex procurement or capital allocation.
Midpoint
At midpoint, the customer (hero) commits to solving the problem or achieving a goal and buys the product based on its promise.
Stage 2: In the second stage of rising action, the customer invests in deploying and using the product to unlock the promised value. Users engage with the product to get their jobs done; the business buyers begin to measure value delivered through usage.
The rising action time frame may be short, such as when a product is simple to deploy, easy to use, and has direct measures of its value impact (e.g., a low-price SaaS tool in the self service SMB segment). In other cases, these two stages may last for months or quarters when the product is complex, configurable, requires user training, and needs major changes to company processes.
Climax
The climax is achieved when the customer solves the problem, achieves its business goal, and unlocks the value promised by the technology. The customer has arrived at the promised land.
The product is deployed and live among the users; the users are hooked and have strong satisfaction, and the buyers are advocates for the technology’s value.
Falling action
The customer works through all implications of using the technology.
The product is humming, the new processes take hold, users scale, and buyers beam with success of business metrics.
Resolution
The customer completes their journey.
The product has delivered value as promised; customer advocacy ramps up.
How to Focus the Brand Story at Each Stage
For a tech company, a strong brand story needs to be delivered throughout the customer’s tech journey, but what elements of the story matter (promise, insight, offering, and commitments) changes based on the stage of the tech journey, and therefore how the story is delivered also varies over the journey.
Awareness Stage: Exposition
This is the stage where the brand story is established via advertising campaigns, intense paid and earned social and PR effort, and endorsements by customers and partners with the aim of generating awareness among the target customer segments.
The tech brand aims to be known as a credible mentor to the hero (customer) should the customer choose to embark on the journey.
Brand Story Focus: Promise the Journey
Promise: Establish the major value and emotion of the brand
Insight: Tease with the power of the tech to deliver the value, but do not get into the nitty gritty of product
Offering: Build high-level credibility through social proof (e.g., customers, partners, and analysts)
Commitments: Make a few iconic commitments in the market, especially around customer experience, for all to believe in the brand promise
All these story elements are created, orchestrated, and delivered typically by various marketing and sales teams during the awareness stage.
Purchase Stage: Inciting Incident to Midpoint
This is the stage where customer engagement increases. The brand story action rises as customers begin to assess the brand’s potential to solve their problem, evaluate the offering, and test the technology. They want to ensure that the brand is an ideal mentor in their journey. At the end of this stage, the customer chooses (purchases) the tech brand.
The tech brand aims to be chosen as the mentor to the hero (customer) by proving its merit as a partner in the hazardous journey into the new world unleashed by the technology.
This is also the sales opportunity stage for the tech brand, where key relationships are established, value promised, technology tested, pricing and terms finalized, and key partners brought along in preparation for the journey with the customer.
Brand Story Focus: Show Viability of the Journey
Promise: Create a specific value promise for each customer, exhibit your commitments in sales and executive relationships, and make customer interactions count.
Insight: For users, lead with the product. Demonstrate its power to get the job done. For buyers, show how the product magic delivers business metrics and value.
Offering: Prove product magic through trials and pilots and proof of concepts. Complete the compelling offering (price and terms). Bring the key partner and other capabilities as needed.
Commitments: Declare for each customer the critical commitments needed for the post-purchase journey. Internally ensure company-specific commitments (e.g., employee, roadmap) are in place.
All these story elements are created, orchestrated, and delivered by various sales, marketing and product teams during the purchase stage.
Usage Stage: Midpoint to Climax
This is the stage where the proverbial rubber meets the road. The customers face the reality of deploying the product in its environment, and users get to fully live with the product. Buyers uncover risks, face organizational obstacles, and make changes to timelines and resources. Users struggle with product shortcomings, and support needs become clear. Processes break, morale is frayed, and relationships are tested. At the end of this, the buyer has either achieved the goals and realized value or has not, and the users are either happy or they are not.
In short, the brand commitments are tested at this stage, and they either meet or miss customer expectations of business impact. The tech brand as the mentor, has to help the customer (hero) transition into the new world.
Brand Story Focus: Make the Journey
Promise and Commitments: Words count less than action at this stage. It may be critical to remind customers of expectations set to achieve the results. The trust and commitment built up to this stage is the foundation of overcoming the hurdles. Essentially, this is the stage to deliver on critical customer specific commitments through employees, product, and partner capabilities.
Insight & Offerings: This is where the tech brand needs to prove the mettle of its core insight, either the product innovation or approach solves the problems or falls short. This is the reason the mentor earned its place in the journey. The expertise, skills, and wisdom of the partners and employees come to fore. The offering may need to be adjusted or renegotiated for success.
All these story elements are created, orchestrated, and delivered typically by customer success and product teams during the usage stage.
Loyalty Stage: Resolution
This is the stage of falling story action. The customer is successful in achieving its goal, and the users are active and engaged. The product delivered on its promise but invariably there were surprises which now need to be resolved; processes were altered that require new adjustments for sustained success. This is the loyalty stage with the need to resolve the certain but unforeseen consequences of technology disruption.
The customer is an advocate for the new technology and the new way of working. The tech brand as a mentor has helped in the path to success. They both share in the success of arriving in the new world.
Brand Story Focus: Benefits of the Journey
Promise: Generate the proof of value created and delivered with customers that fuels advocacy. This is the gold of customer success: the proof of promises successfully delivered.
Insight: Tie the proof back to how the insight and product magic played a role in the journey.
Offering: Bring out the key capabilities that were needed to make the delivery successfully.
Commitments: Convert key buyers and users to champions for the product and its role in the journey. Codify and promote the commitments that were made by the customer and tech brand to achieve the journey. Set the stage for the next journey.
All these story elements are created, orchestrated, and delivered typically by sales, customer success, marketing, and product teams during the loyalty stage.
In short, the brand story can be focused to deliver different expectations at each stage of the tech journey of the customer.
The Power of Tragedy and How to Avoid It
Notice that the dramatic structure for a story with bad outcomes is the same as above. Some customers may not achieve their goal, your technology may not work, users may disengage, the buyers may stop funding, and partners may not deliver on time. Every well orchestrated tech journey story has a dark side, and the hero may not reach the new world promised. In fact, the more novel a technology (e.g., AI, VR), the more likely that there will be some customer journeys that will end in a tragedy.
According to Aristotle, a tragedy evokes pity and fear in the audience. The news of failed projects, derailed customer careers, and missed deadlines around your company may spread quickly and start a downward spiral. There is no way to ignore this since any tech sufficiently powerful carries its own seeds of discontent.
So, how should you manage a brand story that may end in tragedy for some customers?
First make sure you have success stories of customers who have completed the journey and achieved their goals. Without some customers having climbed the summit, there is little confidence in your brand story anyway. With that as a foundation, make the hardships and the risks of the journey a part of your story. Use the risks to invite customers who are ready for your technology’s call to adventure — and warn away those not ready to take on the disruption of the technology. Done well, this can add credible allure to your brand.
Here is what John Zissimos says of his work on Google Cloud’s Solving Campaign: “We engaged our customers to come with us on that journey, to pilot the brand with us. Those customers that have worked with us for a while were the first people to help us tell that story. We were all vulnerable together because we didn’t know if it was going to work. And it wasn’t that simple or easy, but we went down that road with them, and these are the stories we made with them. They were raw, and they were real. And one story begets another story to get to another story, and suddenly the momentum starts. As our teams and the customers see themselves in the stories, the brand comes to life,” illustrating the fusion of customer and tech brand story journeys.
Key Takeaways
Discover your tech journey story across different customer types and segments.
Build your version of truth for your ideal journey story for each customer segment.
Share it with your customers, partners, and employees before and along the journey. This is a great way to set expectations and establish your role as an expert mentor on their journey.
Manage daily context with a customer based on where you are in the journey story.
Be truthful about what rising actions or conflicts do you foresee. The strongest way to build relationship equity with customers is to have them trust you during the hard terrains of the journey.
Be a mentor for your customers on how to manage the failures, especially the risks and dislocations triggered by your product.
References
Building A Business Brand with A Collective Soul: An Interview with John Zissimos, VP of Creative, Brand, Media and Customer Programs at Google Cloud
Google Cloud Solving Campaign
A blog series on B2B tech branding - This is Part 4 [Structure].
Part 1 [Theme]: Building A Tech Brand for Business. Part 2 [Elements]: Elements of a Tech Brand Story. Part 3 [Process]: Creating an Authentic Brand Story. Part 5 [Case Study]: Building a Brand with a Collective Soul [Google Cloud interview]