Review: Building a Story Brand, by Donald Miller

There are mountains of bad marketing books out there.

Books whose sole purpose is to elevate a consultant, speaker, or agency in order to drive clients and speaking opps to their door.

I thought this might be one of those books.

It is not. In fact, the book is pretty great.

Miller looks at marketing through the time-tested methodology of storytelling, laying out a simple (and simple does not mean easy) framework for creating a marketing message strategy that interests and engages your target customer.

Miller’s “StoryBrand” framework looks like this:

It’s an effective structure that also forces a business to be displicined about what it sells and how it sells it.

Much of the book fleshes out the details and strategies involved in creating something compelling and effective inside this framework--and, again, the content truly is useful. There’s no holding back information so you have to hire Miller’s agency. You can, if you want guidenace and content development, but there’s enough meat here for small businesses to build a story themselves so they can push it out into the wild for testing and refinement.

Later in the book comes the selling we’ve come to expect in marketing books--propping up the agency’s ability to infuse story into a company’s culture, for example.

But that’s forgiveable, because Miller gives us so much value in the rest of the book.

Miller implores businesses to position themselves as the “The Guide” who can lead “The Hero”--the customer--through a transformation. And Miller clearly demonstrates the power of that philopsophy, serving as the Obi-Wan Kenobi who leads the reader through a detailed, effective messaging framework.

“Building a Story Brand” is the rare marketing book that deeply explains strategy and follows up with tactical suggestions for execution.

Very smart, very useful. I recommend “Building a Story Brand” for any marketer or business owner.

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