How Brand Storytelling Drives Business Growth | Park Howell on the Story Cycle System

Every brand has two stories. The one that they think they're telling and the one the world actually hears. And here's the kicker. When those two don't match, you don't just lose sales, you lose trust, you lose talent, and you lose the chance to stand out. Welcome back to Chats with Jason.

Jason.

I'm your host, Jason Esprager, and today we're joined by someone who's mastered the art and the science of closing that gap. Park Hal is an Emmy winning business storytelling coach, best selling author of Brand Bewitchery, and host of the top ranked Business of Story podcast. For decades, he's helped leaders at companies like Coca Cola, Hilton, Dell, and even the US Air Force use stories to open more doors, close more deals, and turn customers into lifelong believers. If you've ever wondered why some brands feel magnetic and others sound like noise, you're about to find out why. Because today park is taking us inside his story cycle system to show us how to clarify your message, amplify your influence, and build a story that sells. Park, welcome to the show.

Jason. Thanks so much for having me. It's a pleasure to be here.

Now, park, before we get into frameworks and strategies, can you give me one bold truth about storytelling? 95% of business leaders still don't understand.

One bold truth is that you have to have a beginning, a middle, and as basic and dumb as that sounds, most business leaders think a story is and this happened and then this happened and then you wouldn't believe what happened here and then this happened. And that's just not the case. If you don't have an and to set up a but to bring in the problem, the plot twist, if you will, the conflict or contradiction, and then a therefore, here's the way forward. You've missed out on storytelling. And I can't tell you how many times I've heard people say, oh, let me tell you a story and it's not a story, it's a litany of a facts. And that litany is boring. And I always ask the question of brand leaders, when was the last time you were bored into buying anything?

But don't you get told it or taught, I should say at elementary school about a start, a middle and an end. Like this is not something that they're just hearing now.

Yeah, Aristotle and Poetics talked about every story has a beginning, a middle and an end. But in business and business leadership, they quite often leave out the messy middle. Or in branding, if you're selling something they don't really hammer on what the problem is, they're actually solving for their audience. They just show up and say, hey, I'm here. We have this great new widget. You want to buy some? So it's funny, it is like first grade, elementary, beginning, middle and an end. But in business and organizational communications, that messy middle is often left out. And yet that is where all the firepower is for your emotional storytelling.

It's because people are not proud of the messy middle. Or they think that people expect things to have always been perfect. Like what? Why are they so scared of that messy middle?

I think that's exactly it. They don't want to make their brand look bad. They don't want to admit to a failure within the organization as a leader that they have to try to fix. They want to believe that everything is rosy and wonderful and moving forward. They also want to come across looking smart, sounding intelligent and all of that. And if they start bringing up a bunch of contradiction, conflict or negativity, then they feel like it may actually say something about them and that leadership. And yet if you were trying to actually make something happen in someone's life and move them into a new paradigm, a new story, you have to have the beginning, you have to have the middle because that's the, that's the trigger to get them to do something. And then you've got to have the end.

And here's the way forward makes so much sense. See it and live it every day. And I know I'm guilty of the. And, and, and from time to time.

We are, we all are.

So park, you often say if you don't tell your story, people will make one up about you and you probably aren't going to like the story that they make up. When did you first realize just how true that was in your own journey?

Oh gosh. And I started studying story in earnest and why it works and how it works and the frameworks that work. And that was over 20 years ago. I came across this thing called the Heider Simmel study. Now Heider and Simmel were American social psychologists back in the mid-1940s and they were studying behavior change and outside external influences and stimuli on ourselves and what you need to do to manipulate those in order to get someone to change behavior. And they showed this little is almost like a Rorschach video. It was this black and white, very crude looking produced video back in 1946 of these triangles in the square and something's going on and it's just over a minute long. And when you watch that there are no people in it. And yet you ascribe gender to these different roles of them. There's no dialogue in it yet in your mind creates a dialogue as to what's going on. And then there's an absolute beginning, middle, and an end action that takes place. And then it just stops. And when I show that video to people and you can see it on YouTube, just go to Hider Simmel and you can see the actual film and use it on yourself, What I realized is that people make up stories. Their limbic brain makes up story to purely make meaning out of something that at the moment is meaningless to them because they feel like they've got to bring some sort of control to the chaos that they're watching. Now, we'll lay that on the business. And if you are showing up with a PowerPoint that is just loaded with charts and graphs and numbers, and I'd ask you, Jason, what's the first syllable to the word numbers? Numb. That limbic brain is not making meaning out of the communication you're giving it. So it wants to shut down and conserve its energy and resources. So it just simply makes up a story and then turns you off. And that's the greatest impact that you can have negative impact on your own brand or leadership. Storytelling is if you are unclear, then that brain is going to make up a story just to try to find some finality in the banality, to create that. That meaning and then shut down. There's a guy who started Amazon. My brain's oh, aso. Thank you, thank you.

He's. He's one of the most successful business people in the world.

And we both just. I got lost on Steve Jobs and then, you know, Faceless. He said, a brand is what people say about you and you're not in the room. I believe a brand is the story people tell about you when you're not in the room. And you better make sure they're telling the right story.

So much to unpack there. I'm wondering, just for our audience's benefit, if you could share with us a background or did you just wake up one day and go, you know what? I'm going to become the story guy?

No, actually, when I was a little kid, I was one of seven kids and my mom and dad said, park, stop telling stories. So I just grew up in a sort of a storytelling family, like all of us are, to an extent. When I was at university, I studied two things. I studied communications, public relations, advertising, because I was always fascinated with the ad world. And I studied Music composition and theory. Because I was writing songs when I was a little kid and I thought, I probably am not going to make any money as a composer, but I'm here. I wanted to understand the science behind writing music. Why does it work on our brain? Now, fast forward all these years, 40 some years, and now I find myself teaching people the composition and theory ideas behind powerful storytelling. But my career has really been in advertising. I started my own ad agency in Phoenix, Arizona in 1995, ran it for 20 years. In year 10 is when. And we were very much of a traditional agency, meaning tv, radio, print, outdoor, direct mail, that kind of thing. Then of course, the interwebs shows up, E commerce, websites, then social media. And I was kind of lost in this new digital world. I'm like, how do you make this work in advertising? And there was so much noise coming at us that I was really looking for a solution to that. And it was in 2004 that our son Parker was going to film school at Chapman University in Orange, California, just outside of Hollywood, a very renowned film school. And I said, parker, send me your books and your recorded lectures when you're done with them, since I'm paying for them. Because I want to know, what does Hollywood know about story structure and whatever to be competitive in the most competitive storytelling market in the world. And that's Hollywood. That's when I learned the Hero's Journey. And when I looked at that, I said, this is just a customer journey, or this is a founder's journey, or this is every one of ours journeys. Why don't they teach this basic fundamental monomyth structure to all of us in the brand marketing, leadership, communications world? They didn't. They don't. So I took that upon myself and that's where I created my 10 step story cycle system. Inspired by Joseph Campbell's Hero's Journey, but really mapped to business. And that's a system that has grown brands by as much as 600% by simply getting their narrative foundation right and then telling that story properly, consistently and compellingly across all channels. That's how I found myself where I am today. So it's just been an evolution. Jason?

Yeah, it surprises me that people still aren't familiar what Hero's journey story is or that framework is because it is so impactful when you learn it and start applying it. You mentioned some numbers there that I don't want the audience to. To tune out to. Was preparing to interview you for this episode. I was thinking, what are the skeptics saying? And I can Hear skeptics saying that storytelling is fluffy. It's a new way for advertisers to get money out of me or advertising agencies, I should say, and why would I care about this storytelling stuff? And all I need is sales. You mentioned a couple of numbers, or at least one number that really stood out to me that would probably put those skeptics to sleep. But when someone says to you this storytelling stuff is just fluffy, how do you prove that story actually drives the bottom line? Is it just that it helps brands grow by 600% or is there more that you share with them?

Yeah, so let me give you a few different ROIs and that's the best way. Number one, let me start with the first ROI and that's purely survival and evolution of the Homo sapien species. We are the only organism that we know that thinks, plans, organizes and acts in story. You think about it every time you're going to do something tomorrow and you're trying to get people around you to do that, you are telling them a fictional story about what's about to happen and it doesn't become a real story until it actually happens. In fact, they'll even argue, look at the great book called Sapiens that they say that Homo sapiens in it we were able to overcome the Neanderthals who were stronger, taller, apparently better eyesight. How they know that, I have no idea. Better hearing that they should have just cleaned our clock, talking about David against Goliath. But what they have determined, that's the anthropologists and scientists, is that the Homo sapien we thought in story, plan, organize and act and story. We've got 20 Neanderthals that are going down to hunt a saber tooth tiger down by the river. They always show up every day at about 4 o'. Clock. So we're going to go down there at 4 o' clock tomorrow and we're going to wipe them out. That's storytelling, that's creating a fiction to organize and move forward. And the Neanderthals didn't have that capability again, so the science says. So now let's just jump that way forward. The very first time I saw a story, super impactful because I got this story cycle system and then I built it and here's my book, a textbook on it. And we used it on a company here in Arizona. It was a community health center, a non profit community health center that had been around for 33 years. This is circa 2009. They were in big trouble. They looked like they might be going out of business. Because the whole landscape of community health started changing. And we went in and for the first time we ran them through the story cycle system and they had a brilliant CEO by the name of Avin Suate Tafoya. She totally got it. She understood how it worked. They implemented it within Adelante Healthcare. They ended up Jason growing by 600%. And Aveen said, you took us from bankruptcy to this phenomenal national leadership role simply because you helped us craft a narrative that was true to our organization, our values, vision and mission, which then attracted in the right practitioners, the right staff, the right patients. And they grew in the world of sustainable healthcare by 600%. I had never seen growth of a brand in all the branding work I had done up to that point. And that's when I knew I was a onto something. Give you another real quick one, two real quick ones. There is an auto dealership in Quebec, Canada called Pret Auto Partez in France that's ready cargo, or so I'm told. They came to me and asked me if I could help them craft their brand story because they had just launched and this was back in 2016. Now here's the thing. They're a used car dealership and they were focused on the at risk buyer. Those people that were upended by the global recession or maybe they had a health problem, they lost their money, they went to bankruptcy, maybe it was a divorce. And they said, these are good people and we want to help them get back on their feet. And a way to do that is to get them into a car they can actually afford and actually make that monthly payment every month for two years and that will help repair their credit. So I realized that they had Andre Martin Hobbs as the CEO of it. They had a much bigger purpose and vision than just selling used cars to credit at risk buyers. And so we put them through the whole story cycle system and we landed on the core narrative of Pre Auto Partez your vehicle to financial freedom. He built his entire brand around that. He became the fastest growing auto dealership in all of Canada. I think he has since opened his sixth store, as they call them. And he is franchising this concept of helping people repair their credit by putting them in the right car and then working with them on their finances moving forward. 400% growth. And he will be the first one to say, everything we do is based on this brand story that you created of setup, problem, resolution, set up. You want a new car, you want the freedom, you want the prestige of having it, but you have lousy credit Therefore, you can now go through our financial planning program. That's very short, brief. We'll get you in the car you can afford and we are going to put you back on the road to financial freedom. Prate Otto Partez, your vehicle of financial freedom.

What a phenomenal example of the power of storytelling and how that can influence a brand in ways that I don't think people would expect. Park, I'll get you to finish this sentence for me. Storytelling isn't fluff. Storytelling is.

Magic. Now that's going to sound fluffy, but here's the thing. If you are going to move that fellow homo sapiennet, fellow storytelling ape into action, then you use the magic of storytelling. But you have to understand the magic if you're going to actually cast the spell. And the magic comes in the way of story algorithms. We use three of them and. But therefore the five primal elements of a short story for big impact and our 10 step story cycle system. And here's why it works, Jason. It hooks into that primary primal pattern seeking, problem solving, decision making, buying, limbic brain, our emotional center, our survival center. And that's why this whole idea of the algorithm of setup problem, here's the problem we've got to solve for to survive around. Therefore, here's the way forward. That's why it's so powerful.

We're going to get to the story cycle system. If you've been watching or listening, I guarantee you it's worth sticking around. But. But before we dive into it, park, we live in a TikTok tweet length attention economy. It's so hard to get someone to watch a 30 minute video around a topic that's going to change their business, their lives potentially. If someone watching this today only got 10% improvement in their brand metrics, 10% of their sales from the things that you're sharing, that would be a phenomenal return on their investment of their time. So in a world where that is all about attention now, and attention is hard to get, how do leaders tell stories that actually stick when people's attention spans are shrinking?

Let me give you and your viewers one framework that they can take away right now. And if you're open for it, Jason, I'll even use it on you to build a 15 second brand story for your podcast. Are you open for that?

I am. It sounds like I'm going to need some paper though.

Maybe, maybe not. But let's. I'll walk you through it. So here's the framework. It's called the and but therefore I learned it From a evolutionary doctor from Harvard, PhD. His name is Dr. Randy Olson. I learned it in 2013 and it was a little bit like the hero's journey. When I saw it, I was totally enthralled by it. Wow, this is incredible. And it's these three words that I call that are actually the DNA of storytelling. Now here's how you use them. Act one, or sentence one is what we call your and statement of agreement. You want to make a statement to set the stage that is a shared vision of what your audience wants so that they know that you understand them and you appreciate what they want and why that's important to them. The but Statement is Act 2. This is the problem. We call it the statement of contradiction. This is the stating of the problem that they currently have that is keeping them from getting what they want. Which now we've opened up this story loop into the limbic brain and it's begging for to be close. It's begging for that answer. The therefore statement of consequence. Therefore picture the feeling you are going to get. The euphoria of actually achieving what you want when you do this. And it's the when you do this that is your call to action, your product or your service. Always at the second part of that conjunction, it is unbelievably powerful. I've been teaching it to brand leaders, scientists, academia, you name it. To show people how this works, here's the quick outline of how you build it. Then let's build one for your show right here. Name your audience. Who is your ideal audience? Because you want to place them at the center of the story. And you're even going to say you as such and such. Then you want to say want this and it's important to you because of this. So you're setting the context for the story where they want and you're raising the stakes by saying and here's why it's important to you. Then you say but and. Now follow that but with an emotion, a negative emotion. But you're frustrated, you're fearful, you're anxious, you're whatever. Because using the conjunction word of because of this major problem that you're going to help solve for them. Finally. Therefore get them to picture what that solution looks and or feels like when you do this. What action do you need to take to get that done? Okay, so that's the quick overview of how you write an and but therefore. And again, the and but therefore is at the center. It's a central character in our story cycle system and our story cycle genie Product. So with that, Jason, let me ask you, and I'm going to write on this end, we're going to just do this live for all your group here, your watchers. Who is your number one audience for this podcast?

Senior business leaders.

All right, what do they want? And they may not even know this yet, but what do they want relative to what you're going to offer them?

So what they want is growth in their business. That's the easy way for them to put it. What I think they, deep down, really want is to unlock systems, tactics that help them achieve success faster, to achieve the transformation faster.

And if you could unlock what systems? Like operational systems?

Yeah, it could be operational systems improvement systems, change management systems.

Okay, so if they cannot unlock that and then what was the thing, then what's going to happen? They want this growth. If they can unlock this, then they're going to be able to achieve what.

So if unlock it, then what they'll achieve is more repeat and referral sales. They'll have more time in their day to work on their business instead of in their business.

Okay, so we got a few different things competing here, and that's okay. This is the beauty of the abt. It helps you really hone your story. So I've heard they want to grow their business. I heard they want to unlock these operational and change management systems. And if they do that right, then they will what, be able to get referrals or grow their business or do more with less or what's the real problem you're solving for.

For them, the real problem is that they're not generating enough repeat and referral business.

Okay.

So that's holding their business back, always grinding to get the next sale, as opposed to leveraging their greatest asset, which is their customers, to generate repeated referral sales.

Okay, and what kind of negative emotion does this lead them to? Is it frustration?

The word that comes to mind always for me is overwhelm.

Right.

And because they just feel like they've been trying, but they're still on that hamster wheel, they're not seeing the growth, and hence they get, you know, the overwhelm is, well, what's next?

Yeah. All right, I'm just making some notes here. Now let's go to the therefore, the close, the statement of consequence. Therefore, how are they going to feel when they unlock these operational and change management systems to free them up?

Yeah. So when they achieve it, they will feel that they're back in control of their business and that they have a business that can achieve the success they desire without burnout. Okay, look at me just piling on. And.

And, no, this is great. No, this is the way it works, and this is the way our brains work. And this is why the ABT is so beautiful in focusing this. And then what do they learn from your show?

This is the beauty of the show because we explore such a diverse range of topics. They can learn or they can get the insights to solve their biggest challenge today. If they feel that their brand is in a sea of sameness, then this episode will help unlock how they can reposition their brand if they're competing with other products that are similar to them. A sea of product sameness. You know, we've got an episode on how to differentiate your product. And so in every episode, we provide tactical strategies that they can implement within days, if not minutes, listening to the show that will help them achieve transformation, help them achieve that next step in their transformation.

Okay, so something to the effect. I've just taken all of this in real quick, just jotted it down, and then this is going to be needed to be refined very much, but it's going to be something like this. As a senior business leader, you want to grow your business. And if you could unlock some proven operational change systems, then you could develop the repeat and referral sales that will help rocket your revenue. But you are overwhelmed because despite your best efforts, you are not creating enough repeat and referral business. And it's not only exhausting, it's expensive. Therefore, imagine the control you'll feel when you start using the proven insights gained from our eclectic group of international business leaders that you can only access here on chats with Jason, period. And then you could go on to even expound on that. There's your setup. Problem resolution. Placing your audience at the center of the story, demonstrating to them that you understand who they are and showing them that you appreciate what they want and exhibiting empathy for why they don't have what they want. And there you are articulating to what I call the three forces of trust building. You are showing your audience you understand them. You're showing that you appreciate what they want, and you're empathizing with why they don't have it. So your audience is going, wow, Jason's just like me. Wow. Jason gets me. Wow. Jason has taken the time to really understand what is holding me back. I'm going to listen to Jason because he is now a trusted host of eclectic business minds around the world that can help me build. Build that retail empire.

I'm looking for what a masterclass in how using a framework can unlock a story. I don't think anyone listening would have thought and but therefore would lead to what we just did. That was absolutely masterful.

Let me give you an ROI on that. A couple of them. I was working with a company out of Denver called Tremble and they've been around since in the 1970s and they're now a gigantic international SaaS platform for the construction, agriculture, transportation industry. And I was working with their sales and marketing team back in March of 2022 teaching them how to use the ABT framework in all of their message, every last piece of messaging. Think about this setup problem resolution framework. We took a campaign, a LinkedIn campaign that they're running in five different countries in five different languages from March of 2022. And in April of 2022 they were going to rerun the campaigns with little copy changes here and there. They sent them to me and I worked with them and I said okay, I'm not going to rewrite these. I'm just going to reformat them using an and but therefore. So it was not like stellar copy that was winning the day. It was simply setting it up in the framework that the brain wants to get. And, but therefore. And here's what happened. Here's another 400% increase across all five countries. They saw their engagement rates on LinkedIn go up by 400% from March 2022 to April 2022. Talking about a powerful AB test for the ABT because they were simply delivering the information in the way their audience's brain wants to receive it.

It makes so much sense and just talks about power of frameworks in general. You've shared information from it. You created the story cycle system. Can you explain what makes this different just from telling a good story, just so that our audience absolutely gets why this is different.

So many people really don't know how to tell a good story because they get too long winded. They go on because becomes pointless and whatever. And it's using the frameworks both in the ten step story cycle system that gives you a larger narrative arc right down to the ABT to get it focused to even the five primal elements of a short story, which is just simply an expanded abt. What I like to tell people is look it, you as a homo sapien are a storytelling ape. You are an intuitive storyteller, but it doesn't mean you're necessarily good at it. I want you to become an intentional storyteller using these frameworks. And when you start putting your messaging in these Tight little frameworks like this, it will blow your mind about the kind of engagement you can get and so forth. And so what makes it different is you're not just out there mumbling messages like everybody else is doing in the world and just clogging the airways in our earways with just bunch of banal brand and business content. You are speaking to the brain in the way it makes meaning, in the way it wants to receive information. That's what makes it so fundamentally different than any sort of communication framework you're using now.

Of course, there's more than just the story cycle system that you created. You've now created the Story Cycle Genie. Do you want to share a little bit about this exciting project you're working on?

Yeah, absolutely. So the story cycle system, when you apply it to a brand, it can take you months. You got to do a lot of discovery, you got to do a lot of research, a lot of brainstorming, a lot of soul searching, self introspection and you got to go all. And it's exhausting, it's time consuming and it's expensive, as is every branding project. What we've done is taken all of that ip, that intellectual property, and we've put it on this platform called Brightsea and now it is AI driven. But Brightsee is our own proprietary platform that you think about it as just being a lockdown of all of your content that competitors can't see, even AI can't come in and take a look at it. And we help you create a brand brain. And simply all you have to do is you take your website, maybe one or two pieces of content marketing material you have, you feed it into the Story Cycle Genie and you can go to StoryCycleGenie AI and in about two minutes it'll give you a brand assessment. It'll say, here's how you're showing up in the world. We ran one for you. That brand assessment validates what you're doing well, it highlights or reveals some gaps that you could easily fix to be even more successful. And it actually provides inspiration for some fresh ways to talk about your brand. And the entire Story Cycle Genie is built on, on our three proven narrative frameworks. The big one is the story cycle system and then we use the and but therefore and the five primal elements of a short story throughout. So it creates your foundational brand narrative and then will enable you to create brilliant marketing strategies based off of your foundational brand narrative. And of course produce any possible content you could imagine that is always on brand because it is based on the brand story that you help the Genie arrive at simply by it first looking at your website and then you coming in and simply iterating on it. And so the whole idea is now you can use our proven story cycle system and you can create that brand narrative in minutes, not months. You can do instant marketing strategy and produce instant content. You might work at it for three or four hours. And the savings across the board, we ran the numbers is what you would normally pay for that big brand development could be anywhere from 5 to 30 to $50,000. You probably will have about $50 invested in because you know the cost of running the Genie. So you could do this stuff in minutes, not months, at a fraction, and I'm talking like 1% of what it would have normally cost you with an expensive agency and that sort of thing.

It's phenomenal. And before you and I even had a chance to talk, you were very generous. You ran chats with Jason show through StoryCycle Genie and shared with me the output. I was delighted to say the least. And I love just how thorough it was. Based on very little import from the website itself is fairly simple. So I definitely encourage people to check out Story Cycle Genie along with getting a copy of your book if you can do both. I'm speechless almost because it was so good and I was just having a look at it again earlier today and you talk. One of the areas you talk about is emotional promise. And it's interesting how you talk about the emotional promise of chats with Jason being transformation. And then today we of course did the end, but therefore exercise. And again I'm talking about transformation. It definitely seems to be part of the DNA of part of my personal brand. So really great stuff that you're doing there with making storytelling and brand building really accessible and I think that's phenomenal. We're coming to the end of the show, but there's a couple of questions that I just can't let you go without asking.

Fair enough. Let me get a drink of water so I can prepare for this.

Well, this one usually catches, I guess offhand a little bit, but I think you get out ace it, that's for sure. Let's just say that if you had to explain the difference between marketing and storytelling to a 10 year old using only the items from their lunchbox, how would you do it?

Ah, that's beautiful. I would pull out their little juice box and I would have them look at the label on that juice box and I would ask them, how do you react to this label, do you like it? Do you. Do you not like it? Do you care about it? Or whatever. And maybe because I'm not a big juice box guy, I can't think of a brand, but we're going to just make one up. Say it's the popsicle juice box. And the little kid says, oh, I really like this one because I like the flavor. And you go, all right, what about that packaging? Have you really thought that much about it? Oh, it catches my eye, and whatever. And then I'm like, okay, would you prefer to have a different chance juice box in there? Oh, no, I really love this one. Why do you love this one? Because whenever I drink it, I always feel so good. So I go, okay, here's the difference between marketing and storytelling. Marketing is that package that you're looking at to be able to get your attention. Storytelling is your experience, how you've experienced that brand. If you found that you don't particularly like that cherry juice in there, but mom has been cheap, and so she buys you the worst vinegary type, kind of, and you're stuck with it. That's a story you're telling yourself when you really want that Kool Aid juice box over there, because you know how much more sugar is in it. At least your taste buds do. So marketing is what is presented to you to infiltrate your space. Storytelling is the story you tell about that particular brand to yourself and why you want to keep coming back to it.

What a great way to explain storytelling and the difference between it and marketing. Park, most leaders want to be the hero. Why is that the fastest way to kill your brand story?

Because nobody likes bravado. Nobody likes chest pounders. Everybody wants to be at the center of every story. The famous book by Dale Carnegie, how to win friends and influence people and just say their name over and over again. Jason. Because, Jason, everyone wants to be at the center of the story. Is that right, Jason? It just is. It's just the way we work. So when a brand shows up and says, look, we're wonderful, we're marvelous. You've heard about us everywhere. We obviously have the best product in the market. Just buy some. That's condescending. That's speaking down to people. And people go, screw you. I'm going to go and buy the second runner up here who actually is taking the time to. To understand who I am, what I'm about and what I care for. And they're speaking to those needs. And that's why, like in the story cycle, Genie output, I produce for you and every brand produces. What are the first three things we start with? First category is the hero of the journey. It's not you, the brand, it's your audience. And it identifies your top three audiences in order of importance. And then what does it do? It goes in and identifies the emotional triggers for each audience. What do they want, what are their challenges, what are their fears, what are their frustrations and what are their aspirations? Because those become the story lever points that you are going to use to speak to them from their point of view. And what does it do then? The very next thing is it then creates an ABT statement for each one of those audience that you can use as the foundation for all of your communication moving forward. Long winded way of saying is you as the brand are not the hero of your story. Your audience is. The second part of that is your story is not about what you make, but what you make happen in the lives of the people you serve. From your colleagues to your customers to the communities you serve. Nobody cares about what you make. They only care about what you make happen in their lives.

No one cares about what you make. They only care about what you make happen in their lives. Park, one last question and then I promise to let you go.

Hey, I've got all day here.

Jason, if someone listening today wants to story on, what's the very first, simplest thing they should do to start owning their narrative?

Gosh. Start working on your abt, Practice it. And just like I did with Jason, I write an ABT right after you're watching this about your company. Who's your number one audience? What do they want relative to your offering and why is that important to them? But what frustration are they experiencing because of what problem? Therefore, how are they going to feel when they solve it? When they do this with you? Do that right now. And that is the beginning of building your storytelling intuition, your storytelling technique. Because EABT is the DNA of storytelling.

Park, Absolute brilliant advice to end the show on. Thanks for being with us today, Jason.

Thank you so much. I appreciate it.

So here's the truth. Businesses don't run on products, processes or platforms. They run on the stories we tell and the ones people tell about us. Park showed us today that when you clarify your story, you amplify your impact and even simplify your life. If this episode inspired you, share it with someone who's building their brand or leading a team. And don't forget to hit that subscribe so you never miss the conversations that can transform the way you do business. I'm Jason S. Bradshaw, reminding you that better business starts with delivering a better experience and as we heard today, a better story. When you transform your experience, you transform your business and the world around you.