Why do Schools, MacDonalds, and Google all make customers the hero of their publicity?

If you want to know how to get noticed, this show is for you. I have interviews, tools, tips, everything that an entrepreneur could need in order to help their organization get noticed for free. Thank you for joining me, Jim James, on the Unnoticed Show. Now, who does the best job of putting their customers first and making the hero's journey It's schools. I've just been to my daughter's graduation ceremony, and I can tell you that they do a fabulous job of doing what the textbooks say, and that is to make your hero the customer. I'm going to share on this podcast how that makes a difference to you if you're running your own business, because the hero's journey is a common narrative in theater, movies, but also it's the best way to generate productive public relations for you and your business. Now let's just think about that. When you're sitting there as a proud parent or grandparent, aunt or uncle, and watching your child about to leave their school, the teachers come up and they announce the children in order. And what they do is they celebrate the successes and the achievements of each of the children One by one, and then collectively as well. We as proud parents, we're part of the team, we're part of the supporting team for the children. But it's the children who we have all worked very hard to take from one place, beginning of school, to the end of a particular journey. In this case, going from the nursery school through to the end of grade 6 and getting them ready To go to the next part of the journey. Schools do this intuitively because what schools recognize is that actually we care about the school, but we're really all focused on how well the children do. And the performance and the well-being and the happiness of our children is a reflection of how well the school is run. Now, when it comes to public relations for our own businesses, how many of us consider our customers or our staff or our partners in the same way. Most of us stand up when we're doing our public relations or advertising and we talk about ourselves. We talk about how great we are. Now imagine if 30 children were standing there and 60 parents were sitting there in the audience and the headteacher was to get up and talk about themselves and say what a great job they've done. And how wonderful the facilities are, and how the teachers deserve all the credit, and the children just happen to be there. We paid for the children to be there, or certainly the taxpayers did. And you know what? The children were really the customers, but we really were the heroes of the story. And that's often really what's happening in conventional approach to public relations. Most of us are telling our story. We talk about how we set up the school, how we decorated the classrooms, how we bought the infrastructure, how we hired the teachers and how we trained the teachers and made them the best teachers in the industry, how we developed the best innovations and methodologies so that our customers could be unmentioned. Most of us have a few case studies, and I'm guilty of this as well. Really talking about ourselves and how well we've done for the clients, not how well the clients have done as a result of being our clients. Now, to take it further, at the school ceremony, the children are each celebrated. They win awards. They get somebody, a teacher, to read out on their behalf something about them. The teachers will say, this child is successfully completed the curriculum. Maybe they won a prize for sport or art or science. The teacher will give a short rendition for that child, but then later on the children will often do their own, either individual stories about— in this case yesterday, children talking about their early memories, their best memories from nursery, their best memories from each year, And each child played a part on stage at several different times during the event. They were giving gifts to the teachers that were leaving. They sang a song about the values that they'd learned by being at the school. They gave each other hugs as they realized they were going to be leaving together. What the school does is it fosters a culture of collaboration and cooperation and companionship amongst its customers. It gets the students to all feel like they're part of the community. But as parents, we're invited to learn more about the school, we're invited for drinks, we're invited to talk to the teachers, we're invited to wander around and see what work has been done by the children in the classrooms. How many of us do that with our own companies? How many of us invite our own customers into our facilities to explain what we do over and beyond just delivering the product to the customer. Now, of course, the school is slightly exceptional. It's a training facility, but the concept is the same. And when I've interviewed people like Park Howell, who has the Business of Story podcast and his book Brand Bewitchery, he talks about the hero's journey and about how companies need to put their customers center stage. And I've always struggled with that a little bit, to be honest, because you think, how do I do that? And yesterday, watching the school put the children literally centre stage until the storm clouds rained us all indoors. The schools do this very well indeed. So it reminded me then of the theory between what actors and actresses do in movies and what we can do in our own businesses. Now, the hero's journey, or what is sometimes called as the monomyth, was written about by a chap called Joseph Campbell in his book The Hero with a Thousand Faces. And basically the idea is that there are very few stories in the world, and Campbell originally identified 17 different stages that a hero goes through, and they evaluated great plays like The Wizard of Oz, for example. And it's been simplified a little bit, and I'd just like to tell you what those are. So a chap called Christian Vogler wrote The Writer's Journey: The Mythic Structure for Writers, and I just wanted to share with you these stages because these are each stages that we can help our customers overcome as businesses, but they're also potential case studies, press releases, interviews that we could be having with our customers about their experience with our own business. In other words, these These are really content opportunities. If I can just read these to you. First of all, we have the customer in stasis. So the child, for example, is at home. And then there's a call to adventure. That child, that 4, 5, or 6-year-old, depending on where you're living, gets called to adventure. They get taken to nursery school. Those of us that will remember the refusal of the call as my daughters clung to my legs and said, Daddy, don't leave me. Don't leave me at the school. The child hates going to school at the beginning, and then they meet the mentor. They meet the teachers or the teaching assistants, and then they cross the threshold. What in this book writer's theory is the special world? They enter the special world of school. It could be the special world of your business. They cross that threshold, and then they have tests. They start to learn things. They have allies. They have teachers' assistants. They have other children. Then they have their enemies, those that they don't get on with. And then they start to approach the inmost cave. They start to learn things and start to experience school in ways that are sometimes challenging, sometimes thrilling, sometimes scary. And actually, every customer goes through this as well because they start to trust us as companies. And at some stage they have to say, I pay you to do this next piece of work for me, and I'm no longer going to do it myself. That is, of course, what they're paying us for. So they approach the inmost cave of our business, and then they have, as children, the ordeal in the abyss. Now, in some cases, this is where the relationship isn't going so well with the client. So how can we communicate with them about that? The anxiety of delays or product spec not being quite right. And then there is an apotheosis. There is a change as the client starts to change and move and grow with us. We start to then have to change, and both the client and the company have to elevate, that they start to work together. And the customer, if we're doing it right, starts to learn and to trust us. As providers of a service, just in the same way that these children have had to go from being at home to becoming independent. And then the boon, the next stage: the children start to become self-learners. They start to feed, play, study, make decisions for themselves. In the same way that if we do it right, our clients or customers are working with the goods and services that we've provided with our. Education. Maybe it's a manual, maybe it's a video. Whatever it is, they're starting to get the benefits of working with us. Now, the refusal of the return. There's a moment when the customer is going to have to leave the way that they worked before and work in a new way with what we're providing them with. Sometimes it's a substitute, but by and large, they're buying something from us to do something differently, to be somewhere different, be a different person or a different company as a result. There comes a moment when they have to embrace the change or decide to go back. Now, in the hero's journey, the hero refuses to go back. Sometimes they can't go back. And in the school analogy, the children can't go back. They're too old. Sometimes they're held back a year. But even if they want to, these children have to grow up. They have to move from one grade to the next, whether they like it or not. And what we're hoping is at school, the mentors, the teachers, and all the support staff around them are facilitating that growth so the children don't want to go back. And we as providers of services and goods and products, our role is to be the mentor, is to help our customer to adopt the change and to introduce that change within their own business or their own lives so that it's positive. Just in the same way that our children, as they get to be more independent, start to decide they don't want us as parents to play the same role anymore. I still have a role of driving them everywhere. I still have a role of paying for everything. But now they want to organize their own social events. They want to study their homework themselves. They know how to do online shopping themselves. They know how to watch TV and make their own choices. They know how to make their own food. They're all skills that I've taught them as a parent. And these are all skills that we are sharing with our customers in whatever way that is, whether it's through an instruction booklet or a video or an online guide. We're trying to help our clients to grow past the immediate need that they had when they met us, move past that, and so that when they come to stage 12, which is the road back home, this is where they have a choice. They can go back, but actually what happens is they go back but as a different person. So their behavior is different, the way they operate is different. And when they then start to behave and interact in their old world, but with their new skills, or in the case of these children, in the new world, in the next school, they have the qualities as individuals, or that you had as a company when they started this journey, but now enhanced with this new level of skills or this new product or new service. So they become the master of 2 worlds. In other words, they're the master of the world they came from, but also the world they're going to. And when we have customers that feel as though we've given them mastery over the good or service that we've sold them, then they become evangelists for us. And this is really what we see when we look at people that are, for example, Tesla drivers. Or Apple owners, because the training and the facility, but also the community surrounding these kind of products, is so great that people want to share because they feel so confident in their own knowledge and experience of using it. So the return with special knowledge actually is stage 14 in this hero's journey. It says that they return with a special knowledge And actually, for me, this is where people become ambassadors. Now, this is where, in the case of, for example, the children who have left the early school and gone to the senior school, they then tell other people, other children, and are in fact used by the big school when visitors come to the school to explain what they learned in the junior school. As companies, we don't really do that. We do testimonials sometimes. But how often can we get our existing customers to help guide our new ones? Certainly in the case of Tesla or of Apple, that's very much the case, and it's something we can aspire to. Now, these stages don't necessarily all happen in order, but the idea is that as a business, we can help our clients to pass through each of these stages. Just in the way that the school has done that. But again, the role of the company is to be like the headteacher on stage to coordinate, to facilitate, have the infrastructure, bring in the teachers, bring in the infrastructure, the learning curriculum, but not to put themselves center stage. Now, that's important because as a business, when it comes to publicity, people want to read about other people like them or other companies like them that are going to be on the same journey. So if we can start to find existing customers that are these various stages and share how they are learning and growing, then we are creating great content for those potential customers that might want to read or watch or listen for a solution to the problem that they're facing. So the hero's journey, yes, it's for all those 11-year-olds that are going to leave junior school and move to senior school, and all those 18-year-olds that are going to be leaving secondary school for university, and all those people leaving one job to go to another, and all those companies that are going from one kind of service or installation to a new one. If we see our customers as the center of the story and we map out the journey for them, then we can create the right content for them at the right times and help them on their journey. And by doing that, they will of course help us in our journey of building our companies too. Thank you so much for listening to this episode. Hope you found it useful. Do please reach out to me, jim@eastwestpr.com, if there's anything I can do to help you. And come to eastwestpr.com and subscribe to our weekly newsletter, chock-full of great tips and tools Free advice on how to get yourself noticed. Thank you so much for listening to this episode of The Unnoticed Show. My name is Jim James. Thank you for listening to this episode of The Unnoticed Show. I hope that you've enjoyed it, and if you have, please do rate it on any of the players. If you'd like more information, go over to eastwestpr.com and subscribe to our weekly newsletter, or connect with me on LinkedIn. That's just Jim James, East West Public Relations. I'd be delighted to connect with you and let me know how I can help you to get noticed.