Park Howell - The Business of Story: Shifting Your Brand from "What You Make" to "What You Make Happen"

In 3, 2, 1.

Welcome to Becoming Preferred, the podcast where we help you level up your business and become the best version of you.

Today, we're tackling the one tool that separates iconic brands from the white noise of the marketplace.

Story.

Our guest today is an Emmy award.

Winning advertising veteran who has spent over 40 years proving that story isn't just a creative exercise, it's a growth engine.

Park Howell is the founder of the business of Story and the creator of this store, Cycle System, a framework that has helped brands scale by as much as 600%.

He is the author of Brad B. Witchery and has just pioneered a way to merge human emotional intelligence with AI through his story Cycle Genie.

If you've ever felt like your message.

Is getting lost, or if you're struggling.

To explain your value with a 20.

Slide deck, this episode is for you.

Park is going to show us how to use artful intelligence to sharpen your positioning, reduce the cost of brand deposits development, and ultimately help you win the battle for the mind of your customer.

Join me now for my conversation with Park Howell.

Well, hey, park, welcome to the show.

We're delighted to have you.

Oh, thanks, Michael.

It's great to be here.

Now I see you're in Munds Park, Arizona, and I'm embarrassed because we have an office in Tempe and I forgot where Muns was.

So you're just south of Flagstaff?

Yeah, about 17 miles south of Flagstaff.

In fact, my wife just is heading into town right now to get some more flowers for the front of the house and it'll take her about 20 minutes to get there.

So it's not too bad.

It's a little bit like we were in Phoenix.

And if I was to drive from 44th street and Camelback to Thomas and 32nd street, it'd take me 20 minutes and, you know, through harrowing stoplights.

Now we have a beautiful drive.

The only thing you have to watch out for, the elk and the deer, basically.

It's got one of the largest elkers in in the country.

People don't realize that here in Arizona.

And what's nice is I think you're about 6,000ft plus.

So in the summertime, that's the destination place.

It's beautiful.

You get a game of golfing without sweating out a couple of gallons.

Oh, yeah.

And we live in the largest contiguous ponderosa pine forest in the world.

And most people outside of Arizona don't know that.

They think Arizona is just flat desert, but it's very much not.

We are up on the mogollon Rim just the very south end of the Colorado Plateau and it's absolutely spectacular up here.

I've skied on the San Francisco Peaks and water skied the same day.

So I've actually done it in the same and you can actually see the desert from the top of the chairlift.

So interesting as.

Oh, awesome.

Hey, we're delighted to have you part we're here going to be talking about story and storytelling and you've created some pretty cool tools which I'm excited to talk about.

You've written books on the subject which we'll also talk about.

But before we get there because we have a lot of business professionals, entrepreneurs, executives, organizations and and right now with AI kind of hitting the marketplace and we've got this new evolution, I call it the big disruption.

Where do we find ourselves?

How do we place ourselves, how do we position ourselves so that we can out position the competition and the power of story?

But before we get there, let's go back.

You're in high school, where are you?

Where are you?

I think you were up in the Northwest somewhere.

You're trying to decide what you want to be when you grow up.

How did we get here?

Yeah, I grew up in the Pacific Northwest just north of Seattle.

Went to Buffalo High School, went to Washington State University and when I was studying at wsu, you I knew I was going to go into the communications program because I wanted to be in either journalist, PR or advertising.

And I kept walking by the school of Music every day and I thought, you know, because I'd been playing the piano and writing songs since the third grade and I thought, you know what, maybe I'll just do some studying, get a minor in music while I'm getting this major in communications.

And it turned out I got a major in music composition and theory first and then that second major 1/2 year later in advertising and marketing.

And really I knew I'd starve as a composer but thought I could make it in the ad world.

And I've been in the advertising, branding, marketing world for 40 plus years and I ran my own agency for 20 of those years down in Phoenix.

All over the place.

Different vertical markets or was there a specific market you focused on?

Yeah, at first we were kind of all over the place.

And this was 1995 when I launched it, I had one gigantic customer forever Living Products International.

They were an international network marketing company selling aloe vera products and I had them for 18 years.

They were a fantastic company client.

The second one was Sky Harbor International Airport, which now I had them for 10 years, and then we added a bunch and brought in a lot more people after that.

Really about halfway.

In the first 10 years, I was doing that, just building it.

The second 10 years, we did a lot of work in sustainability, green marketing, that kind of work.

In fact, Arizona State University called me and had me come in.

I taught a master's class in the school of sustainability around sustainable storytelling for business.

So it just kind of evolved, as it does, and long comes 2016, and I really wasn't that excited about running an ad agency anymore.

So I just wound it down.

I didn't sell it.

I just said, you know, I'm done with this.

But I'm using it as a springboard into what I do today.

And that's consult, teach, coach, and speak on the power of story.

And I do it internationally for leaders and their people.

And it typically is coming from very much of a brand storytelling framework, because I believe everything is a brand.

And what I mean by that is, what is a brand?

It's the story people tell about you when you are not in the room.

And you want to control that story and make sure that that story is accurate as to who you are, what you stand for, and how you contribute to the world.

And that's a ubiquitous you being personal, professional, and of course, your brand, your business brand.

My wife and I, we have eight and a half grandchildren.

But with the grandchildren, they're always like, hey, Papa, Hey, Nana.

Can you guys tell us a story?

Can we get ready to go to story?

When I was raising our children, I traveled a lot.

I was building my speaking career, so I used one of those little speaker boxes.

We didn't have FaceTime back in those days, and.

But so we'd call in on telephone, had one of those speaker boxes that you saw in Charlie's Angels, where Charlie's talking to the angels, so you never saw his face.

And I took a storybook with me, and I would read the kids stories from the road.

So that way, hey, get ready for have your basket.

Your jam is on.

Dad's going to call in and read your story or tell you a story.

And they love stories.

And throughout history, we tell stories.

And it's been going on for literally thousands of years.

So why is story so important, and why is it so effective, according to you?

Yeah, well, if you think about it, and its story has really been around about 70,000 years.

And we Homo sapiens, or storytelling apes, you might call us, are the only organisms that we know of that plan, organize, and act in story.

Because you think about it, anytime you're trying to get a group together or you're trying to attract customers in, you are telling them a story about how much better tomorrow can be.

And if you just do this with me today, which is fiction until you make it fact, until they say, yes, let me buy in, let's do this.

Now.

Storytelling is probably, I would argue, our very first technology.

Because you think about it, stories are the software that drive the hardware of our meaning making machine.

And you know, our ancestors navigated and survived the savannah on story.

And it's the same thing we do today to navigate, survive this onslaught of communication.

And now, you know, you can add to that AI that is bringing it at us even faster.

Sure, sloppier in hell.

But story is so important because like I said, when people think about you or your brand or your company, what story are they telling themselves?

Because they're not telling themselves data, you know, and features and functions list.

No, they are telling themselves a story about the impact you're making in the world.

That's the importance of having your story dialed in.

And I think the story invokes the emotions.

And we know from advertising and from marketing that people buy first with emotion, back it up with logic, second or reasoning.

So they do the homework with their head, but they pull their trigger with their heart.

If they don't like you, it's not, or they resonate with you, it's not going to happen.

Now the stories have evolved, but what's interesting is there's always a framework to a story.

So we watch television, we watch, you know, it could be back in the sitcom days, it was always a 30 minute story.

Now we have Netflix and we got 60, 90 minute stories.

But it seems like Hollywood seems to follow that hero's journey model.

And maybe we can talk about the framework of the story because a lot of people don't really dissect it.

We watch a movie, it's boy meets girl, girl takes off in Europe on a trip, boys trying to find girl.

There's all those things or whether it's Hunger Games or whatever your favorite movie is going to be, there's always this over riding arc to the story where you might Star wars.

You've got, you know, Luke running along the planet shooting critters on his planet.

And Darth Vader comes in with the dark store, starts destroying everything and it kind of moves on from there.

And all of a sudden in comes a guide.

And in that particular case, the guide was Obi Wan.

Obi Wan comes in, he doesn't fix the problem.

He helps guide the problem.

And I think we.

What happens is most people in their story, they make their company the hero of the story.

Where I believe we need to make our clients the hero of the story.

Let's talk about if you would unpack that a little bit, and how Hero's Journey fits into the basic framework.

Yeah.

When I was first introduced to the Hero's Journey, it was back in 2006, and our son Parker was going to film school at Chapman University in Orange, California, very prominent film school.

And he graduated in 2010, and he worked in Hollywood for a dozen years and then moved on to Austin, Texas.

And now he's very, very successful in virtual reality and mixed reality filmmaking.

But while he was going to school there, I was running my ad agency, Park Co.

In Phoenix.

And I was having a hard time really understanding this whole new digital world and this amount of information we were just getting blasted by and how our traditional forms of branding and advertising were going to compete in this world.

And so I told Parker, I said, you know, 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?

And of course, one of the first things he sent me was Joseph Campbell's Heroes with a Thousand Faces.

And when I looked at the Hero's Journey, Michael, I said, oh, my God, this is a customer journey.

This is a colleague's journey.

This is my journey.

Why don't they teach this in marketing and advertising?

Because it is a blueprint, a universal blueprint to how we all experience life and how we experience brands that we want to buy into.

And so I mapped out to business and I created the 10 step story cycle system that I used starting back in 2008 for branding and brand story development.

And first, it was just kind of a science project, thinking, will this really translate over into our world?

And the very first client I used it on over the course of a few years, once they adopted the story we built through the Story Cycle Genie, they grew by 6, 100%.

And they said it was precisely because they dialed in their story for themselves, for their colleagues, for their customers, and for the communities they serve, all wrapped into one overall brand narrative arc.

And that's my goal when I knew I was onto something and actually was about the time that I realized it was going to jumpstart me to get out of the advertising agency business 10 years later and do exclusive brand story and leadership story development using My story cycle system.

Yeah, it's quite interesting.

And how people can tell if you look at your website.

A lot of times when the websites first came out, they're just brochures.

Online brochures.

Here you find me.

We do a lot of paid advertising and people will tell the story just like they'll tell a movie story.

May recommend a TV story or a book story because we love stories we like to hear.

You can walk into a room and say, here, I want to tell you this, and facts and figures, data as you put it.

Or I can say, hey, do you guys want to hear a cool story?

And everybody stops talking and listens because they want to hear the story.

Hey, I got to tell you guys a story.

And they'll listen to it.

So it's really creating that story in that narrative.

So first question, big question I have for you.

In a world of endless noise, why is having a brand narrative no longer a luxury, but it's a mechanical necessity for a business that wants to be preferred over its competitors?

Yeah.

What do you stand for?

We live in a land of abundance.

We have abundant choices on who to buy from, where to go to eat, what car to drive.

I mean, you know, it used to be marketing was all about scarcity.

You want to be the most scarcest offering.

If you don't have your brand story really dialed into that number one audience that you serve and how you serve them, what problem you help them overcome, and people understand and can digest that story immediately, well, then you are in a wash of commoditized offerings, you know, so if you are going to stand out, well, like I said, you are, or you had mentioned that you are, have seven kids and I'm one of seven kids.

If you don't stand out in that brood of seven kids, you don't get fed like the rest of them.

You don't get your, you know, you get nothing but hand me down.

So, you know, it's kind of the same sort of thing as what do you stand for in the world that makes you stand out?

And how do you tell that story so that everybody knows what that is?

You now own some real estate between the ears of your customers, your colleagues and those communities you serve because they understand you, you have meaning in their world.

And you will only get that through the stories you tell.

Interesting.

You often talk about the ABT framework.

Can you explain how a simple three word structure can actually transform a rambling elevator space that 30 second elevator spit into a compelling value proposition?

Yeah, I love the ABT.

I learned about it from Dr. Randy Olson, a Harvard PhD evolutionary biologist who then gave up tenure, went to USC film school, graduated, produced three documentaries on climate change and global warming.

But his real bulk of his work was teaching scientists and academics how to use what he learned in story, much like I did.

I teach business how to he does it from science.

And he introduced to me this concept of the and but therefore back in 2013.

And when I saw it, it hit me like a ton of bricks, like the Hero's Journey did, because it boils down a very complex message and makes it as simple as possible.

And in fact, the big large Hero's Journey is built on the superstructure of the and but therefore it's a way you can just think of them each as one sentence.

The and statement of agreement is your setup.

The but statement of contradiction is the problem.

And the therefore statement of consequence is your way forward or your call to action.

And the way that marketers and branders use this is you identify your audience.

You name them at the very beginning, just like you said, because you want to place them as the hero in the story.

So you name them, you describe what they want relative to your offering, even if they don't know what your offering is, yet in essence you are foreshadowing your offering.

So who are they?

What do they want?

And you want to raise the stakes here.

Why is it important to them?

That's your statement of agreement.

And all you want to do is get your audience nodding yes.

Say you understand me, you get me, you appreciate what I want.

Why that's important to me.

Now you introduce the but statement of contradiction.

But they don't have what they want currently.

And so you say but and then you introduce a negative emotion.

You're frustrated, you're fearful, you're annoyed, you're exhausted, you're whatever because of this problem that they have not yet solved, that you of course are going to solve for them, that becomes your but statement of consequence.

And then you get to the therefore therefore and you stay on them.

You don't introduce the brand or your solution immediately.

Stay focused on them.

Imagine what it's going to look like.

Imagine what it's going to feel like when this happens by doing such and such with us.

And then you deliver your solution.

The second clause in the therefore statement of consequence.

So it uses what we call the three forces of story of agreement, contradiction and consequence that our primal pattern seeking, problem solving, decision making, buying, limbic brain loves.

Because it's the software that speaks to that limbic brain to make the meaning out of the madness of being human beings or the meaning out of that complex message.

And then Michael, it does one other thing.

So it uses those three forces of story of agreement, contradiction and consequence.

And when you do it well, you basically deliver manifest what I call the three forces of trust building.

And I already had mentioned them, that and statement of agreement it is you demonstrate that you understand your audience and you appreciate what they want, why that's important to them.

Then in the but statement of contradiction, when done right, you are demonstrating that you empathize with why they don't have what they want.

And then the therefore is where the trust has been built.

Therefore, let me share, show you the way forward on how I can help you get it.

Basic three act structure to story.

But you can share an ABT in less than 15 seconds to hook that limbic brain getting them leaning in.

And then maybe you share a little short anecdotal story that shows that gets them to picture that problem solution dynamic.

Then and only then do you start bringing in the logic and reason, the data points or whatever to support what you're trying to tell.

That's the power of the ant.

But therefore it's interesting and you've talked about it in that hero's journey.

The it's a common mistake, I think in business storytelling is making the company the hero.

Right.

What we're trying to do is they're actually the guide in the process, aren't they?

Yeah, we want to make the client the actual hero.

So who should be the hero?

And actually.

And what's our role as business owners?

So again, the example, you know, Star wars, you got Obi Wan, he became the guide.

Luke did all the work.

He had his doubt, didn't know what he's doing, but he got the map, the road map, the encouragement from his guide.

Then comes along Yoda.

So sometimes you change those guys if you want.

You could use Hunger Games for those who are big fans of that one.

You had Katniss out hunting bunny rabbits, Right.

And all of a sudden Donald Sutherland comes into the district and starts blowing up things and destroying everything and take care of it.

So Woody Harrelson was now the guide who started helping Katniss and do what she needed to do.

So our role is the guide and our customers.

So we have to look at our marketing, look at the stories we're telling, what are our salespeople talking about and follow that ABT formula and go from there.

So I think you've unpacked it really well.

You talked about this, you actually gave the number.

Many entrepreneurs feel stuck in a price where.

How does a well crafted story allow a business to increase its margins and grow as much as you've seen by as much as you've said?

600%?

Yeah.

Well, it separates you from the commoditized world out there when you are just leading with features and functions and who's going to win that game is the low price leader.

And there's no margin in the low price leader.

But people will buy into a story.

Do you remember Michael, was it last year that some tech dope paid like $4 million for a banana taped to the wall, you know, with masking tape or duct tape, I guess to the wall.

There's no value in that.

It's not even really that valuable as a piece of art.

But that dude bought the story and then the story that surrounded that.

And you think about anytime you make a big purchase, you're telling yourself a story as to why you absolutely need that big.

In fact, I just did it yesterday.

I bought myself a new putter and it cost me $380.

And people who don't play golf think I am mad.

But you know what, A lot of my friends have been using that putter.

They've had a lot of success with it.

My putting has been kind of wobbly.

So I told my story yesterday that I need that $380 putter.

I could go to Goodwill and buy an eight dollar putter.

But why would I spend the 380 for this brand new technology?

Because of the story I told myself.

Yeah, no, it's interesting and that's the emotional connection.

And we believe it, right?

We believe in those things.

You know, I'll give you an example.

My wife and I have matching wedding rings and it's hard to see it and those on screen unless you're seeing on video.

But it's two metals in there.

You have tungsten and you have gold.

Now if anybody knows anything about metallurgy, you can't do this.

This is a physical scientific impossibility to see what you're seeing.

You cannot merge gold as a soft metal with tungsten, which is hard metal.

Now this ring, but obviously it is.

So this ring, you can't cut it.

It fits on her fingers.

She has a matching one.

You get to send it back in once in your lifetime if your fingers shrink or get big.

But if it goes, if your fingers get too big for it, you lose the finger before you lose the ring.

There's just no way to cut it, it never loses its brilliance.

So why did we buy it?

What was the story?

Well, there's a guy by the name of True True tungsten and he knew it didn't work, but he developed a 29 step process by which you could fuse gold with tungsten.

But 29 steps of process.

So he took two separate independent metals that don't have any shared characteristics, fused them using 29 step process.

And now that you see it.

So my wife and I each have it and it's the metaphor for us.

We're two different metals, we're two separate individuals and we actually survive and have a wonderful marriage and raise seven children because of process.

So for us it was the process that got to us because that's what created a successful ring.

And it's also helped create a successful marriage.

And anyone's been married for any length of time understands that, right?

Yeah.

You have to work out those processes to make it work and raising big families.

So that's what the power of story is and that's the ring to it.

You know, back in my earlier days I bought beautiful watches and for my 40th I wanted to buy some Rolexes just as a something of showing significant value and.

But the reason I bought it is not so much because it was a Rolex, but what I love as a speaker and what we both do in our work is there's 150 moving parts inside that watch.

So there's a lot of behind the scenes.

And what you see up front looks elegant, it looks simple, it looks straightforward.

People go, what's the big deal?

It's just a.

My Apple watch does far more than that ever does and keeps better time, right?

It gives better time.

But the 150 moving parts, not just a chip inside, is symbolic of what we do.

It's a metaphor of what we do when we go on stage and we do our work or you're creating all that is going into the development of what we do and people don't see it, but we get a nice elegant finish to it.

So there's two examples of story and how that works.

Make sense?

Yeah, it absolutely does.

You know, I mean we have a beautiful golden doodle Hazel and she's getting on in life.

We're not going to have her for much longer.

We've had her for almost 13 years and we paid a thousand dollars.

People can pay a lot more for that dog in other places.

I could have gone to the pound and picked one up for free.

But it's the story I'm telling myself is what did I want?

And then where do I go to get that?

Where do I find a reputable breeder in that case, you know, or if I'm buying anything, if I'm buying a Rolex, where do I find a reputable watch shop that's going to sell Funny Rolex story.

When we were raising our kids, they're in high school, one of our youngest sons, Cade's friend's dad was an attorney and he loved going down to Mexico and he loved getting great deals and he went down and he came back with a Rolex on his wrist and his son said, wow dad, what'd you pay for?

And I can't remember, it was really cheap.

And he jumps in, goes into the swimming pool, comes out the R and the X fell off the watch and now it says Olay, who got taken in that little anecdote, but he bought it because of the story he told himself, right?

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And now back to my conversation with Park Howell.

Let's talk about why the story helps with what we call the fog of features.

Business professionals often get the, you know, we call it the curse of knowledge where they talk too much about features and actually lose the audience.

How do we strip away that fog to find the core message?

So I've got two big beliefs in story and you've been talking about the first one and that is you are not the center of your story.

Your audience always is right.

The second one is your story is not about what you make, but what you make happen in your customer's life.

And it's a paradigm shift.

And I hear this all the time.

That first was, oh, wow.

We're always just talking about ourselves.

We need to put our audience at the center.

Then that second one is, well, what do you mean?

They don't, you know, they don't want to hear about my widgets and all the great advancements and the innovation.

And I go, no, they don't.

They actually don't give a crap about it.

They only care about what you make happen in their lives.

Outcomes, outcomes, outcomes, outcomes.

Start writing from that perspective, your audience's perspective, and how you are going to change their life for the better with what you do.

Yeah, no, I love it.

It's like, you know, form factor.

When our kids all get together, we're all together on the weekend for Mother's Day and for birthdays and with the grandkids.

And when the phones are all sitting on the table, I can't tell mine.

I have to touch the screen, see the grandkids, or find my wife's picture on there because I kept.

They all look the same, whether it's an Android, whether it's.

And we have mixed bags in the family.

Right.

So I don't know which model it is.

And so to me, I really can't tell.

I really don't buy for its form factor.

I buy what it does.

So what it does is it unleashes me.

I can sit on a beach in Australia and have talking to clients.

They don't difference.

Or a riverboat in Europe doing FaceTime meetings.

And my clients think I'm in the office.

So we buy what the outcome is.

That's what we're always buying.

Too often we get stuck on all those features and those benefits.

So.

Well, you know, a brand that does it.

Well, Michael, you're.

And you do a lot of traveling, so maybe you use them as booking.com.

Yeah.

So what's their tagline?

Booking.com.

Booking.

Yeah.

That is the best example of your story's not about what you make booking dot com.

It's what you make happen.

Booking dot.

Yeah.

They're gonna put you in the right place.

So anybody out there that's stuck on features and functions and that kind of thing, just think of booking.

Yeah.

And what is the.

Yeah to your business?

Yeah.

No, it makes it.

It's kind of like a.

An insurance policy.

When I buy an insurance policy, I'm not paying all that money for a piece of paper that has A bunch of things I'm buying.

So when something happens or happens to me, well, I'm either building an estate or protecting one that is covered.

When we were young and starting on the road as there were speakers, I needed to create an estate.

Now it's more about protecting an estate.

So it's, that's what I'm buying, the alcohol.

I don't care what it looks like when I get in a car.

I don't care what's under the hood.

Now some people do, some people really care about all the what's in there.

I don't.

I just want to know how good do I look in this thing?

Get out of the way.

I can't see myself.

Does it, do I look good?

It's.

Everyone has their reasons, right?

Why do we buy the things we do?

And if you want to look at emotion, how it fits into it.

If everything was logical and we purchased logically, we would all dress the same, we'd all wear the same clothes, we'd all have the same jewelry, the same watches and our kids would all be named Parker.

We just use the same name because it's practical, it's logical, but it's emotional.

It evokes emotions.

We are naming after a grandmother, a mother, a family.

Those become those main reasons.

Let's talk about sales and LinkedIn.

We have a lot of people in storytelling sales and LinkedIn.

This one doing some of the background on your work I thought was very interesting.

So for the entrepreneurs listening who use LinkedIn for business development or building networks and communication, what is one story driven tweak that they can make in their content today to get more engagement?

Yeah, right.

Well, their bio.

Go and look at the bio and rewrite it as an anbut therefore that's the first thing you can do.

You probably end up shortening it a little bit, but you'll get very specific.

And you are going to not necessarily be writing about you right off the bat.

You are going to be writing about your number one audience.

That number one profile and people.

Michael, you probably hear this too, is like, oh my God, park.

You know, I've got 10 different kinds of customers that come to me and I go now yeah, maybe you do.

But you have one.

It's the Pareto principle.

You have one customer profile that makes up 80% of your revenue.

So pay attention to them and rewrite that bio right there using an and.

But therefore identify them right up top.

What do they want relative to following you?

Why?

You know why.

From their point of view, would it be important for them to connect with you and why is it important to them?

And then.

But what is that problem that you are going to help them solve by following you?

And then therefore how do you do it?

And then that's where you bring in your curriculum vitae.

You know all the major points of what you do, but you're writing it from your audience's point of view.

That's job number one.

And then job number two is that next time you start posting and you could a B test this.

Write a post the way you would normally write it and then write it and post it the next day again using an and but therefore framework.

And watch what happens to your engagement.

If you don't believe these three words are that powerful, just do an a B test and you are going to see engagement go up.

Incredible.

And maybe it won't hit on the first one, but on the second one.

But on the third one, it doesn't take too many.

We've had some SaaS companies using the ABT for their LinkedIn campaigns and they saw engagement increase by 400%.

And all we did was reformatted their copy using an anbut therefore.

So those are the two things.

Go to your bio, make it an ABT and then go and start posting as an ABT and watch what happens with your engagement rates.

Yeah, I think you say stop posting, start provoking.

So you know, we call it.

We call it agitate.

Don't irritate, but agitate.

Yeah.

Ask questions or something that get them.

Hey, because you're.

We're always a solution to a problem, I believe.

Right.

So your product or your service is a solution to a problem.

What problem?

Unless that gets articulated from the client or we articulate that in story, you're just wasting your time.

You're just hot air, you know, squeaking at them.

Absolutely.

Are there examples?

Have you got an example that comes to mind?

You don't have to actually mention the brand.

You've talked about 400, 600.

Have you got a specific company or a consult?

We have a lot of entrepreneurs, a lot of consultants.

Then you've worked with many of those where.

What was that transformation like?

So you got them, they were doing this.

They then applied the frameworks that you teach and you're.

And then we'll talk about the genie as well in a minute.

And then what was that transformation?

What kind of things did you see come out the other end?

Yeah, one of my favorite stories is actually a Canadian company up in Quebec, Pret Otto Partez and That's my butchered French for ready.

Very well for ready cargo.

That's the translation.

Andre Martin Hops was the founder of Prate Auto Partez and he connected with me back in 2017 following a story workshop I did at Social Media Marketing World.

And he said, hey Park, I want to talk to you about helping me develop the brand story for Auto Partez.

And I go, what is that?

He goes, well, we are a used car dealership for at risk buyers, people that have poor credits and we're in Quebec.

And quite honestly, Michael, I told myself an anti story thing and I don't, I don't know if I want to work with a used car dealership for at risk credit buyers.

You know, it sounds like kind of a shark.

They're going to take advantage of them.

They're going to sell them something they can't afford.

They'll repo it in three months, they'll wash, rinse and repeat, right?

So Andre says, I'm going to call you in three weeks and we'll start working together.

I go, I'm sure, okay, great.

And I didn't really think he was going to call because nobody ever does after they do that, right?

Well, sure enough to his word, he called me up and I said, okay, let's just make sure that this relationship is right for both of us.

Let me just ask you a few questions before you hire me, before I say yes, I said, can you help me better understand what you're actually trying to build there?

And he said, I just am looking for 20% growth over the next two, three years.

And he goes, I've got a car dealership here and yeah, we sell used cars, but we've got a bigger mission and our mission is to help Canadians who to no fault of their own, got in real difficult financial straits.

It could have been the worldwide recession.

And maybe it's a health issue that took all their money, maybe it's a divorce and they just, they want to get back at their feet.

They haven't had a vehicle, they've lost that self esteem and they've lost freedom.

He said, that's the word we hear time and time again.

So they come in to buy a car and we won't sell them any old car.

We first make them go through a two to three hour financial planning seminar with us and they have to fully disclose their financial well being.

And then he said, we will only put them into a car that they can afford.

Our goal is to make sure they make every car payment for the next two years.

If they do that, then they significantly repair their credit.

So he said, yeah, we are a used car dealership to financially strap Canadians, but our bigger picture is to get them back on their feet.

So the and but therefore was something to the effect of you, I'm going to say you as the buyer coming in, you want the freedom of owning your own car and the convenience of being able to drive yourself anywhere, but you've got bad credit.

Therefore, imagine getting a vehicle that will help repair your credit right here at Prey Auto Partez.

That's something that's roughly what the ABT was, the foundational ABT was.

It all led to then their cornerstone campaign theme tagline that they're still using today.

Pre Auto Partez your vehicle to financial freedom.

So it becomes an aspirational brand story.

He said he got rid of all of his salespeople.

He brought in only people that work for him, that care about helping Canadians repair their financial standing, and then got him in cars.

And people started taking the bus eight hours across the country to come and buy a car from him because they know he would and his team put them in a car they could afford and start repairing their financial freedom.

To me, that's the power of a really solid brand story.

It helps drive the business, it reduces risks, and of course, it enhances the brand because everybody is living into the same story.

Well, you raise an interesting point.

Quebec is a bilingual province.

It's French and English.

And so obviously, the methodologies and frameworks that you're teaching work in any language.

Yeah, we're all homo sapiens storytelling apes, are we?

We all process content the same way through the story structures of our brain.

Well, it's interesting.

You know, my wife and I were talking about, we were watching people at the airport in different cultures, and everybody was hugging.

So one thing that we have that's in common even with story, is we hug our loved ones, friends and everything.

So I think that is a common human thing for sure.

Let's talk about the future of brand strategy.

So with the rapid evolution of AI, where do you see the business of story heading in the next three to five years?

Yeah, well, we're already there.

We've arrived at it.

And that is the fact that you use AI to expedite your brand storytelling process creation, which usually, or in the old way, do it take three, four, five, six months to really get your brand story dialed in.

And you pay anywhere from 30 grand to 150 grand to make that happen while using AI properly.

Now you can actually dial in one to two to three days tops.

And we're talking a couple of hundred bucks, maybe a thousand bucks when you're all said and done and you can get world class branding.

And that is what AI has brought to the brand story world.

Now.

It does not replace the brander, it does not replace the business owner, does not replace a marketer.

When done right, you collaborate with AI to amplify, to augment your abilities and your capabilities at a fraction of the amount of time and energy it used to take and of course the fraction amount of the money it used to take so that you can get to market faster.

And those that are using generic AI to create sloppy brands, it's not working for them because they look and sound like everybody else.

So they are wallowing in the garbage.

And garbage in, garbage out.

But if you're using one that is specifically built for brand story development, strategy, creation, then content, then you're way ahead of the curve.

Well, let's put in a shameless plug here because you actually did this and we're talking about the power of story, but you actually created a product called Brand Cycle Genie.

Story Cycle Genie or sorry, beg your pardon.

Yes, that's okay.

Yeah, your pardon.

And we've been doing it in the manual process for years.

So following the formula with the Hero's Journey, you know, we were using Don Miller's formula, wrote the book Brand Story.

Great, very successful.

Don does a great job.

So he's also capitalized on that whole story.

We call it Brand Story Story, but it doesn't matter that.

Stay within the proper trademarks.

But how is AI changing?

Because you sent me a, I think about a 13 page report where you took one of our websites and you just did it on your own.

We didn't ask to do it, but boy, you nailed it.

What was the process?

What went on behind it?

You covered all our key points, identified some areas that we didn't even think about.

But more importantly, you gave us some direction of where to go.

How did that framework come?

Like what happened behind the scenes and what would someone have to do maybe in a manual process versus just plugging in the information and going from there.

We took our story cycle system that I've been doing since 2008 and by the way, you mentioned story brand and a lot of people say, oh, park is a story cycle Genie and just a knockoff of Donald Miller's story brand.

Now as a matter of fact, we were doing the story brand type thing with our Story cycle system eight years before he even launched StoryBrand.

We did it internally in our agency and built it.

He did it on an industrialized level.

His is more of a kind of a marketing tool.

Ours is a deep dive brand story creation tool.

And so it took us two years to build it.

And it was a customer of mine who had been through our story cycle system process for his digital agency in Sacramento and for this Mira content platform that they had built the SaaS product, we branded it, pulling them together, they flourished, they ended up selling both.

And he came to me and said, I love your process so much.

AI is perfect for we can now collapse that development time for months into literally minutes.

You can really what I yours?

I simply fed it your website in two minutes.

It gave me a brand assessment of how you're showing up in the world.

And then, and because I didn't know your brand, I just said, okay, that looks good, move on.

And then from the brand assessment it created your complete brand narrative strategy.

And that took about five minutes.

So within 10 minutes I had that whole piece done.

I sent it to you so that you could review it.

And that's just the beginning of building your brand brain inside of the Genie.

Once it knows you and build your customer stories and your overall content playbook, which could take you a couple of hours with your iteration in there, then it'll develop all of your strategy, all of your content always on brand.

And it's all locked down on our Brightsee platform.

So it's not hallucinating, is not pulling in general stuff from generic AI.

And so it's a tool specifically to help you develop world class branding and make you stand out in the world very, very quickly.

Who's that best designed for you?

Obviously agencies.

I know you have an agency platform, but also individuals, companies, marketing departments, people working with clients, independent business people.

Can they all use the same tools?

Absolutely.

So it's built by agency principals, myself, my two partners for agency professionals.

You can white label it and you can just, I mean, if you go in for a pitch, think about it, Michael.

If you go in to pitch and you're going up against some other agencies and they're showing up with capabilities, but you're showing up with what I gave you in that pitch and said, here's some of our thinking.

It's not completely fleshed out, but here's the platform we'll be working from.

What do you think you are delivering value immediately.

And then of course you use the story cycle Genie to build on that and get them to market faster than you've ever gotten Anybody to market before then.

Small, medium sized businesses that can't afford the big branding agency, they don't have the time to do it.

They can simply use the GENIE to very quickly build that world class branding.

And because it sits on our enterprise MCP server and I don't begin to understand all the acronyms of the development side, a lot of it is built for enterprises.

So we've got a few enterprises on there right now so that their entire teams can be working from the same genie, not a bunch of disparate different generic AI custom chat bots out there that aren't speaking to each other.

We've got over 33, 34 experts inside the story cycle genie all connected with our cognitive mesh architecture.

So they're all speaking.

It's like you've got a 30 plus person brand content agency sitting right there for you.

Well, it's like the small, you know the beautiful part with AI and I think we talked in the prior to the show going on.

I have a new book coming out a couple of weeks, Staying relevant in the future of AI and we talk about how it's amplified and use that word and it accelerates the process so it levels it up.

So if you're a marketing agency, if you're a business professional marketing specialist within a company organization, it's just going to save you time, help you focus.

The key word I would use is the clarity.

You get the clarity to clarity quickly.

Simply.

It used to take us days to actually do it.

We'd have to charge a client thousands of dollars and now this is affordable.

It's something, it's a tool.

So I think that's a good application of AI.

Like you said, you can, it's democratized it to where the small companies can now compete and even out compete and out position.

The enterprise type level companies can't think.

Well.

Yeah.

And absolutely.

And you can go to StoryCycleGenie AI, we've got a red button right there and get a free brand story.

Great.

And so all you'll do is give it your name, your email address and the URL to your website and in about 60 seconds it's going to give you a grade from A plus to F minus depending on how well you're telling your story and then a 14 point storytelling assessment that will validate what you're doing well, it will reveal gaps that you can easily fix and even inspire you with new ways to think about your brand story.

It's not what I sent you.

What I sent you would have been the next Step.

Okay, here's what, what it's telling me.

Let's start fixing it.

So I went into the genie brain and actually ran yours to build the assessment and the narrative strategy.

What people get here though, is tremendous insight into how their brand is currently showing up in the world.

I like to say it's like, like mirror, mirror on the wall.

How is my brand showing up for all?

And then you might cringe at it.

You might be excited about it.

You might go, we got a little bit of work to do.

Well, we'll have all those links into the show notes.

If business owners or entrepreneurs feel like their brand is currently invisible or confusing, I think those are excellent places to start.

And it's offering a free resource definitely worth checking into and can save them literally thousands of dollars.

Again, it's disrupting that whole marketing.

It's kind of like, like ad buys.

You know, back in the day we used to make a premium on ad buys.

It might be 10, 15% back when you're doing sky harbor or you're doing something else.

Oh yeah, that's all gone by the wayside.

And people can do their thing.

So small can compete.

The Davis can compete and beat the Goliaths.

Hey, Park.

This was fantastic.

Time runs out quickly when we're having fun.

Thanks for creating all this.

We'll put all that information into the show notes.

Any final words for our listeners before we start?

Say goodbye.

Yeah.

Michael, number one, thank you so much for being here and for the rest of you out there, my whole job is to help you excel through the stories you tell.

So please, if I could be a service to you, hit me up on LinkedIn.

I've got my Business of Story podcast every Monday.

Michael, I need to get you on there to talk about your new book.

That'd be awesome.

And just know that I'm here for you all and go test your brand story.

StoryCycle, Genie, AI and it's Park Howell Park.

Thanks for being our guest today.

Thank you.

As you are listening to this episode, what is one idea that you've heard that's caught your attention and why does it matter so much to you?

And who is one person who you.

Can share that with, either sharing this episode or just sharing that insight that occurred to you while you were listening?

Perhaps it is that your brand story.

Is not about what you make, but.

What you make happen in your customer's life.

Or maybe it's a simple three word framework like and.

But therefore that can immediately strip away features and functions noise to build deep trust with your audience.

Thank you for listening, for learning, and for investing in yourself so that you can become the best version of you.

If you found value in this episode, please write a review on Apple Podcasts.

If you haven't subscribed yet, please do.

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Until next time.

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My Executive producer is Beth Smith and Director of Research, Tori Smith.

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