Storytelling in Business Part 3: A Simple Story Structure to Use Today

This is the third part in my Storytelling in Business series. View previous parts here. (*Reprinted from 2020 on my other website!)

One of the great storytelling frameworks that you can find in nearly every epic movie and novel is the Hero’s Journey. It was first codified by Joseph Campbell in his 1949 work The Hero with a Thousand Faces, but he was simply explaining what he saw in works going all the way back to ancient mythology. It’s the kind of storytelling framework that really resonates with the viewer or the reader — but why it does, we don’t know. A lot of folks say that we’re “wired for story,” and the Hero’s Journey might be what we’re primarily wired for.

There’s so much to it, and I’ll get in to the major steps of the framework later. For now, I’ll give you an abbreviated version that you can apply to your business today.

The Hero’s Journey boils down to this: Everything was going fine until a problem arose, and then the hero solved the problem. You’re probably already filling in the “Once upon a time” and epic fights with dragons, and we’ll get to that in future lessons. But this is all you need to know today to get started.

Here’s how you can use it:

Business “About Us” page/creation story: Our founders wanted to do x, y, z (Everything was going fine…), but discovered that they didn’t have the tools (…until a problem arose). So we decided to fix that by creating our product (…and then the hero solved the problem).

Marketing to the customer: You probably want to do x, y, z (Everything was going fine…), but don’t have the tools (…until a problem arose). So we created our product to help you solve your problem (…and then the hero solved the problem).

It’s simple but key to easily tapping into storytelling in your copy and social media posts.