Here are two branding mistakes to be avoided.

They both make intuitive sense, I think.

For who can resist a clear offer that saves you from something?

So here it is. Don’t:

1. Offer a product that does not solve a problem.
2. Make the offer confusing.

See, people are drawn to clarity.

Get too confusing and customers will tune you out in a blink.

Even politicians understand this.

The first mistake brands make is they fail to focus on the aspects of their offer that will help people survive and thrive. All great stories are about survival—either physical, emotional, relational, or spiritual. A story about anything else won’t work to captivate an audience. Nobody’s interested.
…
The second mistake brands make is they cause their customers to burn too many calories in an effort to understand their offer.

-Donald Miller, Building A StoryBrand

Apparently, if you do not have a brand hero, you are at risk of doing this whole marketing thing in the wrong way.

But all of that begs the question of who the marketing hero should be.

Where many companies seem to get confused is that they make it all about themselves.

For at it’s core – firms serve their customers .

Firms that don’t, rightly deserve to go out of business.

Understand: Business, like so many other things in life, is not about you.

I struggle with this in the context of this website.

While I want to discover things that others want to see, it has to be something that I find interesting too.

Customers don’t generally care about your story; they care about their own. Your customer should be the hero of the story, not your brand. This is the secret every phenomenally successful business understands.

-Donald Miller, Building A StoryBrand