Synthetic content syndrome: How to avoid the hidden dangers of AI-driven marketing

The first step to finding your brand story is to clearly identify your hero. Many brands make the mistake of positioning themselves as the hero and developing their narrative around the benefits of their products or services. While this may seem logical, we must consider that whenever we’re captivated by a story, what really draws us in is the way the hero overcomes obstacles to survive and thrive. With this in mind, brands should anchor their story in the shoes of their target buyer persona and ask questions like What challenges does my hero need to overcome to survive and thrive? Where does my hero want to be taken? By exploring these questions, we can open what storytellers call “the story gap.” The story gap is the space where brands help connect the hero of their story with what they want to achieve.

Now that you’ve successfully identified the hero of your story and have a better understanding of what they want to accomplish, it’s time to highlight the problems they’re facing throughout their transformation journey. Whenever storytellers share characters’ struggles against real antagonists, the story becomes exciting and dynamic. As Bronwyn Fryer shared in a Harvard Business Review article titled “Storytelling That Moves People,” “The energy to live comes from the dark side. It comes from everything that makes us suffer.”2

Antagonists can be anything—from people, time, and space to any combination of these forces. When defining the antagonist of your story, it’s important to clearly differentiate who the villain is and how they make people feel. Once you’ve identified your brand’s hero and villain and highlighted the emotions they invoke in your marketing messaging, you enable your audience to connect, as people tend to buy solutions for internal rather than external problems. Now is the time to make your audience act.

Now that you’ve made your audience (the hero) think by showing them the obstacles they need to overcome, it’s time to demonstrate how your products or services are the tools they need to survive and thrive. At this stage in any story, the main character is usually at a point where they need to make a decision and take action. In this case, the decision is whether to do business with your brand or not. Typically, storytellers use two elements to help people take action: authority and affinity.

Authority is demonstrated by providing clear proof points or irrefutable evidence as to why your brand can help the hero get to where they need to go. An example of a company that applies this principle well is Microsoft. Its website provides real stories of how Copilot for Microsoft 365 helps millions of companies save time and enhance employee productivity.

Affinity, on the other hand, is about showing that your brand is capable of understanding what your hero is going through. By showing your audience who the villain is and the emotions they invoke, your brand has already earned some affinity. For this reason—and considering the heightened competition—once you reach this stage in your brand story, it’s suggested that the ratio of authority to affinity lean more toward authority.

Whenever a story gap is opened, it automatically triggers a new aspiration. As human beings, we want to be transformed into something greater, and this is what smart brands do: they define an aspirational identity. As a storyteller, once you reach this stage in your brand story, it’s time to show your audience how their life will be transformed on three different levels—external, emotional, and status. The first is about showing them what they will have; the second is about showing them how they will feel; and the last is about revealing how they will be perceived by others. Incorporating these elements into your story will help your audience engage and truly connect with your brand.