"After 8,000 conversations across every sector imaginable, we have watched smart, capable people struggle to articulate what makes their work valuable. Not because the value is not there. Because they are too close to see it."
Most Marketing Talks About The Wrong Person
Read almost any business website. You will find some version of the same thing: a list of services, a statement about quality, a mention of how many years the business has been operating, and a tagline that means everything to the people inside and nothing to the people outside.
It is not bad writing. It is the wrong perspective.
When you are inside your business, you see your expertise, your effort, your credentials, your story. You write about those things because they feel important. They are important. But they are not what your potential customer needs or wants.
Your customer is looking for themselves.
They want to know: is this for me? Do these people understand my situation? Can they actually help? If your website answers those questions quickly, you have their attention. If it does not, they leave. Confused people do not buy.
This is what the saying means: you can’t read the label from inside the bottle.
Who are you addresses? This is a novelty portrait of Steve Davis by Tamarin Donlan, while she was listening to him at the SA Visitor Information Centres conference 2026
What Is StoryBrand?
StoryBrand is a messaging framework developed by Donald Miller. Its foundation is simple and, once you see it, impossible to ignore.
In every good story, there is a hero who wants something, a problem that gets in the way, a guide who appears with a plan, and a path forward that leads to success thus avoiding likely failure.
Miller’s insight was this: your business is not the hero of your customer’s story. Your customer is the hero. Your business is the guide.
The moment you stop writing about yourself and start writing about them, meaning and purpose become crystal clear.
Most businesses get this backwards. Not because they are careless, but because it is genuinely hard to see your own work clearly from the inside. After 8,000 conversations across every sector imaginable, we have watched smart, capable people struggle to articulate what makes their work valuable. Not because the value is not there. Because they are too close to see it.
The framework gives you the structure to fix that.
The Seven Elements Of The Framework
StoryBrand organises every business message around seven elements:
- The Hero is your customer. Not a demographic. A specific person with a specific problem, wanting a specific outcome.
- The Problem exists on three levels. The external problem is the practical situation: the website that is not working, the message that is not landing, the enquiry rate that is not converting. The internal problem is how it feels: frustrated, isolated, unsure what to do next. The philosophical problem is why it matters: good work deserves to be recognised. Honest, hard-working businesses should not have to fight for attention.
- The Guide is your business. You demonstrate empathy first, which shows you understand the hero's situation. Then you demonstrate authority, which shows you can actually help.
- The Plan is a clear, simple path forward. Not a brochure. Not a wall of information. Three or four steps that make the next action feel manageable.
- The Call to Action is direct. It tells the hero exactly what to do next. This is not the place for subtlety.
- Success paints a picture of what life looks like when the hero acts. Specific, believable, and grounded in what your customer actually wants.
- Failure acknowledges what is at stake if nothing changes. Not a scare tactic. Just an honest account of what continuing in the same direction produces.
When these seven elements are working together, your message stops being something people scroll past. It becomes something they recognise themselves in.
Where Most Businesses Go Wrong
Here is the pattern we see, constantly.
A business opens its website with something like: “Welcome to [Business Name]. We are a leading provider of [service], delivering quality outcomes with a commitment to excellence.”
No one reads past that sentence. Not because the business is bad. Because that sentence is about the business, not the reader.
Or a school sends out a newsletter that begins with the principal’s message, moves through a list of recent achievements, covers upcoming events, and closes with a reminder about the uniform policy. Every single item is written from the school’s perspective, about the school’s concerns.
The parent reads it and feels like a bystander to someone else’s story.
Or a regional body produces a capability statement that lists its programs, its partnerships, its geographic reach, and its governance structure. All useful information. None of it framed around what a business owner or investor actually needs to know.
The gap between what is genuinely assumed to be there and what is communicated is often significant. Closing that gap is the work.
How We Run The Process
This is not a template exercise. It is a diagnostic.
Step One: Stakeholder Conversations
We talk to the people who know the organisation from the inside, and to the people who experience it from the outside. What do your team members believe you do brilliantly that customers rarely mention? What do your customers value that you take for granted? Where is the gap between how you describe your work and how they describe it back to you?
These conversations surface the real story. The one that is usually buried under the official version.
Step Two: Merging What Already Exists
Most organisations have useful material scattered across previous work: old website copy, grant applications, annual reports, brochures, staff handbooks. Some of it is quite good. Almost none of it is organised around the customer’s perspective.
We collect it, look for the threads that are genuinely there, and sort it through the framework’s lens.
Step Three: Applying The Framework
This is where the seven elements take shape. Who is the hero, precisely? What is their external, internal, and philosophical problem? What is the plan? What does success look like for them?
We also layer in the psychological drivers that the framework alone does not capture: the language your specific audience responds to, the words that build trust, the phrases that create recognition. This is where the Language and Style Guide becomes essential.
The result is three documents.
Three Documents That Keep Working
The StoryBrand Framework document is the foundation. It maps all seven elements specifically to your organisation and your audience: your hero, their problems at every level, your position as guide, your plan, and what success genuinely looks like for them. It is the strategic source of truth. Everything else is built from it.
The Psychological Drivers document takes the framework deeper. Human beings respond to messages for reasons they rarely articulate. Some drivers are learned, shaped by experience and environment: the desire to be informed, to feel confident in a decision, to know they are getting genuine value. Others are biological, wired in from the start: the need for security, for recognition, for a life that feels sustainable rather than relentless. This document maps your specific message onto those drivers, identifying the language that speaks to what your audience actually responds to, not just what sounds reasonable on paper.
The Language and Style Guide weaves it all together in practice. It captures the vocabulary, tone, and rules that make the framework sound like your organisation rather than a generic version of any other organisation that you desperately don’t want to be. What words to use. What to avoid, and why. How to open a section, how long a sentence should be, what rhythm creates trust with your particular audience. It also includes the practical messaging: the ready-to-use language for your website, your communications, your pitch. Your team can pick it up and apply it without starting from scratch every time.
Together, these three documents do something most organisations have never had: a consistent, clear, customer-centred message with the psychological grounding to make it stick.
What This Is Not
It is not a rebrand.
It is not a new logo or a new colour palette. It is not a campaign that runs for six weeks and then stops. It is not a glossy report that sits on a shelf.
It is the message that was already there, seen clearly for the first time, and put into language that the right people will recognise themselves in.
The work you have done is real. The value you deliver is genuine. What the framework does is close the gap between what is genuinely there and what the person on the outside sees.
How We Work With You
The process typically involves three to five hours of conversation across your key stakeholders, a period of framework development, and delivery of the three documents described above.
For a solo or small business, the investment typically ranges from from $880 to $1,250 plus GST.
For schools, councils, regional bodies, and growing organisations, the scope is typically $3,500 to $5,500 plus GST.
The ultimate cost depends on the number of stakeholders and the complexity of the messaging challenge.
Every engagement includes the stakeholder conversations, the written framework, and the Language and Style Guide. You leave with documents that are immediately useful and indefinitely reusable.
Start with 20 minutes.
Book a no-cost, no-obligation conversation with Steve to work out whether this is the right fit for your situation.
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