Day 16: Why ‘happily ever after’ isn’t enough

Stories

People love stories.

It’s the reason that Hollywood makes so much money, that television networks can sell box sets of something they previously gave away, and that fiction books continue to sell.

We want more than just a ‘happily ever after’ — we want to know what was NOT happy BEFORE the ever after. And we want to know WHO is part of that story.

Nobody wants a resolution unless they know WHY it matters.

If your customers (those who give you money) are people (and I’d like to know if they are not), then giving them a story is giving them something they love.

People love stories!

See what I mean

Imagine the following two scenarios:

For the ladies:

Once upon a time there was a man and a woman. The man nervously climbed a fire escape towards the woman. She smiled at him. He gave her a rose upon reaching her. She kissed him after saying that SHE rescued HIM. They lived happily ever after.

For the guys:

Once upon a time there was a dying and hallucinating warrior. He gave a set of quick, political instructions before collapsing in the middle of a bunch of guards. A crying woman stood over him as he faded into a blue world. There, another woman and a child waited for him; the child ran to him. He walked in a field of wheat. Later, another man buried a small statue in the sand. They “lived” happily ever after.

I’m fairly certain that Pretty Woman and Gladiator would have made much less at the box office if that had been the whole story.

Ladies, would you care about the woman on the fire escape if you didn’t know the Pretty Woman as a modern day Cinderella? Guys, would you even watch the blue woman and child if you hadn’t seen the warrior’s story and known they were the Gladiator’s dead wife and child?

Basically, we don’t care about the resolution — the SOLUTION — until we have a story to frame it.

Are YOU giving your customers a story they can identify with? Are you helping them to frame the solution you want to offer them?

The Customer Love Challenge

Had LaVonne decided to put together an e-book with 28 tips on how to love your customers, there would be no community around this challenge. Had I decided to quietly do a 28-day plan to woo my customers, would you even care?

Offering you a solution with no story would have produced a much different result.

Instead, we all embarked on a four-week journey together and defined the following parts of our story:

• The main characters: hopeful business people (all of us)
• The supporting characters: our customers
• The middle: the main characters woo the supporting characters
• The happily ever after: the supporting characters fall in love with the main characters… and buy their stuff

The Customer Love Challenge hasn’t existed to just produce a product, it is designed to create a story with a beginning, middle, and happily ever after.

Are you telling a story with YOUR business?

Your story

If you want your customers to love you, you need to give them something to love. You might center your story around yourself and then develop a relationship with your people that way. You might instead choose to develop why your product (without much focus on you) is the resolution to the story of their problem.

You are doing amazing stuff in showing your customers love. You may be developing your story by revealing yourself to your people, or fleshing out the story of what their problem is.

Make sure you are doing so intentionally. Make sure you are giving your people a story to identify with, an event to look forward to, a resolution to something that you’ve identified!

Tell the whole story.

THEN your people will care about the ‘happily ever after’.

And speaking of story, I will be in New York city the rest of the week meeting up with two guys who I met through blogging that have become very dear to me. I will be responding to comments, but it will probably be later in the day so show each other love in the comments until I return. 😉