The Honest Case For and Against StoryBrand

The call from Chicago

A business owner in Chicago called me a while back. He had bought into StoryBrand completely. Read the book, did the work, rebuilt around it, went all in.

And he had not seen the return.

His complaint was not that the framework was wrong. It was that he felt he had been sold something too easily. Do this and here is what you will get. It sounded simple, the payoff sounded close to guaranteed, and neither turned out to be true for him.

I have thought about that call a lot, because he was partly right — and the part he was right about is why I am writing this.

I am a Certified StoryBrand Guide. I have used this framework on client work since 2018 and been certified since 2020. I am not neutral. But I would rather tell you where it falls down than have you find out on your own money.

Why it works at all

Start with the part I have never seen a critic take seriously.

You are reading this now, and I guarantee you did not wake up this morning wondering whether I had a good breakfast or enjoyed my coffee. You woke up thinking about your own list. What has to get done. What is next. What you are wearing, what is waiting for you, what you have to sort out before the day starts.

That is not a marketing idea. It is just true, and it has consequences for anyone trying to get a stranger’s attention.

Your brain is built to survive and thrive, and part of surviving is not wasting energy. So when someone lands on your website and has to work — even for a second — to understand what you do, something in them says next, and the click follows. They are not being rude. They arrived with a problem, and you did not appear to be the answer to it fast enough.

That is why the framework insists on clarity in the hero panel. It is the grunt test: can someone tell what you offer, how it makes their life better, and what to do next, in about three seconds? Pass and they will stay and read more. Be vague, or be clever, and they are gone.

Nobody browses your website for entertainment. They come because something is wrong and they are hoping you can fix it.

Simple is not the same as lazy

Back in 2006 I had an idea for a business called MinistryHub. This was before Facebook, before Twitter — a place where creative pastors and church staff could share ideas and resources with each other.

The need was mine. I was creative arts director at a large church, spending sixteen to twenty hours a week hunting for songs that fitted a particular topic. Then I sat in a live brainstorming session at a big church in Chicago, in a room with a couple of hundred people doing the same job I was, and watched the ideas pour out. I wanted to build that room online.

Trying to build it sent me looking for research on what actually makes a website work and what moves people to act. That is how I ended up reading Malcolm Gladwell’s The Tipping Point, twelve years before I ever heard of StoryBrand.

His chapter on what makes an idea stick uses Sesame Street, and it changed how I think about simplicity.

The show looks effortless. It was not. Joan Ganz Cooney brought in child psychologists to build it. Their head of research, a psychologist named Ed Palmer, invented something he called the Distracter: he would play an episode on a monitor and run a slide show on a screen beside it, changing every seven and a half seconds, and record exactly when children were watching the show and when they drifted to the slides. Any segment that lost them was re-edited or reshot.

The most famous finding came from that. The producers had a rule that Muppets and humans never appeared in the same scene — fantasy separate from reality. The Distracter showed that children stopped watching when only adults were on screen. That is why Big Bird and Oscar the Grouch exist. Brenton Dickieson has written a good account of that decision, and LitCharts has a clear summary of the chapter if you have not read the book.

So when someone says StoryBrand is simplistic, my honest reaction is that they have the relationship backwards. Simple is not where you start. Simple is what you arrive at after you have done the work.

“It is a formula, and it makes everyone sound the same”

The sharpest version of this I have read is Erik Quigley’s piece at Uncommon Crowd, written by someone who used the framework religiously before turning on it. His case: every headline starts with the same construction, every pitch ends the same way, every site has a three-step process. Clarity arrives at the cost of differentiation. And he points at the number that makes it sting. When he wrote that in 2023 the book had passed half a million copies. StoryBrand now puts it past a million, which only sharpens his point rather than blunting it.

The first half of that is true and I will not pretend otherwise. It is a formula. StoryBrand websites follow a pattern, and after enough years I can land on a site and know within seconds that someone read the book.

But the pattern is not decoration. A website is itself a story, told in order, and the order is doing work at every step.

The hero panel. Who you help, what you do, how their life gets better. Three seconds. Twenty-eight real examples here.

What is at stake. Name the problem. Your customer may not be saying it out loud, but I promise they are thinking it — and naming it tells them you have met someone like them before. This is also where you say how it feels, which matters more than most owners want to believe. Donald Miller’s line, and I have found it to be true: people do not buy the best products, they buy the products that make them feel best.

The guide. Now the two questions every buyer is really asking. Do you understand my problem? And why should I listen to you? This is where you make your case.

The plan. People arrive overwhelmed and unsure what to do. If the problem were simple they would have solved it themselves. So you give them the first step. More on why the plan matters here.

Failure and success. What you help them avoid, and what life looks like on the other side — and, if you want to go further, who they get to become.

Now the second half of the objection — that the formula makes everyone sound alike.

That is a bit like saying all Italian food is the same because it is all pasta, tomatoes, garlic, onion, a little wine and some protein. Same ingredients every time.

Anyone who has walked into a trattoria in Trastevere in Rome and sat down to a plate of pasta knows exactly how wrong that is. The ingredients are the same. The cook is what makes the dish.

Your marketing works the same way. The structure repeats. What fills it — who you are, what brought you to this work, the particular problem your customer is carrying, how you actually help them — is not repeatable by anyone else. Those nuances are the business.

When StoryBrand sites do end up sounding alike, it is not the framework doing it. It is someone filling in blanks without ever having talked to a customer.

I will say plainly that I have not seen it happen in my own work. Every client I have worked with is in a different business, reaching different customers, carrying a different story about how they got there. Following the same framework has never once produced the same copy.

“My business is too complex for it”

This is the objection I hear most, usually phrased as we solve complicated problems or our buyers are sophisticated.

Underneath it is a belief worth naming: that a complex business ought to sound complex, because that is what a serious buyer expects.

I have not found that to be true once.

I have worked with clients in digital transformation, and at enterprise scale it is about as complicated as business gets. Go and read almost any website in that field. The copy is dense, abstract and hard to follow — and everyone involved will tell you it has to be, because the problem is genuinely complex.

It does not have to be. You can take any business, however complicated, and describe it at a seventh-grade reading level without losing a thing that matters to the buyer.

There is a scene in The Office that gets at this better than any argument I could make. Oscar is trying to explain a budget surplus to Michael, who asks him to explain it like he is eight. Then like he is five. And Oscar keeps rebuilding the explanation — eventually landing on a lemonade stand — until it is simple enough to land. It is worth ninety seconds of your time.

Here is the thing about that scene. Oscar could only get to the lemonade stand because he genuinely understood the surplus.

What to do if you serve several customers

The sharper version of that objection is real, and it deserves a real answer: StoryBrand wants one character, and I have three.

A recruiting firm serves employers and job seekers. A software company serves the person who signs the cheque and the person who has to use it every day. A roofer serves homeowners and property managers.

The mistake is to average them. Write one message aimed at everybody and it lands on nobody, because it stops describing anyone’s actual situation.

Here is how I work through it.

One problem per character, not one problem per business. That is the whole resolution. StoryBrand does not say your business may only solve one problem. It says each customer only cares about their own. So each character gets their own version of the story — their problem, their stakes, their plan, their picture of success.

Write them out separately, side by side. A column for each customer type. Same rows down the side: the character, the problem, how it feels, what you do about it, the plan, what success looks like. Filling them in beside each other is what makes the differences obvious.

Then find the language they share. That shared line becomes your one-liner, and this is the part people miss. Once the columns are filled in, some words will appear in every one of them. That shared language is your homepage — the version that is true for everybody who lands without having told you who they are yet.

Let visitors self-select. The homepage speaks the shared message and then offers a fork. I’m hiring or I’m looking for a job. Behind each door, the specific message for that character, in full.

My favourite example of the shared line doing its job came from a recruiting client whose headline worked on both audiences at once. An employer read it as the right person. A job seeker read it as the right job. Same words, two readings, no compromise.

So the answer to I have more than one character is not that the framework cannot cope. It is that you have more work to do than a single BrandScript — and that work is exactly what stops your message being generic. The full method is here.

“The results are oversold”

Now the one the man from Chicago was right about.

StoryBrand is presented with a lot of confidence. Clarify your message and customers will listen. The framework is genuinely good, the case studies are genuinely real, and the promise still lands closer to a guarantee than it should.

I do not think that is dishonesty. I think it is the shape of the business.

Donald Miller sells a messaging framework. So when you arrive with a marketing problem, the answer available to him is a messaging answer. That is not a character flaw — every one of us is more likely to prescribe what we happen to sell. It is why I try to be careful about it in my own work, and why I would rather tell you the limits of the thing I am certified in than let you discover them at your own expense.

If you are a hammer, everything looks like a nail.

“It is a messaging strategy, not a marketing strategy”

This is the most serious criticism, and I will get to where it is right in a moment. But there is something it misses.

Walking a business through this framework does not only clarify the message. It surfaces confusion inside the business itself.

I have watched it happen in those coaching rooms over and over. Owners move through the character, the problem, the guide — and then they hit the plan, and the wheels come off the cart. Almost every time.

Not because they do not have a process. They have been running one on instinct for years. It is that they have never once sat down and written out the actual steps a stranger has to take to become a customer.

A few years ago I was working with a husband and wife here in Des Moines who ran a school. As we worked through the framework it became clear that they had made it genuinely hard to become their customer, so we met in person and I stood at a whiteboard and asked them to walk me through it. What does a parent have to do, from the beginning, to enrol a child and get them properly involved in the school?

They started listing. I started writing.

They got to eighteen steps.

I am not exaggerating for effect. Eighteen. And as I wrote number eighteen on the board and turned around, the wife had tears running down her cheek.

I asked her what was happening.

What we did next is the part worth copying. We made three buckets on the board — first steps, second steps, third steps — and dropped each of the eighteen into one of them. Eighteen steps became a three-step plan for the business, and the enrolment process got rebuilt to match it.

No amount of clever copywriting would have fixed that school’s enrolment. The problem was never the words. But it took a messaging exercise to find it, because nothing else they had ever done forced them to write the steps down in order and look at them.

So when someone tells me StoryBrand is only a messaging strategy, my answer is that it is less than a marketing strategy and more than a copywriting exercise. It is the thing that shows you which parts of your business you have never actually decided.

And then, having found them, you still have to go and fix them. Which brings us to the real limit.

Where the message stops and the strategy starts

Once the message is clear, I run the business through what I call the Hero’s Journey — my own reshaping of John Jantsch’s Marketing Hourglass — the seven stages a customer moves through on the way to becoming a repeat customer who sends you other people.

Know. What are you doing that lets somebody who has never heard of you find out you exist? Paid ads, social, the website, search. This is where the clear message gets built into actual pieces.

Like. The words. If your messaging speaks directly to the reader — if they are effectively reading their own story on your site and can tell you understand the problem — they will like you.

Trust. Empathy and authority. The guide. Once they believe you understand the problem and have the experience to lead them out of it, they are willing to work with you.

Try. A simple way to sample what you do without making the full commitment.

Buy. The plan. What does somebody actually have to do to become a paying customer?

Repeat. What have you put in place that brings people back?

Refer. What have you put in place that moves somebody to tell other people who you are and what you did for them?

Look at that list and you can see exactly where StoryBrand ends.

Like is the message. Trust is the guide. Buy is the plan. Those three the framework handles well, and know is where a clear message becomes campaigns and content. But try, repeat and refer have no StoryBrand equivalent at all — and they are where most of the profit in a business actually lives.

The other eighty percent

Here is the part I wish somebody had said to the man from Chicago before he spent his money.

The internet is full of beautiful, clearly written websites getting almost no organic traffic. The message is not the problem. Nobody is arriving to read it.

What sits in the other eighty percent:

Whether anyone can find you. Keyword research, technical health, local SEO, a properly built Google Business Profile, citations that agree with each other, backlinks, content that answers the questions people actually search for.

Whether AI can understand and recommend you. Assistants now answer buying questions directly, and they judge your business entirely on what they can read. The eight things they weigh are here, or start with why most businesses do not show up at all.

Whether the rest of the journey is built. A clear homepage does not follow up, nurture, or bring anybody back. Know, like, trust, try, buy, repeat, refer — the message helps with the first three at best. Working out which stage is actually costing you is what Strategy First is for, and running the whole thing afterwards is what a fractional CMO does.

Whether the business itself works. I learned this the hard way with a client whose messaging was genuinely good and whose business model was not. Clarity cannot fix that, and it should not be asked to.

None of this is a criticism of StoryBrand. It is a criticism of buying a messaging framework and expecting a marketing strategy.

“The quality of guides varies”

This one is true, and I am one of them, so let me be straight about it.

Every Certified StoryBrand Guide has been through the same certification. After that, we are all different.

StoryBrand hands you the framework. What you do with it — how you interpret it, what services you build around it, what you charge — is left to you. So the framework is constant and the practice around it is not.

My story pushed me toward search. A client told me his beautiful new website was invisible, and chasing that answer is why I now think visibility matters as much as messaging, and possibly more. Another guide had a different story and their practice carries different nuance because of it.

Which is the Italian food thing again. Same ingredients. The cook is what makes the dish.

So the practical answer to “is StoryBrand right for my business” is: yes, and you still have to find the right guide. Someone who understands your particular problem and has the expertise to fix it.

Which, if you have been paying attention, is the same two questions your own customers are asking about you.

So should you use it?

Yes. I have used it on client work since 2018, got certified in 2020, and I would start every engagement with it again tomorrow.

Use it if people land on your site and leave — one client of mine was losing 98% of them — your team describes the business three different ways, you cannot say what you do in one sentence without stumbling, or your marketing keeps starting from a blank page.

Do not expect it to bring traffic, fix a Google Business Profile, get you recommended by an AI assistant, build a follow-up system, or rescue a business model that does not work.

Clarity first, because everything downstream is built on top of it and none of it works if the words are wrong. Then the other eighty percent, in the order that your particular business needs it.

The man from Chicago did not get a bad framework. He got a fifth of the job, sold as the whole job.

Common questions

Where this comes from

Books and sources behind the arguments above, if you want to check them or go deeper:

• Building a StoryBrand by Donald Miller — the framework itself. storybrand.com
• Erik Quigley, How StoryBrand Ruined My Branding Process — the best-argued version of the homogenisation critique, and worth reading even though I disagree with where it lands
• The Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell — the Stickiness Factor chapter, on Sesame Street and Ed Palmer’s Distracter. Chapter summary · A closer look at the fantasy-and-reality decision
• John Jantsch’s Marketing Hourglass — know, like, trust, try, buy, repeat, refer
• The Office, “The Surplus” — on what it takes to explain something simply