Want an Efficient Go-to-Market Motion? Tell Your Buyers a Story of Change.
Technology has catalyzed a significant shift in human communication. How a brand reaches its customers has been totally upended in the last decade: the ways people discover, understand, and spread information has been disrupted.
Buying is no longer driven by a single champion—it’s shaped by a network of voices, all influenced by the fragmented, digital-first ways people now gather information. Buyers enter the journey later than they ever have. And they’re more aware of competitors. All of this is driving customer acquisition costs up.
This feels new because it’s happening in messaging apps, on social media, or over email. But the behaviors we’re seeing are actually quite old: we’re experiencing a digital rebirth of the oral tradition.
In this era, the brands that win are the ones with stories that inspire buyers to action.
Woden created the StoryKernel so the most essential brands can win in their market. The StoryKernel repositions your customer as the hero of the story and your brand as their indispensable mentor.
The StoryKernel is Woden’s proprietary process for creating a strategic narrative: a customer-centric story of change that captures a brand’s unique view of its market and why it’s credible to help buyers navigate that change.
Here’s the nine-part arc any brand can use to pull its best-fit buyers towards them, and unlock efficient, customer-led growth.
An Ancient Structure That Still Works
Civilizations began with stories.
Long before business strategy, before disruptors and unicorns, before PowerPoint and pitch decks—there was narrative. Etched on cave walls or shared around the campfire, stories were how we made sense of a chaotic world.
For most of human history, knowledge spread through the spoken word. People remembered and shared the stories that resonated. The rest? Discarded and forgotten.
Storytelling works for four key reasons:
- Stories are easy to remember. Our brains are hard-wired to receive and spread information in the form of stories—they beat features and benefits all day.
- Stories help people communicate shared beliefs. They help people identify who they can trust and form bonds within communities.
- Stories make complex ideas simple. Your story helps buyers understand your product or service without your experience.
- Stories are easy to share. The dopamine hit we get from sharing a good story makes us want to repeat it over and over again—which is how your brand creates evangelists.
We’ve traded the glow from a campfire for one from a smart device, but people still engage with and spread stories in the exact same way.
The stories that have endured throughout human history follow on storytelling arc more than any other: the Hero’s Journey, codified by mythologist Joseph Campbell and echoed in countless modern narratives, from Star Wars to Rocky to The Hunger Games.
Campbell noticed a consistent pattern in the world’s myths: a hero ventures forth from the ordinary world, faces trials, receives help from a mentor, and returns transformed. It’s a structure that has endured because it reflects the emotional arc of human experience.
The StoryKernel translates Campbell’s arc into a framework that brands can use to tell a consistent, differentiated story across their buying journey.
Powered by Purpose
Stories exist to communicate belief. The StoryKernel must be anchored in the same idea of belief—your strategic narrative is only effective when it can articulate your purpose.
Your brand’s purpose never changes. It gets to the core of why the company started in the first place, and transcends your products or services to connect with the buyer’s own beliefs.
Woden believes all brand purposes must meet three criteria:
- Unique to the brand. A good purpose has a viewpoint; it is something you believe or see in the world that others do not.
- Relevant to the buyer. The purpose captures why your brand is essential, and why your customer cannot live with you.
- Authentic. Your company must be committed to realizing its purpose and be willing to stand behind it.
For example, Woden’s purpose is “To unlock its full potential, a company must transform into an essential brand.”
Woden believes a brand’s purpose is hidden inside of it, waiting to be discovered.
The StoryKernel is built on six weeks of interviews with employees, customers, partners, investors and more. And we heavily research the market and competition to help you articulate a purpose that’s unique to you.
Woden’s own purpose captures a state of change: companies needing to realize their potential. Your purpose must capture a similar change, as this is the core of the arc your own story will tell and the impact your brand creates.
Strategic Narrative: A Story of Change
The story that shares your belief with the world is called a strategic narrative. It’s a storytelling framework designed to capture the key elements of your story that you then retell across all your different storytelling applications.
Woden crafts your strategic narrative, the StoryKernel, to be the “mother story” which ensures every interaction you have with buyers is aligned with the message you want in the market.
The StoryKernel is designed to challenge the status quo. Your brand’s purpose invites others to see and think about their world differently. This pulls buyers towards your brand: they want to associate with others who share their beliefs.
There are different ways to challenge the established order. Your purpose may assert there’s a “better way” in an established market. Innovative companies may see a totally different paradigm going forward. Consumer brands might challenge buyers to be a better version of who they are.
No matter the approach, your story requires change and growth—consistent with your purpose—to be effective.
Woden’s Nine-Part Storytelling Framework
The StoryKernel transforms your purpose into an entire messaging hierarchy you can use across your buying journey to convert buyers more efficiently.
All great stories have a Moral, the “lesson” they aim to teach their audience. The StorKernel is no different. Here your purpose is your moral. When people hear your brand’s story, we want to align buyer’s beliefs with your own.
To share that lesson with your audience, the StoryKernel has nine components:
- Existential Threat: A strategic narrative needs clear stakes that underpin the story. Your brand must identify some kind of shift or change that makes the status quo no longer tenable. These threats are external to your buyer; they pull them into the story and build urgency, while aligning you with them against this threat.
- Shared Threat: This threat creates a before and after for your buyer. The old way of doing things is no longer possible, which creates cost of inaction for your buyer. The shared threat connects the stakes of the story to a business (in B2B brands) or a community (for B2C). This challenges buyers to consider a change.
- Our Hero and Their Meaning: The hero of the StoryKernel is your customer. A customer-centric approach builds empathy and attachment with the narrative. Buyers visualize exactly how you’ll help them, and by bringing the existential stakes of the story to a personal level (even B2B brands have a single hero), you form trust with the buyer.
- The Mentor and Their Allies: Your brand then enters the story as a wiser, older character: the mentor. Your experiences, technology or other advantages make your credible as a guide to the buyer navigating the challenges described by the story. You unlock the potential within your customer and surround them with others who share your beliefs and can aid them.
- Call To Adventure: In the StoryKernel, your purpose becomes a call to your buyer: an invitation for them to make a change, join you, and resolve the threats facing them. This is where you show your buyer what’s possible on the other side of the market shift.
- The Talisman: Your product or service is a talisman. It is the literal thing you deliver—the story should capture the features of your product. In the StoryKernel, your product must also have a magical component: what it makes possible for the buyer, the self-actualization it creates or the higher values it represents.
- Obstacles to Overcome: Your buyer wields the Talisman to overcome a series of obstacles. Here you capture what makes your product different, but also the benefits it provides. A good StoryKernel provides tangible examples and use cases.
- Spoils of Victory: Your buyer emerges from this quest with clear ROI from working with your brand. The StoryKernel shows how these impacts can be brought back to the business or community to resolve the Existential and Shared Threats. The StoryKernel shows your buyer why changing the status quo is worth it.
- Potential Achieved: The StoryKernel resolves with the buyer and their company or community in the new world on the other side of the shift you’ve laid out. Buyers are able to not just adapt but thrive as their own potential is fully realized.
These nine elements play out across one, consistent story. Because it’s your buyers own story, they can’t wait to hear it—and more importantly, repeat it.
The StoryKernel
Woden crafts each StoryKernel as a strategic asset. We work within our nine-part strategic narrative arc; doing so helps bring your brand to key points of decision about how it wants to be positioned in the market and tell its own story.
The StoryKernel is succinct: Woden aims to keep them under 500 words. This gives everyone connected to your brand a foundation for individual storytelling applications across the buying journey.
Our clients build an entire Messaging Hierarchy on the StoryKernel: from this one narrative, they are able to derive positioning statements, differentiators, sales and marketing content, and more.
Most importantly, the StoryKernel creates alignment for five-plus years. This one story gets everyone on the same page and telling the same story, so every interaction you have with the market is designed to convert prospects into customers and inspire customers to become evangelists.
Efficient Customer Journeys
The structure of the StoryKernel mirrors the customer journey. When your brand uses this nine-part arc for its own story, it gains more than just powerful language, strategic clarity and a compelling story.
You uncover which elements of your narrative to communicate to buyers at each funnel stage. And as the story progresses through the buying journey, people can’t wait to hear more—just like in any good story. The result is a buying journey that pulls buyers forward with story and converts them more efficiently than ever before
