The Biggest Issue with the Typical Customer Story Arc

Kurt Vonnegut famously identified six classic story arcs that most, if not all, successful stories follow. The customer journey is no different. However the customer journey usually adheres rather strictly to one of these six. That pattern is the rags to riches story arc.

The bootstrap story and the customer journey

Now, is it a coincidence that the customer journey itself follows the good ol' bootstrap story? Not really. Capitalism loves a good rags to riches story. It is optimistic, and supports the idea that anybody can make it with a little grit, creativity, and hard work. Take, for example, this uplifting good news story on Instagram:

The guy began at the bottom, and now he's cruised to the top and is working to inspire rags to riches stories for all those below him. And look at the first comment, "Congratulations! You're strong and a winner!" Nice, right?

Mice invading your home

Customer journeys are usually no different. Fundamental marketing asks the entrepreneur to identify pain points and from there to select a unique value proposition and work towards iterating a minimum viable solution, which ultimately becomes a company's product or service. For example, mice have invaded my home and I am worried about cleanliness. I call local pest control, they arrive, provide a quote, I agree, they set traps, after a few days the mice are gone, and everybody wins. Good story, right? (Unless you are the family of mice.) I started under the crushing weight of a handful of mice, and ended up victorious, mice-free.

Read more from Elie Sherman:

Creating a Cohesive Narrative in a Complex World

How to Write a Winning Press Release: A Journo's Perspective

Pluses and Minuses to Work-from-Home: 2020

However, there's an issue here. What about the five other stories? Don't they have a place in helping to understand customers? Indeed, they should, and do. Even the inverse, riches to rags, may have its place in understanding certain customers. For example, someone who switches from an SUV to driving a Tesla sedan. This customer is concerned with climate change and understands that while purchasing a gas guzzling SUV may appear safer and is certainly fun to drive off road, its long-term effect on the climate could eventually imperil all of humanity. So the customer is factoring a kind of Icarus story in their head. Start without a car, get a car (hooray!), but then destroy the planet. Grim, right? Right, but it also may help us to understand how somebody arrives at willing to fork over the extra bucks for a Tesla.

A Cinderella story

Or, what about the Cinderella story arc, which is really a pair of rags to riches story arcs? We must understand that trying other solutions is often a part of a customer's journey towards the ultimate solution. We go in for the quick fix, and this educates us to choose another product. For example, I am looking to buy car insurance, I buy the cheapest option, but then I quickly end up having my new car vandalized and have to pay heavily out of pocket on the deductible because I didn't get comprehensive, so I go back afterward and choose a pricier option that gives me more coverage, and then my car is keyed but this time I don't have to pay as much on the deductible, and I stay on this plan indefinitely. Of course, the actuaries will catch up with me if I keep getting keyed, and at any rate hopefully you don't have to experience vandalism. But, you get the picture. Life happens.

So, the point is that when you hit the customer storyboard in your attempt to understand the customer's journey to your product or service, it helps to understand that rags to riches, problem to solution, isn't the only way people arrive at certain products or services. You should attempt to define as many stories as possible that lead to your product or service, and understand what motivates the heroes in these stories. Because every company wants to be a hero to somebody.