Want to Improve Your Brand's Storytelling? Shift Your POV to Tell a Better Narrative. Here's How. In a crowded digital media environment of voluntary engagement, brand storytelling isn't enough to grab attention. You must approach the story from the right perspective — your customer's.

As I emphasized in a previous Entrepreneur article, a big mistake in brand storytelling is assuming that you're telling a story about your company. It's really two stories: One about your brand and one about your customer. But you need to lead with your customer's story.

How? Shift your point of view by learning to see their story.

Related: Telling Your Brand Story Is Crucial. 4 Steps To Ensure That It Resonates.

Seeing through others' eyes and looking for tension

Carol Williams understands this. She is the first African-American woman with a creative agency background to be inducted into the Advertising Hall of Fame. The brand stories she created are some of the most famous and most successful ad campaigns for brands like Secret, Pillsbury, KFC and Disney. With Secret, instead of leading with the deodorant's active ingredients, she took an active role in understanding her customer's life.

In the early 1970s, Williams says, "Women were perceived as soft, delicate creatures that didn't sweat." Her famous line, "Strong enough for a man but made for a woman" embraced contradictions in beliefs about men and women. Williams helped reframe the Secret brand to embrace the reality of a woman "working hard while celebrating her femininity." Audience POV and a brand message around this tension resonated.

Award-winning copywriter and author Luke Sullivan has a similar perspective on the right POV for brand stories. He explains, "What is advertising but telling compelling, memorable stories about brands?" He has learned that to have a narrative, you need tension, he and suggests studying your brand's product category and looking for built-in conflicts or cultural tensions that can be turned into stories your audience will recognize and understand.

Airbnb and Peloton understand brand story from the customer's POV

In explaining a campaign for Airbnb, co-founder, and CEO Brian Chesky said, "The number one reason people choose to travel on Airbnb is they want to live like a local. They don't want to be tourists stuck in long lines, fighting with the crowds to see the same thing as everyone else. Our hosts … welcome travelers from around the world into their communities." This shift in POV from app features to audience story highlighting tension was the inspiration for the campaign message, "Why vacation somewhere when you can live there?"

This audience narrative of a contradiction in travel could be uniquely addressed by the brand's product. By reframing the travel story, the brand differentiated its offering from traditional hotels situated amongst the tourist traps. Within a year of the campaign, Airbnb users in the U.S. and Europe increased 17%.

Peloton didn't lead its brand story with high-tech features. The POV is based on their customer's story of wanting to work out but losing motivation and home workout equipment going unused. Peloton's brand story resonates by addressing this tension. The story is not one of equipment alone but of instructors and a community of like-minded enthusiasts who help motivate each other through a connected screen.

On the website, the Peloton brand story leads with a customer perspective, "Tap into motivation whenever you want." This emotional appeal is backed by the rational justification, "70% of Peloton Members work out more with Peloton than they did before." Peloton's story helped create the connected fitness subcategory, leading to 1.67 million monthly subscribers with an annual retention rate of 92%.

Related: How to Build a Brand Story That Buyers Emotionally Connect With

The story is a shortcut to emotion — and without emotion, we can't make decisions

Entrepreneur, best-selling author and speaker Seth Godin explained this idea of POV in the subtitle of his book, This Is Marketing, "You can't be seen until you learn to see." Godin also said, "Innovative marketers invent new solutions that work with old emotions." In telling your brand narrative, don't get so caught up in your new solution's features, figures, bells and whistles that you forget to evoke emotion through your customer's story.

In neuroscientist Antonio Damasio's book, Descartes' Error, he explains how one of his patient's frontal lobe was damaged because of a tumor damaging his ability to feel emotions. Without emotions, the patient could no longer make decisions. Before the tumor, he was very successful in his career. After, he would be stuck spending an entire afternoon simply trying to decide the best way to organize his files.

Damasio explains that emotions help limit options in making a decision by enabling us to imagine what it would feel like to be in different situations. When you tell a brand story from your audience's POV, you're giving them a shortcut to feeling a situation or tension your product or service can help with or make better.

"Think different" about your brand story and the new media environment

In a Steve Jobs speech, "It is in Apple's DNA that technology alone is not enough — it's technology married with liberal arts, married with the humanities, that yields us the results that make our heart sing." Competitors were talking about "speeds and feeds," but Jobs and Apple lead with "Thinking Different" and "Making a dent in the universe" for their customers — the crazy ones, because "the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world, are the ones who do."

In a new media age of voluntary engagement, what grabs attention is when people see themselves in your message. Yes, you can buy a social media ad to get into someone's news feed, but your audience can scroll by quicker than changing the channel during a TV commercial. What will get them to pause and take action? Seeing something they can relate to, feeling something that says you get them.

Related: How to Create a Brand Narrative That Inspires and Engages Your Audience