Is Your Customer The Hero Of Your How-to Videos?

Call it what you will – a documentary, a testimonial, a hero’s story – we love to hear tales about triumph and tragedy. When one person takes on a challenge and succeeds (or fails) we love to watch and share in her experience.

This type of video can take longer than an hour to shoot because you may need to follow a character around a bit. It can also take just a few minutes.

Thanks to YouTube, the world has unprecedented access to the cat video canon, and through our research we found one that elegantly exemplifies the hero tale in its simplest form.

An Unexpected Hero

Now, think for a moment about the last time someone started telling you about their cat. Even if you’re a cat lover, you know it’s at best a 50/50 chance you’ll be bored to tears a minute into someone else’s cat story. More people will spontaneously and passionately tell more boring stories about cats than almost anything on earth. (Dreams and children come first to mind.) Why are Maru’s struggles compelling? Even a dog owner can’t help rooting for him, at least a little.

The Hero’s Journey

In 1949, Joseph Campbell released “The Hero With A Thousand Faces” in which he outlined his theory of the hero myth. Essentially, Campbell identified the structure of almost every tale from Ulysses to Star Wars.

Almost universally (and I’m really reducing this), a hero begins in an ordinary world, receives a call to enter a strange world, faces trials, and then returns home to improve the world. Amazingly, this can be even further reduced to a simple formula anyone can follow to tell a good story.

In the case of Maru and the Box:

1) Introduce the Hero: This is Maru. He is inquisitive and cute.

2) Introduce a Challenge: This is a box. Maru absolutely has to get into that box!

3) Show the Struggle: He tries climbing on the table to jump higher. He fails.

4) Vanquish the Challenge: He pulls out a gun and shoots the box. (You watched the video right?)

You can describe almost anything that’s ever happened to any person using this formula. Just stick to the formula. There are two problems people often encounter when trying to follow this formula.

1) Adding unnecessary details to “fill out the story.”

People often want to add things that aren’t in the formula because they are afraid their story won’t make sense without it. For example, you could get hung up explaining to the viewer why the hero’s challenge matters. Don’t do it. If your hero is passionate about their determination to overcome the challenge, the viewer will except any explanation you give them–if you even bother to give them one. For example: What was the gold stuff in the case in Pulp Fiction? What was E.T.’s ship doing on earth in the first place? Why did Maru have to get in the box? The more you explain your story, the more time you give your viewers to wonder “Do I believe this?” Give them nothing.

2) Thinking their industry is too technical/specialized/boring to make a good story–even with Joseph Campbell’s formula .

This is not true. Ever. The more technical/specialized/boring your industry is, the lower the bar your story has to get over–for the right viewer. That’s because the smaller your niche is, the fewer stories your video has to compete with. When the right viewer watches your hero video they are going to be so excited to see a story about something they care about they won’t care if it’s perfect. They’re going to feel like you wrote a song about them. That’s the best!

For example, check out the tale of the Kenmore 90 series Washing Machine and the Broken Coupler:

Was that amazing or what? Did you watch the whole thing? The first time I saw it I watched it at least five times. Let me break down the story:

1) Introduce the Hero: This is Weston. He thinks he is “handy.”

2) Introduce the Challenge: This is Weston’s Kenmore series 90 washing machine. It stopped producing clean clothes and now makes only a bad sound.

3) Show the Struggle: Repairmen are expensive. (Weston is also “frugal.”) It is impossible to compare the sound he hears the machine making to the sound the repair blogs write about.

4) Vanquish the Challenge: Weston fixes the machine with a couple of wrenches and his bare hands. (and a laptop looping the above video)

The only thing more powerful than a video that tells a great story by itself is a video that helps viewers tell the story that matters to them.

Have you ever heard someone sing a song or read a poem about something small that you knew a lot about like your school or your work or your family or you? It didn’t matter that it was terrible because it was about something you cared about. In fact, it was even better that it was terrible because it meant someone cared enough about what you cared about to risk looking stupid singing a song they wrote about it.

We’ve all (hopefully) heard someone tell a story that had us catching ourselves holding our breaths at parts and laughing out loud at others. You’ve likely also had the experience of trying to re-tell a great story you heard to a friend only to have them stare blankly at you and say something like, “So they couldn’t find the right printer paper, but then they found it.”

From the smallest feline to intergalactic cowboys, heroes come in all shapes and sizes. We’ve been telling stories about them for a very long time. By integrating this classic structure into your videos, you not only help your viewers solve their problems, but you help them become a hero as well.