Conflict in Brand Storytelling: The Problem Your Business Solves
Every business exists to solve something.
THAT'S THE CONFLICT AT THE HEART OF YOUR STORY.
This is Episode 4 of Frame Your Story: The Storyteller’s Approach to Brand Building – a nine-episode series from Synergetic Media applying Hollywood narrative principles to business brand building. Each episode covers one building block of a complete brand story framework. Episode 4 turns to the heart of every story – the conflict, and the problem your business exists to solve.
The complete series has earned five industry awards: two Gold Viddy Awards and three Gold Hermes Creative Awards in Ethical Use of AI, Thought Leadership Content, and AI-Assisted Video Production.
Watch the full series on YouTube, or continue through individual episodes here.
Without Conflict, There's No Story. Without a Need, There's No Business.
At the heart of storytelling is a conflict. No conflict, no story. In brand storytelling, the conflict is the problem your business solves, and it’s the reason your business exists in the first place.
Two Thousand Years of Conflict
Conflict has been a key ingredient in Western narrative for more than two thousand years. Aristotle’s Poetics, written around 335 BC, describes a story as a complication followed by its unraveling. Even the words we use for characters come from it: protagonist and antagonist both trace back to agon, the Greek word for a contest. Robert McKee, whose book Story has been required reading for screenwriters since 1997, put it about as simply as it can be put: “Conflict is to storytelling what sound is to music.”
Some Eastern traditions, like the four-part kishōtenketsu, build stories without conflict. That’s a different tradition, and not the one marketing inherited.
Not to mention, conflict is one of the five key elements of a story. Setting, character, plot, and resolution make up the other four. Without conflict, you don’t have a story. You have an event. When we build a brand story, we weave in all five.
Conflict, in Marketing
Conflict, in marketing, is the problem your business solves. It may be a challenge your customer is facing, something diminishing their life, something threatening what they have, or something standing between them and what they want. It isn’t always a problem in the usual sense. An outdoor pergola answers a want: more quality time with the family, a place that brings everyone together. Good tires answer a need: keeping the kids safe on the road. But in every case, the conflict is what your business exists to solve.
What Are We Doing With Brand Storytelling?
We’re crafting something customers can tap into, relate to, and see themselves in. Ultimately, they need to see your business as the solution to their problem.
The more clearly you define the problem you solve, the more clearly the customers who have that problem can find you, relate to you, and select you as their solution. That holds in search, too. The clearer your site is about the problem you solve, the easier it is for search engines and AI tools to connect you with the people asking about it.
Say a landscape company’s About page opens with “We offer design, installation, and maintenance.” That’s a list of services with no problem attached. Compare it with “Your yard should be somewhere your family wants to be. We design and build it so it is.” Same company, same services, and only one of them tells the customer you understand what they want.
The Other Side of the Coin
I’d go a step further. When you define the conflict in your brand story, you also have to define the resolution, and in some ways that’s even more important. The problem is only one part of the story. How you solve it, and how you deliver resolution, relief and transformation, to your customer is the other side of that coin.
Lunches for Learning, a charity we’ve worked with for years, shows both sides. The problem: in poverty-stricken areas of Honduras, hunger keeps children out of school. Many come for the food. The resolution: a meal, and with it a seat in a classroom and a different future. The appeal letters we design walk a donor through both, from hunger to attendance to a changed life, because the problem alone doesn’t move anyone to give. Seeing it solved does.
Your Brand Story in Three Acts
The three-act structure is the backbone of most Western storytelling. Aristotle described a complete story as having a beginning, a middle, and an end, and Syd Field’s Screenplay, published in 1979, turned that into the setup, confrontation, and resolution screenwriters still work from.
Your brand story has to map that arc out for the prospect, so they can:
- relate to the problem and challenges you describe (Act 2), and
- imagine, and believe, how you’ll provide the solution, the resolution (Act 3).
Act 1 is part of your brand story too, and it’s where this series started. We’ve looked at the characters, so far the guide, which is your business, and the quest, which is your mission. Your market research should have given you a sense of the setting: the world your customer lives in, where the story plays out.
Know the problem you solve, know how you solve it, put the resolution in the mind of the viewer, and your brand story, told well, will carry them through all three acts.
Catharsis
There is an emotional release at the end of a three-act play. Aristotle called it catharsis. You want your business to be the one providing that for your customer: the moment the problem is solved, the relief arrives, and life is better than it was before. Do that, and you’ll have very loyal customers.
The Customer Is the Hero
Notice who the problem belongs to. It’s your customer’s, which makes them the hero of the story. Your business has a supporting role. You are not the star of this story. Many businesses forget that, or never see it, and cast themselves as the star. But in your customer’s eyes, they are the star, and they’re right. We go deeper on this in Episode 6.
This is why the most successful marketing inspires the customer with what they get out of the goods and services you provide. Donald Miller built a whole framework, StoryBrand, on that idea: the customer is the hero, and the brand is the guide.
Define the problem, define the resolution, and keep your customer at the center of both. That’s a story worth telling, and one your customers will want to be part of.