I spend a few evenings a month trying to convince a group of adults that wandering deeper into a demon-infested underground world is a reasonable use of their time.
I’m the Dungeon Master for an Out of the Abyss campaign with a group of friends. My job is to prepare the world, understand what is happening inside it, play the people and creatures they encounter, and give the players enough information to decide what to do next.
Then they promptly do something I did not plan for.
They inspect an object I thought was scenery. They ask an NPC a question I hadn’t considered. They decide to scout south when everything I prepared is north. They attach a mysterious pearl to an ancient sword hilt because, apparently, that seemed like a good idea.
This is surprisingly good practice for product marketing.
Because the most important lesson is the same in both places:
I control the campaign. I am not the hero.
Your Customer Didn’t Show Up to Hear Your Backstory
A lot of marketing starts with the company.
We’ve been in business for 37 years.
We’re the leading provider of…
Our proprietary technology…
We offer an industry-leading suite of…
Our platform features…
None of those statements is automatically useless. Some may eventually be important.
But they’re a lousy place to begin a story.
Donald Miller’s StoryBrand framework makes the distinction explicit. The customer is the character with a problem. The brand occupies the role of guide. The guide provides a plan and calls the character to action, with success and failure providing the stakes. StoryBrand itself describes this as a seven-part framework built from familiar storytelling formulas.
That idea has stuck with me because I’ve seen the opposite happen repeatedly in technical marketing.
A company has spent years developing a product. Engineering has built something difficult. Product knows every capability. Leadership knows how much money has gone into it.
Naturally, everybody wants to talk about the product.
The prospective customer arrived thinking about something else entirely.
They have a problem.
That’s where the campaign begins.
Marketing Campaigns Need a Plot
Joseph Campbell’s work on the hero’s journey is much bigger than a marketing framework, and I wouldn’t try to cram every campaign into every stage of the monomyth.
The useful idea is simpler.
Something is true about the character’s world. Something disrupts it. The character has to act. They encounter obstacles and assistance. They cross a threshold. Something changes.
That’s a story.
It’s also a useful way to think about a campaign.
Consider a cybersecurity buyer.
Their ordinary world might be a security team already stretched thin.
Then something changes.
A new compliance requirement appears. An audit is approaching. The company suffers an incident. Leadership suddenly wants answers. The security team discovers assets it didn’t know existed.
There’s your inciting problem.
The marketer’s temptation is to enter the story at this point wearing a cape:
GOOD NEWS. OUR PLATFORM HAS 47 FEATURES.
Nobody asked.
The buyer is still trying to figure out what to do about the dragon.
Be the Guide
This is where StoryBrand gets particularly useful.
Your product isn’t the hero either.
It’s part of the plan.
Your company knows this territory. You’ve encountered the problem before. You understand the dangers. You can give the customer something useful: information, a tool, a route, a process, a product, a service.
Then the customer acts.
Miller’s framework puts considerable emphasis on that action. A guide empathizes with the character’s problem, offers a plan and asks the character to do something.
That’s a better model for marketing than making the brand the protagonist.
And it’s remarkably close to what happens when I’m running a campaign for my friends.
As Dungeon Master, I know considerably more about the world than the players do.
I know what is behind the door.
I know why the NPC is nervous.
I know what happened in this place fifty years ago.
I know that the seemingly harmless fungus ahead may become a problem.
But simply reading everything I know to the players would make for an awful evening.
My job is to provide enough information for them to make a meaningful decision.
Marketing should do the same thing.
Information Isn’t a Story
This distinction matters when marketing complicated products.
At DornerWorks, I worked around technology for aerospace, defense and embedded systems. That meant communicating products and capabilities involving virtual development environments, secure systems, embedded software, hardware, avionics and space technology.
These subjects come with a lot of information.
Specifications.
Architectures.
Standards.
Compatibility.
Performance.
Security.
Technical terminology.
All of it can matter.
But information alone doesn’t create a campaign.
The story starts when you can answer:
Who needs this?
What are they trying to accomplish?
What is preventing them from doing it?
Why does that problem matter now?
What changes if they solve it?
What role does this product play in getting them there?
Once those questions have answers, the technical details become much easier to organize.
They have jobs.
Some establish credibility. Some explain differentiation. Some overcome objections. Some support a buying decision.
You no longer have a pile of features looking for a headline.
You have a plot.
Campaign Development Works the Same Way
I’ve used this thinking beyond individual product pages.
At CyberRisk Alliance, my go-to-market work covered the campaign from the initial brief through launch and ongoing promotion. That could include positioning, landing pages, email, social, press releases, sales materials and nurture.
Those pieces need to feel like parts of the same campaign.
The landing page shouldn’t tell one story while sales enablement tells another. The launch email shouldn’t introduce a different problem than the product page. The nurture sequence shouldn’t suddenly forget why the prospect was interested in the first place.
This is one reason I like developing the central campaign story early.
Before debating subject lines or button colors, answer the bigger questions.
I often reduce it to something close to this:
Someone wants something.
Something is stopping them.
We understand the problem.
Here is a credible way through it.
Here is what you need to do next.
Here is what becomes possible afterward.
Now I can build.
The campaign brief becomes the source material. Positioning establishes the conflict and differentiation. Content helps the customer understand the terrain. Sales enablement gives the sales team the same map. Email advances the story. The landing page provides the decision point.
The tactics finally have something connecting them.
Don’t Railroad the Customer
There’s another lesson from running a tabletop campaign that marketers should probably hear.
Players hate being railroaded.
If I’ve already decided exactly what my friends are going to do, where they’re going to go and how they’re going to solve the problem, I’m not really running a game anymore.
I’m reading them my unpublished novel and occasionally asking them to roll dice.
Customers aren’t much different.
Marketing teams sometimes design journeys as though customers are obedient little dots moving through a funnel.
Awareness → Consideration → Decision.
Nice and tidy.
Actual people are inconvenient.
They skip things.
They go backward.
They read reviews.
They ask colleagues.
They disappear for six months.
They download the technical documentation before reading the homepage.
They talk to sales before watching the webinar.
They arrive through a Google search you didn’t expect.
They obsess over a minor capability because it happens to solve their particular problem.
That’s fine.
The campaign needs structure without assuming control.
Give people a clear story, useful information and sensible paths forward.
Then let them choose.
The Villain Has to Be Real
Story structures also force a useful question:
What is the conflict?
I’ve worked on campaigns where this was harder to answer than it should have been.
The product exists.
The capabilities are documented.
The target market has been identified.
The launch date is approaching.
But nobody has clearly articulated the problem we’re asking the customer to care about.
That’s dangerous.
Without conflict, the campaign tends to compensate with adjectives.
Innovative.
Powerful.
Next-generation.
Seamless.
Comprehensive.
Advanced.
Those words are trying to manufacture tension that the positioning never established.
Find the actual obstacle instead.
Maybe teams are wasting hours on a manual process.
Maybe developers can’t test something until hardware becomes available.
Maybe security teams can’t distinguish meaningful threats from thousands of alerts.
Maybe marketers are generating traffic that never becomes pipeline.
Maybe a company has a technically impressive product that customers can’t understand.
That’s enough.
You don’t need to invent a dragon.
Give the Stakes Some Teeth
A campaign also needs consequences.
Why act now?
That doesn’t mean manufacturing fear.
It means acknowledging that unresolved problems have costs.
Time gets wasted.
Revenue gets lost.
Risk remains.
Opportunities pass.
Teams keep doing something inefficient.
Competitors get there first.
Customers leave.
A product launch underperforms.
The other side matters just as much.
What does success actually look like?
The strongest campaigns make that state concrete.
The customer doesn’t merely “drive digital transformation.”
They ship sooner.
They understand which leads are worth pursuing.
They find the device.
They identify the vulnerability.
They reduce the manual work.
They launch the product.
They can finally answer the question their boss keeps asking.
That’s the destination on the map.
Sometimes the Party Goes South
This may be my favorite connection between marketing and running a campaign.
You can prepare carefully and still be wrong.
As a Dungeon Master, I might expect the party to react one way and discover within thirty seconds that they see the situation completely differently.
That’s useful information.
Marketing gives you the same feedback if you’re willing to listen.
Customers don’t click.
Sales keeps encountering the same objection.
A message that sounded great internally falls flat.
A secondary use case generates more interest than the one you put on the homepage.
One audience responds while another doesn’t.
The correct response isn’t to insist that the campaign was right.
Change the campaign.
I’ve spent enough time in digital marketing to appreciate that part of the job. Launching gives you evidence. Analytics, customer conversations, sales feedback, search behavior, conversion data and campaign performance tell you how people are actually moving through the world you’ve built.
Sometimes they follow the path.
Sometimes the party goes south.
Pay attention either way.
Build a Campaign Someone Can Enter
Storytelling in marketing sometimes gets treated as a copywriting technique.
Add an anecdote.
Make the About page more emotional.
Write a clever opening.
Those things can help, but the more useful application of story happens earlier.
Story can provide the architecture for the campaign itself.
Give me a character.
Give that character something worth accomplishing.
Put a real problem in the way.
Establish why your company understands the territory.
Offer a credible plan.
Make the next action obvious.
Show what success looks like.
Then let the customer decide what to do.
That’s a campaign I know how to run.
And if somebody decides to attach the mysterious pearl to the ancient sword hilt instead, we’ll figure out what happens next.
