Have you ever felt stuck spinning your wheels through months of painstaking, costly traditional branding exercises, only to end up with messaging that doesn't truly resonate—or worse, never sees the light of day? That's painful for you, frustrating for your audience, and costly for your business—and it's happening in far too many companies today.
But there's good news: the old, cumbersome branding process you've come to dread may soon be as outdated as dial-up internet. What if you could harness a powerful AI-driven tool that's uniquely designed to distill your most captivating brand narrative—not over months, but in mere minutes? A tool that not only defines your brand strategy but effortlessly generates every bit of your marketing, sales, and web content, laser-focused specifically on your business?
Today, we're thrilled to host Park Howell—the self-described World's Most Industrious Storyteller. Park's impressive, Emmy-winning storytelling career spans nearly 40 years, during which he's helped brands achieve staggering results, growing by as much as 600 percent. With his innovative creation—the StoryCycle Genie™—Park is dramatically disrupting traditional branding. He has distilled his decades of storytelling expertise into this AI-driven wizard that’s already enabling businesses to build captivating brand stories faster and remarkably cheaper. If you're looking to throw off the shackles of traditional branding and elevate your business narrative into the future, Park Howell is exactly who you need to hear from now.
The AI Hat Podcast host Mike Allton asked Park Howell about:
✨ Rapid Branding Revolution: Understand exactly how AI can turn months of branding efforts into powerful, results-driven stories created in minutes.
✨ AI Done Right: Learn why specialized AI solutions outperform general-purpose AI tools and how to leverage this distinction.
✨ Humanized Automation: Discover why effective brand narratives depend on a delicate balance between automation and genuine storytelling.
Learn more about Park Howell
- Connect with Park Howell on LinkedIn
Resources & Brands mentioned in this episode
- The Business of Story
- StoryCycle Genie™
- Sean Schroeder
- Brand Bewitchery: How to Wield the Story Cycle System to Craft Spellbinding Stories for Your Brand by Park Howell
- Redefining Brand Strategy: AI Tools for Businesses of All Sizes with Ruheen Jaura
- Business of Story Podcast
- Jay Baer
- AI Primer: A Comprehensive Guide
- AI Training for Businesses
- Explore past episodes of the The AI Hat Podcast podcast
Full Transcript
(lightly edited)
Goodbye Traditional Branding, Hello AI - Transform Your Brand Story with Park Howell
[00:00:00] Park Howell: We've spent the year doing prompt engineering. We use Claude primarily, but it is all based on the Story Cycle System. So think about it as literally being a genie bottle. All right, so we've taken AI, we've bottled it in our Story Cycle Genie. And then you come in and you work with the genie. It first feeds you your story.
Then you go, as I mentioned earlier, and iterate on it. But now it is giving you content specifically from your own website, your own marketing materials. Demonstrates the gaps in your communication, the missed opportunities, or it also delivers you inspiration and other ways to think about your brand story that is uniquely your own compared to your competition and compared to the overall market you are in.
[00:00:53] Mike Allton: Mike's got the hat, the AI kind, unlocking power in business you'll find, cut through the hype, explore the tech, every week new ideas to check. All 10 leads us on a digital quest, AI secrets. He'll always invest tune in tight. Don't miss a beat knowledge. Groove. Keep you on your feet. Listen up to the AI flow business growth.
Here we go. Cutting edge insights. That's the plan with the AI hat. You'll understand.
Greetings program. Welcome back to the AI hat podcast where I selfishly use this time to pick the brains of experts at harnessing the power of AI across all areas of business, from streamlining operations and boosting productivity to gaining a competitive edge and driving explosive growth. And you get to learn to subscribe to be shown and prepare yourself and your brand for this AI revolution and come on ahead.
Now, have you ever felt stuck spinning your wheels through months of painstaking, costly, traditional branding exercises only to end up with messaging that doesn't truly resonate or worse, never sees the light of day. That's painful for you, frustrating for your audience and costly for your business. And it's happening in far too many companies today.
But there's good news. The old cumbersome branding process you've come to dread may soon be as outdated as dial up internet. What if you could harness the powerful AI driven tool that's uniquely designed to distill your most captivating brand narrative not over months? But in mere minutes? A tool that not only defines your brand's strategy, but effortlessly generates every bit of your marketing, sales, and web content, laser focused, specifically on your business?
Today, we're thrilled to host Park Howell, the self described world's most industrious storyteller. Park's impressive, Emmy winning storytelling career spans nearly 40 years, during which he's helped brands achieve staggering results, growing by as much as 600%. With his innovative creation, the StoryCycle Park is dramatically disrupting traditional branding.
He's distilled his decades of storytelling expertise into this AI driven wizard that's already enabling businesses to build captivating brand stories faster and remarkably cheaper. If you're looking to throw off the shackles of traditional branding and elevate your business narrative into the future, Park Howell is exactly who you need to hear from now.
Hey, Park, welcome to the show.
[00:03:48] Park Howell: Mike, thank you so much for being here. I love this.
[00:03:52] Mike Allton: This is awesome. I am so excited to talk with you. I didn't get a chance to actually tell you in the green room, but I've attended your talks at Social Media Marketing World and honestly was too shy to introduce myself. So this is a real thrill and a pleasure for me.
So I'm wondering if you could start by just sharing kind of your aha moment. What first inspired you to create this story cycle genie, kind of transition from traditional methods to AI driven branding?
[00:04:20] Park Howell: Well, it actually started over 20 years ago. I created what is called the story cycle system, wrote a book about it, uh, have taken hundreds of brands through it and have grown brands by as much as 600 percent using this story cycle process.
It's really inspired by the hero's journey and so forth. That's a whole other story. Um, over the years, over two decades of doing that, I realized just how exhausting of a process it is for both myself and my customers, because it can take two or three months of discovery and research and brainstorming.
You've got to go through some psycho analysis with them to really define what that brand story is, but it works. Extraordinarily well. So a year and a half ago, one of my good friends, Sean Schroeder, who also went through the story cycle system for his digital agency called Blue River up in Sacramento.
They went through it 2017. They had also built this large SAS platform called the mirror content management platform. And they were looking for a brand story to tie those two together. We did it using the story cycle again. It took a few months to get there, but we nailed it. They grew exponentially and ended up selling both the agency and the platform.
He came to me about a year and a half ago and he says, I've been using this park and it's great, but man, is it. tough. It just takes a lot of time and effort. I think we could build an A. I. agent out of it that could literally turn those months In the minutes and have it immediately give you content and an authentic, unique brand story for your work that has all the impact that you're looking for, but it doesn't cost tens of thousands of dollars.
It doesn't cost you months and months of time. You literally can do it in under an hour by feeding it your URL URL for your website and some of your marketing materials. The genie shows you, reveals how you are currently showing up in the world with your brand story, and then you can iterate on it real time, right in the genie to refine it as you go.
And the final output then is your new, more clear, concise. compelling story all again, based off the proven story cycle system.
[00:06:47] Mike Allton: That's how it all came about, Mike. That is fantastic. And like I was telling you in the pre show, I wish I would have known about this about six to eight months ago, I was given the role of chief storyteller to grow a pulse.
We didn't have a true brand story or narrative at all. So I set about creating that myself. Now, fortunately, I did have the help of AI at that moment, but I didn't have. a tool like yours. I just had the LM. I was using Gemini and having conversations back and forth. And fortunately, I've been with the company for many years.
So I had that, you know, organizational knowledge at my fingertips, but it still took hours. And to my earlier point, it's still not being used in the company. So we got to work on that. But like, like you're talking about all this. Can take a lot of time, particularly traditional branding. What makes the StoryCycle Genie such a game changer, do you think, for businesses who really want to accelerate that branding process?
[00:07:41] Park Howell: Well, it's fast, it's efficient, it works really well. I like to think of like open AI, like you were using, you know, Claude and JetGPT and Gemini and so forth. Open AI being, general AI being the force, right, from Star Wars. It's the force out there. It can do amazing, General stuff for you, but you have to become a prompt engineering wizard and really understand how it works in order for you to get the information that you want out of it.
People, when they're trying to do branding with chat, GPT and so forth, what we've heard is that. It takes a lot of time to get it right. I'm not even sure what it's giving me is right because it's so general and, uh, you know, hallucinations come in, you know, like, where did this come from? What does this even matter over here?
So what we've done is we spent the year doing prompt engineering. We use Claude primarily, but it is all based on the story cycle system. So think about it as literally being a genie bottle. All right, so we've taken AI, we've bottled it in our story cycle genie, and then you come in and you work with the genie.
It first feeds you your story, then you go, as I mentioned, earlier and iterate on it, but now it is giving you content specifically from your own website. Your own marketing materials demonstrates the gaps in your communication, the missed opportunities, or it also delivers you inspiration and other ways to think about your brand story that is uniquely your own compared to your competition and compared to the overall market you are in.
Now, I'll tell you Mike, I was a little skeptical when Sean first came to me with this idea. I was not nearly embedded in AI like you are, or like he was, uh, is, and, uh, we started using it. We started working through the prompt engineering. I learned a lot in that process. And then as the genie got better, it was working like magic.
I mean, it was blowing my mind with how accurate it was on our overall story cycle process. And then the people I took through it, I mean, their eyes lit up. They're like, where did this come from? That's perfect. I'd never thought about saying it this way. There was no hallucination. Everything works specifically from their brand story because that's what they are feeding the genie directly.
So that's why it works. It did. It's like taking the force and thinking of it as Yoda for your brand story. It's taking all the power of AI. But it's got it bottled in your specific story using our story cycle framework of the story cycle system. I
[00:10:30] Mike Allton: love that. For the audio listeners, like any good storyteller, Park had props.
He opened up an actual genie bottle in front of us and he didn't come out of it, but I was kind of waiting to edit that in. All the way from Egypt. That's right. That's right. And, and I gotta say, I just absolutely love tools. like this that have been designed and crafted to help businesses with a very specific purpose.
Uh, earlier in the season, some of the, some of the folks might remember, we talked to Ruheene Jaura about her tool, Hey Levi, which has a very similar, um, method, but instead of your brand story, it figures out your target audience. So you fill in a lot of those basic details, you know, your business URL and some other basic information, and it helps you develop really fantastic target ICPs, which could then fuel the rest of your marketing. I'd love to help, love to have your help walking through some of those details and kind of pulling apart how this is different from just using Claude or Gemini or chat GPT. Um, you talked about how it's got a lack of hallucinations.
You talked about how you did a lot of prompt engineering. in there. It sounds like you've infused it with a lot of initial information about how to craft a great brand story of messaging. Am I understanding that correctly?
[00:11:50] Park Howell: Absolutely right. It's pulling from all of our content from my website from literally my nine years of doing my Business Of Story Podcast from my books.
Um, so it has all the detail on what and how the story cycle system works. So Mike, when you and I first come Taxes each other a couple of weeks ago about being on each other's show. I thought, well, I didn't know much about you. I know. I think we have in common, Jay Baer, Good friend of mine. I think someone you've been on Convince and Convert with and so forth, but I really didn't know that much about you.
So I simply your URL. From, uh, AI Hat from both your podcast and your website. And I put it in there and what did I, let's see, I had four different, your blog I put in there, yeah, your podcast, the social media hat. com website and your LinkedIn profile, and I asked the genie run me Mike's brand story. It gave me an initial brand assessment first and foremost, and it gave that to me in five seconds.
It read it, boom. Here's what Mike's all about. Can I read it to you real quick to see if this is accurate,
please. So it says, Mike, I was hoping we'd unpack this a little bit too.
Mike Allton is a distinguished thought leader and expert in AI, content marketing, and social media, serving as the head of marketing at Agora plus while maintaining influential platforms like The Social Media Hat.
Blogging Brute and The AI Hat Podcast. His brand centers on demystifying complex marketing and technology concepts, particularly focusing on helping business leaders understand and implement AI solutions effectively. Through his various platforms, he combines deep technical knowledge with practical business application, positioning himself as both an educator and implementer in the digital marketing and AI space.
How accurate is that?
[00:13:46] Mike Allton: That was stunningly accurate. And the reason I say that is because it pipped. It picked up on things that I don't expressly say in the content. So I want you listeners to understand it's not just reading and regurgitating the homepage, like it mentioned that I managed the social media hat and blogging brute, which is a hundred percent true.
I don't talk about blogging brute. On the AI hat. That's a completely different website. Yes. If you do Google searches and stuff, you would find that information about me. Maybe if you poured over my LinkedIn, you might know, but that wasn't on the website. So I was impressed by that.
[00:14:16] Park Howell: So we went and found that.
So that's the first step, you know, literally I take one minute to put in your URLs. I don't have to answer any questions whatsoever. I just put in your material and then it goes on and I said, okay, good. It will then spell out the story cycle system, your story in ours from brand understanding. And by the way, if that description isn't exactly right or the brand assessment, you just at that point tweak it real quick.
Oh, you forgot to say one thing about this or one thing, but typically it's 98 percent there. So then you go, yes. So then it says, cool, I'm going to spell out your story. So it goes from brand understanding. It does identify your top three audiences as they are showing up. In your current website and so forth.
So what you're seeing there is the way you're showing up. If it's not accurate, it means probably there's a gap in your communication and maybe you need to focus a little bit more, but you can go back in and change that. What I love about this, Mike is like for yours, the first one, primary audience, your number one audience, business leaders, and executives, it gives you their challenges, their fears, their frustrations, and their aspirations.
Challenges, understanding AI implementation, staying competitive, fears, missing AI opportunities, falling behind competitors, frustrations, not having the time or the knowledge to implement it right, and aspirations, leading digital transformation, making informed tech decisions. Are those accurate to what your number one audience?
Is looking for with your help.
[00:15:53] Mike Allton: Absolutely. And again, you know, a big differentiator was that's, that's something that you were given, or I would have been given in seconds, right? But just plugging in the URL, whereas I spent a lot of time researching. to figure that out myself, even with the help of AI, because I have a heavy Gemini user.
I love deep research. So I did a lot of deep research projects on my target audience, specifically the St. Louis area where I'm at, and surfaced a lot of those same pain points and aspirations and so on. But Even with the help of AI, that was hours of work.
[00:16:25] Park Howell: Yeah. This literally would have been a minute and a half into the genie.
Now, what now, why those are important? Of course, those become a content lever content points that the genie and you will be using down the road and landing pages, and it will also create customer personas for each one of these different audiences. Your second audience is marketing professionals. Your third is content creators and entrepreneurs.
They all have a list of challenges, fears, frustrations, and aspirations. And what you can do with the genie is once you've run it all through and have it really refined, you can go in and say, give me a 30 day content marketing plan for business leaders. Based off of their challenges, fears, frustrations and aspirations that you identified in 30 seconds, it gives you a complete 30 day plan, including webinar recommendations, topics and so forth.
And then you could even have the genie go in and write some of your posts or all of your posts if you like to. So, but anyways, let's go back to the, um, to the output of it. So Then what's next? Once it identifies your three audiences, we create A B T statements for those. And if you saw me in social media marketing world, you probably saw me teaching the And But Therefore framework, the most powerful problem solution, dynamic story structure that I have ever found something I wished I had learned in the third grade, but I teach it all the time.
Let me give you an example of it real quick, Mike. So A B. T. Statement for your number one audience. As a business leader, you want to leverage A I for competitive advantage And ensure your organization stays ahead of techno lot technological change. But you feel overwhelmed because the A. I. Landscape is complex and rapidly evolving.
Therefore, you can now confidently navigate AI implementation backed by Mike's proven framework for turning technical possibilities into business realities.
[00:18:26] Mike Allton: Love that.
[00:18:27] Park Howell: Set up problem resolution. You have an And statement of agreement. You have the But statement of the problem that you're solving for on their behalf and Therefore Here's your call to action.
Here's the way forward. And all the abt statements are meant to be a foundation that that cornerstone narrative block that you are going to build on in your story. So did that seem pretty accurate?
[00:18:50] Mike Allton: 100%. Yeah, very accurate.
[00:18:52] Park Howell: And you didn't have to even learn how to write an abt. It wrote it for you. It's good to know, know it and how it works because you will want to go in and tweak them a little bit.
But anyway, so then we get into your positioning statement. Now that we, what we're doing in the story cycle is we're identifying your number one position in the market, your audiences, you know, what's your core, uh, problem solution dynamic. And it says your position statement. And this one is a little bit long.
I might even have it shorten it a little bit, but I just gave you what it gave me. Uh, it says for forward thinking business leaders and marketing professionals who refuse to let technological complexity hold them back, Mike Allton transforms overwhelming digital challenges into clear, actionable strategies.
He empowers you to confidently implement AI and marketing solutions that drive real business results, all while maintaining a practical, ROI focused approach.
[00:19:49] Mike Allton: Okay. Well, first of all, thank you for reading that out loud. Cause now I have my next 30 second commercial. Perfect. That's awesome. No, but I think that's fantastic.
That is, that is spot on. And what I love about this, you kind of intimated this a moment ago, that you don't have to know how to do these things. You don't need to know the ABT framework. You don't need to know how to build a great brand story to generate this. And if you're the, you know, visionary executive of a brand, I don't know that I want you learning how to do.
This kind of thing, there's far more important uses of your time, determining mergers and acquisitions and your direction for the company and that sort of thing, work on a system like this, and then provide this to your team and say, this is how we're going to power our content this year.
[00:20:38] Park Howell: Yeah, I mean, we've been doing our beta test all February, just wrapped it up last week.
I had Steve Smallman from F Uh, 15 for sorry, Steve Smallman, 15 for digital agency out on the east coast. And he said, this thing blew my mind. If I had access to it, it would have saved me three weeks of work working on one particular brand story strategy for a customer. He said, I could have probably done it in 30 minutes.
[00:21:09] Mike Allton: Yeah, and that's to say nothing of the brands who don't do this at all, who don't take those three weeks Or three hours even to think through this and instead they're just putting out Mediocre feature based content. They're not telling stories They're not infusing their brand story into their content, which means they're just leaving money on the table because they're not resonating with their target audiences the way that they could.
[00:21:35] Park Howell: Yeah. And Mike, I'd even say it's not their fault. They're so in the trenches and the fog of war that, you know, that look at, they've got a proven business model. They're making money. They're just simply not growing as fast as they could be because they do not have a clear, concise, and compelling brand story.
I want to get them to that growth as quickly as possible. Using our proven system in the genie that can do it literally in minutes as you're hearing right now. In fact, After your position statement, it then created your unique value proposition. Shall would you like to hear that?
[00:22:08] Mike Allton: Please? Yeah.
[00:22:09] Park Howell: All right, Mike's Uvp transforming technical complexity into business success through practical Innovation.
Now it's kind of a mouthful, but what it does is gives you that first one. And then you can go in the G and he said, I like it. Can you make it more conversational? It'll give you two examples. Okay. Can you make it sound like Steve jobs is saying it? It'll give you three examples say now. All right. You've just given me a dozen unique value propositions.
I want you to help me select one and give me the reason why you pick that one. Boom gives you one and then it'll say it because you told me this and this and you're showing up like this So you can iterate on it. All i'm reading here is the very first version It gave me about you and the way to think about this is turning that blank page And that blank stare into the beginning of brilliance.
It does 80 percent of that discovery and thought process to pull it together so that you can spend 100 percent of your time iterating and being creative with it and finding your own true voice. But what we've seen in our beta is when 90%. there and has given you new insights on how to talk about yourself.
That's the thing that really surprised me from the get go. Like this thing is really smart.
[00:23:38] Mike Allton: Long time, you know, listeners of this show and others know with the right amount of information and context and prompt ability, You could use chat GPT or Claude straight out of the box and start to get this kind of output, but you'd have to know so much you'd have to weave in so much direction.
This is what Park has already done for you folks. He's already done all that prompt engineering on the back end. So you don't have to craft the perfect four page prompt that tells the LLM what you want to accomplish. Give it all the guardrails. Tell it don't hallucinate. Don't go on the internet and find a bunch of stuff.
Is there anything else? That's part of your Story Cycle System that you haven't really already explained through reading this to us. What, what else is there to it?
[00:24:23] Park Howell: We're halfway through it. So this is how robust the content is. We've gone and taken, okay. How you're showing up in the world, where the rubber meets the road from your number one audiences, your.
position statement, your unique value proposition. Now we want to start leveling you up into the human realm. I'll say that's all well and good, but how can you show and demonstrate to the world, the impact that you make? And I'm a big believer, Mike, in that your brand stories are not about what you make.
Nobody cares about. Well, you, you, you know, your, your widget, they don't actually care about the genie in my genie bottle. They care about what it makes happen in their life. And the only way you can talk about those outcomes with any sort of real authority is to show it happening in the real world with real people.
So the next part of this, the, the Story cycle genie Journey is what I call the Ooh, And it comes right out of my process. Ooh, stands for O O O means Organization Offering an Outcome. What we used to do, and we would sit in a room and have to do this big brainstorming, but the genie does it for you now is Mike.
I would ask you, I need nine, one word. Think of them as kind of like character descriptors of your brand. I want three that talk about the organization. I want three that talk about the offering and I want three descriptors that talk about outcomes. When you get these nine, one word descriptors, they become story prompts or think of them as story themes that then I would ask you as the humanoid to go out in the real world And show me the impact you're having by telling me a true story.
So for instance, it said for your organization, you had the three, one word descriptors are authoritative. innovative and strategic. Do those three kind of describe the overall organizational brand?
[00:26:32] Mike Allton: I'd say those are fair descriptions.
[00:26:34] Park Howell: Fair enough. So then I would ask you, Mike, okay, you guys are authoritative.
That is pretty opaque. It doesn't mean much. I want you to show me Your authority in action. So take me to a time and place that someone showed up with a real problem, hired you all to help fix that problem. The outcome of that fix that demonstrates your authority in this particular subject matter.
[00:27:04] Mike Allton: Right, right.
And hopefully you'd have that already in a case study. Yeah. A success story, right, that you could easily turn to and show all those results documented. Love it.
[00:27:13] Park Howell: And then you do the same thing with offering. In this case, the next ones are practical, transformative and empowering. And if those are pretty accurate, and of course, you can ask the genie to say, I like practical, but I want a different word that may really be about this.
And it'll go and come up with two or three words, and it will then also define why they chose each word. So why the genie chose each word. So you can see the thinking behind the genie of what it's doing for you. And then the final ones for years were outcomes, clarity, growth, and confidence. Cool. So if clarity is one, Mike.
Show me a story that demonstrates you creating clarity for a customer because for your prospects, they are going to buy a true story. Well told long before they buy your features and functions and bullet points and anything else, they want to see it in action. And then they want to participate in that story for you to bring that same sort of clarity to them.
So. These become these nine one word descriptors. I have you go and look for a story for each one of the descriptors, which, by the way, then triggers more stories. And before you know it, you have 50 amazing little anecdotal stories that you can tell in under a minute that become your most Powerful form of content marketing.
There is true stories. Well told
[00:28:42] Mike Allton: Obviously couldn't agree more. Again, as a chief storyteller at Agorapulse, that is my job is to surface those stories. I'm interviewing customers every day, every week, uh, and, and turning those into success stories. We just revamped our entire success stories page because it's so important to have those at the fingertips, both the prospects and your sales team.
And I love this idea of. prompting yourself or other people in your company to think of specific stories that fit a scenario. Because as human beings, if I just say to you, Park, give me a story. Okay, well, you're all over the place, right? Who knows what kind of story you're gonna come up with. But if I say to you, give me a story that reflects how you provided clarity to one of your customers in your organization that's specific enough to prompt our brains.
to think of an actual story that'll fit that use case.
[00:29:32] Park Howell: And then we train on that. So we train on both the end, but therefore, where you can use that framework and all of your messaging. And then we train how to tell these stories using the five primal elements of a short story for big impact. They are timestamp that triggers the limbic brain to pay attention, location stamp that fires up the theater of the mind.
A single central character. And I tell people, you're not talking about a brand. You're not talking about an organization. You're talking about an individual in that brand or organization by proxy represents that organization. What do they want, but why did they currently have it? What was the major problem you were going to help them get through?
Therefore, how did you solve it? And there's always a little bit of a surprise moment in that solution. Never fails. So what is that surprise solution? Then your moral of the story is how you were there to help them. People, you build authority in telling those stories, right?
[00:30:27] Mike Allton: A hundred percent. Love
it.
[00:30:29] Park Howell: So that's the beginning.
Those, that's where you start really building your story library based on what the genie knows and then what you have fed the genie about your, uh, brand story. Then it leads into two really powerful words. And these are continuing to level up the humanity of your brand. First one is the emotional promise.
What do people emotionally feel when they work with you and your brand? And I mean, colleagues, when they show up every day to prospects, to customers, to the communities you serve. So in your case, after everything that Genie looked at, it said, your emotional promise is empowerment that they just feel.
Empowered and the confidence that comes with that. And the, the sort of leveling up the sort of superhero thing I can now do specifically with what you have taught me. So this is important because when you are telling your brand story and acting it, being a part of it and delivering on the promises you make with those stories.
That you got to feel that empowerment coming through. If you ever create any content that feels less than empowering, then think twice about posting it. Think three times about how you're going to rewrite it, or even ask the Genie saying, I love this story, but I'm missing the empowerment portion of it.
Can you help clarify this story for me? The Genie says, your wish is my command. There's your story. It's not hallucinating. It's not taking it from anything else, but your particular story as it relates to your competition and your industry.
[00:32:09] Mike Allton: Love that folks listening, you should know that that is spot on what I try to do with all of my content and all of my services, because like you said, at the outset part, my target audience is generally feeling overwhelmed and powerless when it comes to AI and AI integration.
So hopefully by me helping them, they're feeling now the opposite of that they're feeling empowered. And, you know, more in control of how they're able to implement AI. Love it.
[00:32:37] Park Howell: That's cool. Now we go from that emotional woo woo promise. What am I feeling into the physical gift? Meaning, can I actually attach an ROI to the physical outcome?
And we're always looking for one word to describe that. In this case, your physical gift, according to the Story Cycle Genie is clarity. So can people go from, God, I was totally confused. I was totally overwhelmed. I just don't get it too. Wow. I got, I, I, I totally get it now. Kind of like what Sean Schroeder did with me when he taught me about prompt engineering and how he was going to build this out.
I went from total confusion, neophyte into clarity saying, I get it now is, is that kind of accurate with what you delivered to your. customers.
[00:33:25] Mike Allton: Absolutely. And what I really love about this is the core psychological principles that you're hitting on here. You're allowing the different kinds of learners and thinkers that you might be talking to, to see the Why and the How and the What and understand, you know, some people might want that supportive feeling.
They might want to, you know, see that they're going to be empowered, whereas others might want, I want to know, and I want to make sure that I'm going to have clarification at the end or feel clarity. So I love that.
[00:33:57] Park Howell: Now, now we keep moving up, keep elevating the humanity of the brand. It doesn't matter if you're in business to business or business to consumer, people buy from people, not brands.
So we want the brand to manifest as a personality. And we ask the genie from everything you're seeing here, what are the core. personality archetypes that the brand represents. And it'll say, here's what it currently represents. And of course, you as a user can go in and go, ah, that one's not quite right.
Or I'd like another way to think about this. And so in your case, uh, Mike, it said you there's, there's three archetypes. There's the primary archetype. That is the strongest one. And then we always look for two secondary archetypes that help. inform and help bring more color to that primary archetype. It says your primary archetype is the Sage.
And then it goes on to explain why your content consistently focuses on shaping deep knowledge and expertise. You emphasize understanding and wisdom over quick fixes your AI Hat podcast center on education and insight. You help others make better decisions through increased understanding. Your communication style is thoughtful, analytical and wisdom focused.
You're driven by the desire to help others understand complex topics, and your content demonstrates a commitment to truth. And objectivity.
That is a hundred percent spot on.
Is that you?
[00:35:32] Mike Allton: Absolutely. Yeah. I mean, I wouldn't have ever used the word sage. I kind of like that. I like it, you know, but the descriptors around it is exactly how I have often thought about myself and done that for years.
Uh, you know, being, being a source of truth and wisdom and calm, uh, you know, being able to, you know, not go off on quick fixes or buy into hype. Yeah, absolutely. That's true.
[00:35:57] Park Howell: Well, I love that. And so that's your primary archetype. That's how your materials and you are showing up in the world. And then as these two secondary archetypes, and these are always fun because they color.
That's Sage. Uh, the first one is the guide. second one is the Creator. The Guide is you don't just share information, you show people how to implement it. Your content provides clear pathways and actionable steps. You help navigate people through complex techni techni technological Landscapes. Easy for me to say.
Your role at Agora Pulse demonstrates practical leadership. You focus on helping others achieve their goals. Your approach is supportive and mentoring. You create frameworks and systems that others can follow. You have a supporting archetype of the Guide.
[00:36:47] Mike Allton: I
would totally agree with that. Absolutely.
[00:36:51] Park Howell: So you've got the wisdom of the Sage and the authority of the Sage, the guy that's been out there and done this a lot, really understands the landscape.
And now you've got the Guide that you can take people under your wing and help navigate them through it. And then the third one, well, it's a secondary, it's equal to the guide is called the Creator. So You're just not all left brain guiding. You also have this right brain, emotional creator, uh, creator, because you consistently develop new content across multiple platforms.
You innovate in how you present and package information. You help others build and create their own success. You demonstrate mastery and content creation and platform building. You're always exploring new technologies and ways of doing things. You encourage innovation and creative problem solving and your work shows a pattern of building and developing new approaches.
[00:37:46] Mike Allton: That is absolutely true. I mean, three years ago I wasn't doing podcasting. I wasn't doing YouTube videos. Uh, been a consistent blogger for over a decade, but yeah, I. Long time recognize that you got to be able to move to different platforms and try new technologies and content delivery platforms.
[00:38:03] Park Howell: So, so
people say, okay, Park, that's great.
But what do I do with this? Well, it informs the personality of your brand, the look and feel of your website, the user experience on your website, your content creation. So you might take this and say, well, Creator is a very powerful secondary archetype. Let me go look at one of my landing pages. And if it's not very creative, if it's not suggesting this creator mentality, then it's like, maybe I need to go in and punch that up.
And what you do with the genie then, as you copy and paste your website, your landing page into the genie and say, make this sound more like the creator. With an emphasis of the sage, boom, it will then pull from your story and give you that first draft for that landing page that you can then go in and put a hundred percent of your time into tweaking, create, you know, uh, being creative with how you talk about it.
What I did with mine with the, I put the story cycle genie through the story cycle genie and it came up with the sage as well because of all of the work that I've done with. Storytelling and that sort of thing. And I said, I like sage, but I would like something more relatable to the storytelling world without losing the sage emphasis.
And it came back with mystic and I liked it because it says you are tapping the ancient and Power, mystical power storytelling for use in modern day applicable, applicable brand story creation. So I just took the sage and I put a little bit of a tweak on it and I go, yes, um, and this is going to be important too, because when it starts creating content for you, it's going to, in your case, speak from the sage point of view.
With that guide and that creator tone of voice in there. Once it gives you that content, you may well say, okay, that's pretty good, but now I would like you to put it a little bit more in my voice, or I want a little bit more of the guide voice in this particular one. Okay, cool. Boom. Eric gives it to you, then you as a human go in and do your tweaking and voila, like magic.
You've got your content in minutes, not hours, days, months.
[00:40:21] Mike Allton: Absolutely. I cannot wait to, you know, run through some of my landing pages and, uh, kind of lean into some of these roles. Folks were talking with Park Howell about how AI. Specifically, his system is helping us really understand ourselves and our brand, and then communicate that better.
And I've got several more questions that you're not going to want to miss, but first a quick word from our sponsor.
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So Park, before we move on, is there anything else that you wanted to cover, uh, in that report or in that framework?
[00:41:49] Park Howell: Three last things. Number one, brand purpose statement. So why do you exist beyond making money? And this is again, hugely important because it speaks to the emotion and the emotional storytelling of your brand.
In your case, the genie says, Mike Allton exists to help people harness technology innovation to achieve Sustainable business growth.
[00:42:15] Mike Allton: That is so true. My entire reason for starting the podcast and eventually the AI hat was specifically to help colleagues of ours, friends, folks like Jay Baer and other folks that we know who hadn't to that point been doing anything with AI.
And I saw a very existential crisis coming from marketers and wanted to help all of us figure it out.
[00:42:37] Park Howell: Yeah. So that's perfect. And so then the next, the final deliverable on it, and I won't read through this one. It's 150 word brand narrative and says, okay, from everything you've told me, here is the brand narrative that now becomes a foundation for you to work with, to tweak and do whatever, and you can go through.
And what I like to do is with the genie, I said. Love it. Now give me a 100 word version of it. Love it. Now give me a 50 word version of it. Love it. Um, then anything else you can do with the genie, you can say, okay, now I want to go back to my number one audience. I want you to apply the story cycle system based on this foundation that we've created here.
And we've tweaked, we've iterated on to my number one audience. It will spell that out. It will then give you. landing pages for them, depending on what your particular offer is. And it will literally create any content you can think of. Uh, not vision, uh, visuals yet that'll come, but now all the written content you need, Facebook posts, LinkedIn campaigns, ads, video scripts, sales presentations.
You can even use it on your competition to go and say, how is my competition showing up? What's their story? You feed it their website. And voila, you get everything that you can see how you are positioned against them. You could even tell the genie pick out their three things that I want to really position myself against.
Boom. It'll give that to you. But the thing is, and I heard this the other day, I love the line of, you know, when you're in the bottle and we're all in the bottle of our business, you can't see the label on the outside. Well, this is what the genie does. It helps you let your brand genius out of the bottle by showing you exactly how you are showing up in the world for everyone else to see, and then enabling you to go in and make the refinements to that story to have you frame name and claim a market category that.
No one else can compete with you in because you're doing such a great job of telling your brand story.
[00:44:44] Mike Allton: Love it. Yeah. That's a little more relatable than can't see the forest of the trees. Was there, was there a third and final one or was that it?
[00:44:50] Park Howell: No, I think the third thing that I was trying to get across is you could use it for all of your content creation.
It's not going to hallucinate on you. It's not going to get general on you because it's building your content specifically from your story. Based off your competition within your industry.
[00:45:07] Mike Allton: Well, that's a, that's a great segue to my next question, because I'm, I'm wondering how you see this kind of AI driven storytelling and content marketing in particular, do you see it overtaking traditional branding and marketing, or do you see kind of a blending of the two and how do you see them working together?
[00:45:22] Park Howell: Yeah, I saw a note and I wish I could remember the author. It was shared to me by Sean about a guy saying that, you know, the top 10 things if you're building an AI agent like the genie that you've got to consider. And he says, you know, the most powerful ones are going to take out 80 percent of the repetitive tasks and give you then that room to go and bring your human humanity to it and your creativity to it.
So what I see it replacing is the old Traditional form of branding, discovery, branding, research, brainstorming, competitive analysis, and that sort of thing that literally, as we talked about earlier, take weeks, if not months, cost you tens of thousands of dollars that you can now do. in minutes and you don't need a big expensive branding agency at this point to, to do that for you.
You can do it for yourself, work with your team, be able to really refine that brand story. And then maybe you might need to bring that agency in to help activate it, maybe to help now creating the visuals and build out your website and some things like that. But you don't have to wait. For months to make that happen.
You can literally start doing it that same day. So I think that's where the disruption is, is taking out all that time consuming the stuff that literally is a brander. I stopped liking doing, I stopped enjoying. All the tedium of the discovery and the research and the competitive analysis. And now it just hands it to me.
And now I can bring my fun part, my creative into creating and refining that brand story. So it becomes killer out there versus killing me. To create it in the process
[00:47:13] Mike Allton: For all of the business leaders and market professionals listening. This should sound like a godsend for the agencies who might be listening.
I'm sorry, but this should be a wake up call. I was listening to Paul Reitzer on our official intelligence show just this morning, talking about how. much agencies are going to be disrupted due to AI. And it's not that you can't get through this AI revolution, but you are going to have to change and adjust the things that you're doing on behalf of your clients.
Use Park system to do a lot of this brand narrative creation and then work with your clients on strategy and implementation. Those are the things you should be focusing on. For the other marketers and business leaders who are listening. My last question for you, Park, could you just share one or two simple steps that could help them immediately begin improving their brand stories, even before they get into using an AI tool like yours?
[00:48:07] Park Howell: Yeah. The first thing is what is the one problem you solve for now? I know what you're saying to yourself, but Park, we solve lots of problems for lots of different people and I would argue, no, you don't. I mean, you do, but that's not helping you in focusing your brand story. What's the one thing you do?
What's that one thread That you can create now an and but therefore a problem statement on and michael give them a real quick education on the abt Here's how it works Name your number one audience. Remember that number one audience persona probably represents 80 percent of your business. It's the whole Pareto principle.
Who's that number one audience? What do they want relative to your offering? And why is that important to them? That's your statement of agreement. But what emotion are they experiencing right now? Because of what problem you are going to solve for them. Therefore, how can they picture what tomorrow's going to look like when it is solved, when they do such and such with you, those are the steps of the And But therefore the very first thing I would have you do is write an ABT statement for your brand and see if you can identify the one singular problem you helped solve for them. And then you can add more problems to that. But each problem gets its own ABT statement. So that's the thing. That's the number one thing they can do right now is get crystal clear.
And that singular problem solution narrative that their brand does, you know, solves for their customer.
[00:49:50] Mike Allton: Love it. Park. I honestly feel like this has been one of our most powerful episodes ever. And interestingly, it's because we've showed people AI, but more importantly, there were fundamental problems that we have shown.
Need to be and can be solved. Uh, so I absolutely love this part. You've been amazing for folks who want to reach out and know more, where should they go to connect with you?
[00:50:13] Park Howell: Well, here's the thing. So we're going to be launching the genie here in about three weeks to the world. We're through all of our beta testing.
If you want to learn more about it, go to business of story. com forward slash story cycle. Dash genie. So all one word story cycle dash genie. Um, you can learn more about it there and you can actually register for the launch and the bonuses. And here's one of the big bonuses, Mike, we're giving anyone who registers.
Now I am going to send you my abts of storytelling micro training course for free. It's 125 registration. You get it for nothing. for just signing up for the launch of our genie and whether you actually do the genie or not, you will at least get the benefit of understanding how to use the ABT in all of your messaging.
And I like to throw it out there because the ABT plays such a hit, a big role in the story cycle genie and the crafting of your overall brand story. So that's the best place to, uh, to, to find me as business of story. com. Of course, I'm in LinkedIn. Park Howell, pretty easy handle to find. Um, and of course, you know, I hope you'll come over and listen to my show that Mike, you're going to be on here shortly too.
I can't wait for it. And that is the business of story. Uh, been a podcast I've been producing for going on nine years now. Actually, Jay Bear helped me launch it way back in the day in 2015, uh, 2016. And, uh, anyways, that's how you can track me down.
[00:51:49] Mike Allton: Fantastic. Thank you, Park. Of course, we'll have all those links in the show notes below, but remember it, this is your first foray into the world of AI business.
I've got a perfect resource for you in the show notes below that AI primer designed to get you quickly up to speed on the terms, the tactics, and the underlying technology that's powering this AI revolution. Check it out and I'll see you in our next episode. Welcome to the Grid.
That's a wrap on another episode of the AI Hat Podcast. I hope you gained some valuable insights and actionable strategies to boost your business with AI. If you enjoyed this show, please subscribe, leave a review, and share it with your network. And don't forget to visit theaihat. com for more resources and to connect with me.
Until next time, keep innovating and remember the future of business is human and it's powered by AI.
