The Five Basic Brand Plots | Using Booker’s Seven Basic Plots for Brand Storytelling
Back in NC, in my previous life, I found myself in the throes of startup culture surrounded by Steve Jobs cultists, design thinkers, and lovers of lean. And that’s where my crazy dream was born:
What if there were templates out there to help me make these brand films faster?
Shortly after that desire was seeded, I found them (all five, in fact) tucked away inside of the depths of a book so massive, you can use it as a step stool: Christopher Booker’s The Seven Basic Plots.
In this episode, I’ll take you through my own journey to discovering this incredible resource, the two plots you can ignore, and go over the five plots that I use to shape my brand stories.
You’ll Learn:
An overview of Christopher Booker’s The Seven Basic Plots
Brief primer on the Toyota Production System
The five brand plots and their global beats
Examples of how specific industries favor certain plot types
Key Terms:
Rags to Riches - A hero of lowly origin and means is living a dreary, oppressed life. They enter initial success that gives them a way out of their oppression, but it’s fleeting. This false success is shattered and they end up back where they started, but now worse off since they had a taste of freedom. With the help of a fairy godmother or benefactor, they discover a power within themselves and end up ruling their kingdom.
Rebirth - A hero is tempted by a dark power. Initially it is intoxicating and a source of strength. But it eventually consumes them and enslaves them. The hero falls into a dark spiral, becoming a danger to others and themselves. Eventually a healer or lover appears, drawing out their good nature, and freeing them from their inner prison.
Overcoming the Monster - All is peaceful and happy, but stories of a dark threat arrive. The hero begins to prepare while the threat is still far off. They encounter minions which are easily defeated and are over-confident with their preparations. Then the monster arrives and it’s more terrible and powerful than they could have possibly imagined. The hero is shocked by their defeat. But armed with better information, they regroup, resupply, and defeat the monster in a thrilling final battle.
The Quest - A hero bored with the mundane dreams of adventure, and to their chagrin, adventure finds them. A gatekeeper, often their mentor, sets them on a perilous task to obtain a magical trinket. But this journey isn’t something they can do alone, and they build a team of various specialties to help them. The team encounters a series of trials that test their might. They arrive at their destination, only to find that they must accomplish yet another insane task. They arrive at the final challenge, which can only be completed by the hero, and make their thrilling escape. They are then rewarded with the treasure/kingdom/girl/etc.
Voyage and Return - A hero, bored with life, daydreaming for adventure stumbles through a portal and ends up in another world. Initially this world is fascinating. The walls are made of candy, the animals are adorable, and the scenery is mesmerizing. But soon the magic becomes a nightmare and turns on our hero. They must rely on a Good Samaritan to help them escape. At the moment when the full might of the world is unleashed on them, they make their thrilling escape, back to their home, where they hug their family and stop taking things for granted.
If you’d like to purchase The 7 Basic Plots, would mean a lot to use this affiliate link.
Episode Transcript
Hey, brand storyteller. So I just have a little. It was asked whether it's a confession. I got a bit of confession to make and just recorded recorded this entire episode only to realize that I did not record the entire episode. So this take to like this take two. There goes an hour. Oh, man. All right. So in this episode, I want to talk about the five basic brand plots.
Essentially, what we're going to be looking at is a book that has made the a significant impact on my professional career and kind of just it changed the entire trajectory of my career. And this is Booker's seven basic plots. Essentially what this book is, is if you are familiar with Joseph Campbell's monomyth, okay, like the the monomyth is the the story beneath all stories, the hero's journey.
What's really funny is everybody acts like they know the hero's journey, but not a single one of us can recite all 12 phases of the hero's journey. So there's a big bit of an ordeal. All right. Luckily, as Booker mapped out these plots, he limits them to anywhere from 3 to 5 different stages. The theory of the Hero's Journey is that the all story is all great.
Myths from humanity across cultures actually follow the same structure that there's a same structure beneath all of them. And then what Booker kind of does and he doesn't directly explain this, doesn't directly hit it on the nose. But you can tell that this what he's doing is he kind of looks at the hero's journey and then he starts realizing that actually there's about seven different flavors of this story, that that story the intent of that story is for it to be broad.
It's a giant basket in which all stories exist within. But kind of when you let those stories sit, you start noticing that they tend to grouped together in in these little bundles. And that's kind of what he's looking at here. He's looking at those bundles in which these stories grouped together the different flavors, the different expressions of the hero's journey.
And he identifies seven different expressions. He actually identifies nine, but he focuses more most specifically on seven. Those seven that he focuses on are rags to riches, rebirth, overcoming the Monster, The Quest Voyage and Return, Tragedy and comedy. Couple of years back when I was living in North Carolina, I was working at a company named Story Driven. My role in that company was Story Mentor.
Essentially, I was in charge of creating our storytelling process and then onboarding our employees on to that storytelling process. It's like it was just a made up term that we made. I was basically acting as like kind of like ops and creative director all in one. At the time, we were working at a startup co-working space. We were kind of like an ugly duckling inside of the startup space.
We were truly a small business, but surrounded by other startups, so we had convinced ourselves that we were a startup. But anyways, there is a big benefit to that because I learned some really lasting lessons that still continue with me as I continue to build my own business and love them was my love for creating processes because people in startup culture like they love oh my gosh, they love processes.
I remember I was walking through the halls and I was walking behind two guys, and when the guy looks a guy and he goes, he's super excited. He's like, So now we have a process for creating a process. And so that's the level of process love that is inside of the startup world. Everyone's focus on efficiency. If you if you had like I had no clue about the Toyota production system before entering that world.
After entering that world, I was a total fan of the Toyota production system really quickly. Toyota production system is kind of like what created the idea of Japanese of Japanese production and Japanese manufacturing. So lean process, if you've ever heard about lean, it's this understanding like of conventional American mass manufacturing has as historically been built on the idea of, Hey, we have this product now, how do we make this product at scale and cheaper, right?
How do we cut? And it's all about cutting costs. And and as you're doing that and you're trying to make this more and more make more of this thing, the overall quality of that thing starts to degrade. Okay. Japanese manufacturing was kind of different. Basically what they do is they create this product. It's like we've got this really great product.
How do we make this product this good every time? And how do we design a process as efficient as possible so we can make this thing at scale? Okay. So the goal isn't to cut costs and reduce quality so we can make it at scale. The goal is to let's make this thing as good as it's original and now it's design an efficient system.
So that way we can make this thing faster. Okay. And so I remember at at the time I was we worked two doors down from this company called Nugget. They're still around. They're totally awesome. You can check them out. Nugget, comfort icon. Essentially, they made a custom couch and we had watched them since their since their Kickstarter day where they they spent all this time making this custom couch and then and then they targeted it at at kids.
Right. So young kids and and essentially it's just like you can use it as a couch to lounge around and you can also turn this couch into a sports really cool product. So they had made this this custom made product. And, and one day they gave me a tour of their warehouse and they had designed like custom designed the their warehouse and laid it out and and custom built templates.
So that way they could make this thing as efficiently as possible, but make it the same exact way every single time. It was fascinating. It's like that scene in The Founder where Ray Kroc is talking to the McDonald's brothers and McDonald's brothers are explained to him how they redesigned the flow of the kitchen and practiced it on the tennis court to get it just right.
If you've never seen that film, I highly recommend it. Super awesome. And that scene alone is worth watching the entire film. So. So I kind of like was looking at this and it just changed my mind about what I understood about mass manufacturing. And, and it changed my mind because I came at this from the artist perspective, an artists we hate processes and templates, right?
That just means it's not creative. You give us a blank canvas and we'll start from there. But this changed everything. And I was looking at this. I'm like, Man, if you can build your own custom templates to create a custom product over and over again, why can't we just do that with a story? Right? And so I just got fascinated, obsessed with this, like we need to be able to do this so that way we can make these stories faster and get them out the door to our clients faster.
I remember at the time our assistant editor in Derby had just finished a film and he called me over to look at it. And so at this point I'm going to help him pull the edit together. We're going to find the story. And then once we found the story, his next step would to be, let's tighten up, tighten up the edit to match that structure and then go find the songs.
So I sit down, I watch it. Now, this story was a documentary of a a guy who put a basically put a a clinic together. All right. You'll hear his story as I explain it to you. So I watched the video within Derby and I sit back, I'm like, okay, here's what the story is. This guy starts off in this poor village in Ecuador.
And and clearly he's not happy. He's depressed. Right. And then but then he gets the ability to go off to Cuba, to study, to be a doctor. So we're going to have an uplift there. And now he's stoked because he's thrilled. He's thinking of it's almost like sugar plums and rainbows and butterflies are in his mind because he's got these dreams of being rich, getting out of poverty like heck, yes, I've got the ticket to get out of here.
I'm going to go be a doctor. I'm going to make a bunch of money. So he goes off, he becomes a doctor. And right as he gets out of medical school, his brother gets shot and he has to go back to his village. So there's a there's a hard cut right there. And now we're sad, real sad, because now he's at his brother's deathbed and at his brother's deathbed, his brother tells him that he's got a vision from God that he is supposed to go build like use his his medical knowledge to build a clinic inside of his village so he can serve to serve his community and his brother dies.
And now he's this this guy is just frustrated and wrestling with this because he wants to honor his brother. But that means giving up his dream. But then finally comes to a sense of I think this is actually what I'm supposed to do. And so he builds the clinic, and now he's running this this clinic in his village, and he's found this sense of fulfillment that was way deeper than he could have ever imagined.
And he's actually helping people. And so I map that out, like, so you've got this this initial rise, kind of like this party. Maybe we were thinking of the party song, kind of like a tropical theme, hard cut off that. Then there's a a sad song, but it's almost like a slow rise build to the end. Maybe a cinematic song will work.
Great, great there. And and so I tell and derby. So tighten that thing up. Find those three songs. You should be good. It's like, okay, all right. So now I've got a little bit of time to kill while that's. Well, that's happening. And, and I look over at the bookshelf and I see this book sitting on our shelf, and I have never cracked this book open before because, well, for one, it's three inches thick, literally.
It's a massive, massive book. And so it's very intimidating. But I'm like, well, I got some time now because it's going to take a derby, maybe an hour to do this. Let me just crack it open and see what's going on here. So I open up the book and the first thing I open to is rags to riches.
And this is the framework of the rags to riches story. The hero from lowly means is finds themselves in an oppressive environment. There are the either being oppressed by by the environment itself. So they find themselves in poverty or they're a prisoner or they're oppressed by other people. But they have that that are inside of this oppressed environment.
And then they move into the dream stage where they're able to escape. But the escape is short lived. It's almost like a false sense of success that they feel and they get. So it takes them out of their impressive environment, but it's almost like a false success and that is very short lived and eventually crashes down and the rug gets pulled out from under them and they end up worse off than they were before they started, because now they've had a taste of what life was better, but now they end up back where they were.
So they've been robbed of their escape. But then slowly over time, they're able to find a power within themselves. And then they they grow, they mature, they change, and then they end up ruling and reigning in their kingdom. They look at this and I'm like, Holy crap, that's the story I literally just told in Derby to edit like Beat for Beat.
It is exactly what just came out of my mouth. And I'm shocked. I'm shocked because well, granted, this is Cinderella, right? That's the Cinderella story. Is that that framework? There's tons of other stories that follow this framework, like Oliver Twist, you know, like all these things where people are like or any sort of sports story, like The Mighty Ducks.
Okay? Like, that's that story, right? Just like, holy crap, this was someone's life. Here I am thinking I'm clever. You understand this? Like I'm thinking I'm clever here and smart because I just figured out the structure of the story and told. Told the assistant editor what it was. Right. But yet here's this book. Been sitting on my shelf this whole time.
Actually had the answer. The entire time in this book. And not only is it just for fiction stories, this is a person's life. This is their life journey that they're telling us. It's how they structured the beats of their own personal narrative, and it's how we lodge it was the logical answer for how we should structure that story in the edit.
And so it changed it for me because I suddenly realized like, Oh my God, stories are everything. They're literally the foundation upon which we build meaning and we define ourselves. And not only that, but we use these specific structures to define ourselves, like these things are already there. We just like put ourselves inside of that story. And then the next thing I realize is, well, dang, imagine how much better this story would have been if we'd had known these plots ahead of time.
Like Nathan, who filmed the story. What if he knew the rags to riches plot archetype before he ever went down there? If he could have already understood, Oh, these are the beats of the rags to riches. Then immediately upon hearing this guy's story, he would have known within that moment, this is a rags to riches story. He would have known exactly what question to ask because he would know what beats and where that story is going without even needing that person to tell him the whole story first.
Right. Game Change. Immediately I had found the templates and so I started just diving into this book and studying this book. Let me just kind of give you a brief overview of these different plots and how I started applying them to marketing. So like I said, the title of this book is The Seven Basic Plots. The different plots that he goes over are comedy, tragedy, rags to riches, rebirth, overcoming the monster, the quest and voyage and return.
After I studied these and kind of initially looked back at prior videos that we kept telling over and over again, I started seeing these structures in those videos that they were just naturally there. There were two structures that I didn't find, okay, those two structures are comedy and tragedy. Now, the reason for that is because comedy is Booker's definition of comedy isn't like the these sort of like what we would think as a funny comedy, right?
Where you've got the this individual character who gets placed there, a silly character gets placed in a crazy situation. And and they as they kind of like bounce their way through that situation, it makes us giggle, right? That's not what comedy is for him. Comedy for him is kind of like the Greek comedy and where you've got like a group of people that collectively fall into chaos and it just can continuously becomes more and more chaotic.
The closest story that within our culture that I can relate to that definition of comedy would be Meet the parents. Okay. And and that that type of a story is, is not nearly common within our culture. It's a bit foreign. It's because it's a bit foreign. We don't more we don't readily model our own narrative off of that.
Right. And so you don't see that very often at all. And therefore businesses don't ever use it. There's never an opportunity when I've encountered a story and I've not understood what the story was, and then I've realized, oh, you know, we were we're doing a comedy here. It's also because of the chaotic stuff. And if you're talking about the chaotic stuff, companies don't want to communicate the sense that they are in chaos.
They want to communicate a sense of strength. All right. And then the other one is tragedy. And that should be completely obvious. We don't tell tragic stories in business. Okay. Like a tragic business story is blockbuster. All right. Like there's a reason why that story is tragic. It's because they're not around anymore. All right, so so, like, no business is brand.
Story is tragedy. And so what I really realize is of those seven, five, five of those are actively used in brand storytelling, those five being rags to riches, rebirth, overcoming the monster, the quest and voyage and return. Let me just kind of give you a brief overview of each of those archetypes. I've already gone over rags to riches, so I'm not going to rehash that.
So let's look at the rest. So let's look at rebirth. Rebirth and rags to riches are kind of similar. They kind of had that same sort of sort of flow of they're being pulled from misery into light. Okay, but rebirth is instead of there being an external force that is attacking your character, the character is the is the antagonist.
Like the protagonist is they're the hero and the villain in the same story. Jekyll and Hyde. Okay. So, so that's that's kind of the situation you're looking at. So with the rebirth, rebirth, you've got this this person, but a but a growing dark power comes over them. It's either a temptation or a poison that gets inside of them.
Now, initially, they get they gain power from this. Right. It feels fun. It's thrilling. Okay. And and they they start to become more and more tempted and more and more drawn to it. But eventually this power turns on them and enslaves them and traps them, and they become imprisoned within themselves and and are going to end kind of like they lose themselves.
And this thing takes completely over and they begin to hurt the people that are close to them. And then eventually someone comes a sort of like rescuer or some sort of healer type of person comes in, is able to to help them shed off that evil and then bring them out and restore them to themselves. That's rebirth. Overcoming the monster.
This is like Jaws. And he's sort of like slasher horror film, right? There's this really cool like Dragon film with Christian Bale and Matthew McConaughey. Kind of forget what the name of the movie is, but it's very underrated, so you should totally check it out. But but essentially overcoming the monster is there is a there's a peaceful town, right?
And everything seems to be going okay. But you start to hear of a growing dark, dark power off in the distance. And so they begin to prepare to battle this this power. And they might they might fight some minions here and there, but they're easily defeated. And so they're gaining confidence about their plan. But eventually, the monster shows up and they fight this monster and this thing dominates them.
And they are completely just shocked and humbled and now frightened because they realize that they're completely outmatched and this thing is way more terrifying than they anticipated. So they have to now regroup, rebuild, retrain. They fight the monster again. And they have the they have the thrilling victory. And then they save the princess and rescue the town. And whatever that's overcoming the monster, then you've got the quest and voyage and return the quest of noise.
You return a kind of like cousins. They're kind of like sister stories where one is more actively driven by the protagonist and the other one is is driven by circumstance. Okay. A good way to think of the quest and the voyage and return relationship is thinking of the Iliad versus the Odyssey. Okay. The Iliad is more of a focused quest.
We're on a mission to go fight a war. The Odyssey is I'm just trying to get back home, and I keep getting thrown into this chaotic, like adventure, and I just want to get home. Okay. So the quest itself is basically like the monomyth. Like, that's what the quest is. You have a a hero, a humble hero out of this peaceful place.
But he's thirsting for adventure. And adventure finally finds him. And often it's it's something that he's going to get some sort of, like, knowledge or or magical trinket or something. He's he's on a journey to go get. But in order to get this thing, he needs to he needs a group of people around him to help him on this journey.
And then along the journey, they need a guide. And that this guide, like helps, helps to teach him something new about himself and maybe gives him some some magical powers or whatever. And then they go off and they fight this villain who's guarding this thing that they need. They defeat the villain, they get the thing, and now they're the hero, right?
So that's the quest voyage and return. It's kind of like the quest inverted in a sense, where you've got this hero that falls into this foreign land and the whole story is they're trying to get out of this place. Now, initially, they're not trying to get it out. Initially, it's actually fun and it's magical. Think Wizard of Oz.
It's a great voyage and return story. Also, Alice in Wonderland, another great voyage and return story. Right? Like initially, it's fascinating and it's magic. And they're trying to figure out this new world and how it works. But then the world turns on them, right? And now they need to get that get out of here. And so they're able to now they have to learn new skills, defeat the defeat the thing that the gatekeeper that blocks them from getting out.
Then they have the thrilling escape and they get back home. And what I've noticed is that within specific industries, the specific industries themselves tend to favor specific plot types. For the majority, there's a single plot type that defines that industry, but then sometimes you'll notice that that it might be too plot types that tended to find that industry at the maximum you'll find three, but it's very rare that you'll find any.
You'll find a single like industry telling all five. Okay. Oftentimes it's just like they they tend to favor their their stories. So for instance, health care loves rebirth. Like the rebirth story is your your your general health care story, especially mental health. All right. So, like, so for for for the the suicide story that I did that won the Emmy, where you've got the three suicide, two suicide survivors telling their story.
That story follows a rebirth plot. And what's interesting is you're lining up like how how I edited that. I lined up each of their journeys in parallel to each other because they all follow those same beats. Right. So that that story itself is going almost like kind of like a case study to to show this this pattern in other people's journeys.
We see their journeys as unique, and they are unique because they are personal and they happen to them. Yet they still follow the same pattern because we organize them in this same way. And so that rebirth story is like this dark power comes over them. They begin to hate themselves, they begin to hate their situation. They want to kill themselves to get out.
And then they become completely, completely taken over by this where they actually attempt to take their life. Luckily, it fails. And then the counselor comes in and and draws and is able to help them escape from that internal prison and draws them out to the light. And now they're much better in and healed person. Okay, that's the rebirth story.
This also works in addiction recovery, right? So like the addict starts out in whatever substance they're addicted to. Initially, it's fun and it's amazing. But then the it turns on them, they become a slave to it. And now they they become a shell of their former self and they hurt the people who are near them. And then eventually they find help.
The person who helps them, helps them to shed that skin, pulls them out into light. Now they're a better and healed person. That's your rebirth journey. Now, the rebirth story can also be a physical thing, doesn't necessarily have to be a psychological oppression. So if your body itself starts to reject you, right? So if there's a rapid onset of an auto immune disease or maybe you're you get cancer, okay?
That journey is also follows a rebirth journey as well. So that's why health care loves says another thing in health care could be could be a voyage and return story especially if you're talking about a diagnostic odyssey. Right, where the patient can't get the proper diagnosis for what's afflicting them, but they know that something is wrong and they have to go to specialist a specialist, a specialist, a specialist to finally find somebody who can help them find the the proper diagnosed diagnosis.
All right. So that's where the person's in a confused world can't get out. Finally find somebody who has the answer, who can get them that key, that can bring them out of that situation. Start up story. So start up origin stories. Most always follow the quest archetype because you have a a person who has a vision that goes out to try to accomplish that vision needs to build a team around them to do it right.
And they're going to go change the world. And that's what they're always trying to do. They're always trying to change the world, right? So like startups for Origin Stories, they love the Quest archetype. Advocacy groups are they are always overcoming the monster, right? So and then so if you look at Patagonia specifically, while they're not an advocacy group, what they're doing is that sort of like level four branding where they're doing philanthropic marketing with their stuff.
So if you look at the stories that they tell, they Patagonia tends to tell two different plot archetypes, those two different plot archetypes are overcoming the monster and quest. So the quest is usually the their sports focused archetype, where they're following the athlete and the athlete is like, maybe they're climbing a mountain with a group of friends or they're, they're going to run some race or something.
Like that's their Quest archetype, but they also tell their overcoming the monster archetypes. And those are when they do damnation, artificial, like those types of mission based stories are following the overcoming the monster archetype. And then for Voyage and Return, you'll find that a lot in say like therapy coaching. Some sort of like consulting or guidance often are in some sort of voyage and return because you're trying to advise somebody who is overwhelmed, confused inside of a place where they feel like everything's upside down, can't make sense of it.
That's often the way that you find a voyage in return story. Hope this was helpful. Like I said, go get this book. Probably have a link to this book in the in the show notes we are Amazon affiliates so if you do really want to buy this book, definitely buy it through my link because that would really help out.
I would appreciate it if not just get the book. It's awesome. Like I don't care how you buy the book, just get this book. If your whole job is dependent on being a brand storyteller, telling stories, trying to communicate your brand, you need this. And then the benefit I know it's intimidating. Trust me, I didn't read it for at least a year because.
Because it just looked. It's three inches thick, right? It's not really inviting you to open it. I do have the thing to share, though. All the first the vital information is within the first hundred or so pages of the book. The rest of the book, I kind of haven't even read the whole thing all the way through, right?
Like Booker kind of did us a favor by putting the important information right at the front. So you kind of notice that like, these pages are really dirty, these pages still clean. So just saying that it's not going to take you a year to read this thing. You just got to crack it open. Read the first the first couple of chapters because those are the ones that focus on those plot archetypes.
And then really you only need to read about five of them because those are the only ones that you're ever going to use within a marketing context. I hope this was helpful. If you guys have any questions. As always, you can reach me at Storyteller Giant on Instagram or Twitter. Just send me a DM, be happy to talk or you can send a message directly on my website: McNab Storytelling.com. I'll see you in the next one. Take care.