And What Fits Better
The short version: Every brand story framework you’ve ever downloaded is built on the Hero’s Journey – a narrative structure that centres individual triumph, ignores community, and promises a clean ending that real transformation never delivers. If your work is relational, values-led, or community-centred, here’s why that matters, and what the Heroine’s Journey offers instead.
I have a confession to make.
I have never been a fan of Storybrand.
I know, I know, it’s everywhere. Everyone swears by it. There are certified guides and workshops, and a whole ecosystem of people who will tell you it changed their business. And look – I read the book, I did my research, I took the Hero’s Journey underpinning seriously and spent time with it properly before I made up my mind.
And then I put it in a box marked “we can do better” and got on with my life.
It was just too easy, too reductive, and I didn’t buy the promise that you could fit any business, any offer, any kind of transformation into a single seven-part framework. Some of the most meaningful work I know (the relational work, the community-led work, the work that takes years and doesn’t come with a tidy before/after), simply does not compress into that structure. And when you try to force it, you end up with messaging that technically ticks the boxes but disappears into the same vague stuff everyone else is saying.
What frustrated me more was that I couldn’t find an alternative that I could actually explain to someone.
I knew what great brand storytelling required – I’d been doing it for clients for years. Writing and strategising messaging that increased conversions, built customer loyalty, grew brand visibility, and gave founders the confidence to actually show up and create content without second-guessing every word. The results were real, the methodology was solid. But when someone asked me, “So what framework do you use instead of Storybrand?”, I didn’t really know what to tell them.
I was waiting, I think, for someone to build the thing I was looking for. A Storybrand alternative for people who cared about people, and nuance, and the complicated reality of how change happens in real life.
And then I found a book called “The Heroine’s Journey” by Gail Carriger. And then I fell down a rabbit hole so deep my family briefly wondered if I’d ever come back up. (This is the same brain that once spent thirty minutes in the Iron Age exhibit at the Dublin Museum and spent the next three months exclusively reading about ancient Irish history. So, you know – completely proportionate response.)
The rabbit hole in question was story structure. Specifically, the question of why so many of my values-led, community-centred clients felt vaguely uncomfortable when they tried to apply standard brand story frameworks to their work. Why the process felt reductive in a way they couldn’t put their finger on.
What I found changed how I think about brand messaging entirely.
And it starts with understanding who, exactly, helped you write your brand story.
What is the Hero’s Journey, and why is it everywhere in marketing?
The Hero’s Journey is a narrative structure identified by mythologist Joseph Campbell in 1949, first adapted for Hollywood by Christopher Vogler, and turned into a brand messaging framework by Donald Miller in his Storybrand methodology. At its core: a character has a problem, meets a guide, gets a plan, takes action, and either succeeds or fails.
That’s it. That’s the whole architecture that most of your marketing has been built on.
Campbell’s original research identified a pattern of storytelling that appeared across mythology, religion, and folk tales from completely different cultures. He called it the monomyth: the idea that all great stories follow the same fundamental arc. A hero leaves their ordinary world, crosses a threshold into the unknown, faces a series of trials, reaches a moment of crisis, and returns transformed.
Vogler condensed Campbell’s seventeen stages into twelve when he was working at Disney in the 1980s, applying the structure to film narrative. Miller then applied Vogler’s framework to marketing, making brands the “guide” in the story and positioning customers as the hero on a quest.
The result is a framework so embedded in how we talk about business that most people don’t even notice it’s there. Every time someone tells you to “identify your customer’s pain point,” every “before and after” transformation story, every email sequence that builds to a dramatic call to action – these are all Hero’s Journey mechanics, applied to marketing.
And it works – for a very specific kind of business, telling a very specific kind of story.
The problem is that it’s been handed to everyone, regardless of whether the story it tells is true for them.
Why does the Hero’s Journey feel wrong for values-led, community-centred work?
The Hero’s Journey carries a specific set of values (individualism, personal triumph, clean resolution) that are fundamentally at odds with relational, community-led work. If your clients aren’t lone heroes on a quest, the framework will always produce messaging that doesn’t fit.
If you’ve ever sat down to write your website copy, your Instagram bio, or a launch email and felt like you were forcing something – this is probably why.
It centres the individual over the community
The Hero’s Journey requires your client to go it alone.
Love, friendship, family, community – these are all treated as distractions or obstacles on the path to individual triumph. The hero must eventually leave behind everything that ties him to his ordinary world. The story ends with one person standing apart from everyone else, victorious and changed. The higher he climbs, the more isolated he becomes. And that isolation is presented as evidence of his growth, rather than an awful (and unnecessary) cost.
Now, consider what that means for your messaging if your work is built around community. If you run a group programme, a membership, a peer support space, or a coaching container where the whole point is that nobody has to figure things out alone.
You’ve been using a framework that treats community as something to transcend on the way to individual growth. And then wondering why your messaging for community-led work feels hollow.
Your clients aren’t looking to go it alone. They’re looking for their people. And the Hero’s Journey has nothing useful to say about that.
It ignores the systems your clients are navigating
The Hero’s Journey takes place in a vacuum.
The hero’s transformation is entirely personal – the product of his own skill, resilience, and grit. The systems that shaped him before he ever made a choice are simply irrelevant. The structural inequalities, the inherited narratives about who gets to succeed and how, the sheer cognitive weight of existing inside capitalism, the patriarchy, and whatever else the world is currently throwing at everyone – none of it appears anywhere in the framework.
The Hero’s Journey doesn’t talk about the collective struggle against the patriarchy (because it IS the patriarchy), or racism, classism, or the connection we have with nature. It’s not interested in any of this – because it’s too complicated.
Which means every time you use the Hero’s Journey to write for clients who are exhausted by those systems, you’re implicitly agreeing with the narrative that their exhaustion is a motivation problem. Something to overcome on the way to buying your offer.
It’s probably not the message you want to send, and it’s almost certainly not true.
The people I work with (and I’d guess most of the people you work with) are navigating systems that were built for someone else; their exhaustion is structural. It can’t be fixed by the right guru, or morning routine, or uncovering a magical productivity hack. And a brand story framework that pretends those systems don’t exist is actively misleading.
It promises a clean ending that real transformation never delivers
- The Hero wins
- One battle, one outcome, one moment of triumph
- Story over
Which makes for a very satisfying film and an almost completely useless model for the kind of transformation most of your clients are going through.
Real change (the kind that involves questioning what you’ve always believed about success, untangling inherited beliefs about money and ambition, rebuilding your identity after leaving systems that no longer fit) doesn’t have a tidy endpoint. It’s messy, open-ended, frequently nonlinear, and often requires revisiting. The “transformation complete” moment of the Hero’s Journey exists in fiction because fiction gets to end. Your clients’ lives don’t.
When you use a Hero’s Journey framework to talk about your work, you end up promising before/after transformations that are cleaner and more complete than anything you can deliver. And your clients (who are living the reality of ongoing, complicated, still-in-progress growth) can feel that gap.
What is the Heroine’s Journey?
The Heroine’s Journey is a separate narrative structure identified by author Gail Carriger, built around connection and community rather than individual triumph. Where the Hero becomes stronger by going it alone, the Heroine becomes stronger with every person she gathers. She ends the story restored to her community, not alone in her triumph.
In 2020, Carriger published her analysis of a narrative structure that can be seen across some of the most commercially successful fiction ever written. Romance novels, cosy mysteries, young adult fiction, stories that critics consistently undervalued and readers consistently loved.
What these stories had in common, Carriger argued, was a fundamentally different story structure from the Hero’s Journey.
She called it the Heroine’s Journey.
The three acts: Descent, Search, and Ascent
The Heroine’s Journey works in a cycle rather than a straight line. It has three broad movements:
The Descent: something breaks the heroine’s familial or community network. Her pleas for help go unheard. She loses power, often not by choice. She withdraws out of necessity.
The Search: in isolation and danger, she begins to search. Not for a boon or a victory, but for connection. She finds a surrogate community – people asking the same questions she is. She delegates tasks to people whose skills complement hers, gathers information alongside her found family, and does the deep, uncomfortable work of transformation supported by others.
The Ascent: she moves toward reunion and negotiation. She seeks to restore what was broken, or build something better in its place. The resolution is a third way – a compromise, found together, rather than a clean victory. And she ends the story restored to her community. Stronger, yes, but still connected, and still part of the network.
Revenge and individual glory are irrelevant – her network is everything.
What makes the Heroine’s Journey so different
A few things I need to point out before we go any further:
The Heroine’s Journey is not the Hero’s Journey with a woman in the lead role. It’s a completely separate narrative structure with different values, different mechanics, and a different definition of what strength looks like. You don’t swap one protagonist for another and get the Heroine’s Journey. You need a different architecture entirely.
Heroines can be any gender. Carriger is explicit about this (Ted Lasso and Harry Potter follow the Heroine’s Journey). The terms hero and heroine describe the story structure, not the character’s identity. A man who leads with community, who asks for help as a strategy, whose strength comes from his relationships – that’s a heroine. A woman who goes it alone, who defines her success through individual triumph – that’s a hero. The gender of the protagonist is beside the point.
Asking for help is a strategy, not a weakness. This is perhaps the most fundamental difference. In the Hero’s Journey, the hero must eventually face his greatest challenge alone. Asking for help is a sign that he hasn’t yet become the person he needs to be. Once he’s there, he can leave any guides behind. In the Heroine’s Journey, the heroine gets stronger with every person she gathers. The more companions she has, the more powerful she becomes. Requesting aid doesn’t diminish her – it expands what’s possible.
The ending reflects reality. The Heroine’s Journey ends in compromise. Some things remain unresolved, and some things need revisiting. The resolution is a third way, found together, that acknowledges the ongoing and imperfect nature of real change. Because real transformation is an open-ended process, and the Heroine’s Journey is honest enough to say so.
The Hero’s Journey vs the Heroine’s Journey: three key differences
Community vs isolation
The Hero’s Journey treats the people in your client’s life as obstacles or distractions on the path to individual triumph. The story ends with one person standing apart from everyone else.
The Heroine identifies people whose skills complement hers and delegates accordingly. She asks for help without shame and ends the story restored to her people, having achieved something together that none of them could have managed separately.
What this means for your messaging: If your work involves community programmes, group containers, memberships, or clients whose lives are full of people and real commitments, your messaging has been telling a story that actively contradicts what you actually do. The Hero’s Journey positions your clients as lone warriors. Your work is built around the idea that they don’t have to be. Those two things are not compatible.
Systems vs vacuum
The Hero’s Journey has no interest in the structures your clients are navigating. Their exhaustion, their complicated relationship with ambition and success, the weight of inherited beliefs about who gets to take up space – all of it gets flattened into a motivation problem. Work harder, the framework suggests. The tools are here.
The Heroine’s Journey starts from the understanding that we are all operating inside systems (capitalism, patriarchy, structural inequality) that shape what’s possible long before anyone makes a single decision. The exhaustion is structural, and the Heroine doesn’t just learn to survive those systems, she has the capacity to change them.
What this means for your messaging: If your clients are carrying the weight of inherited beliefs, systemic barriers, or the accumulated cost of being told to work harder inside a system that was never designed for them – your messaging needs a framework that acknowledges that weight exists. The Hero’s Journey doesn’t. The Heroine’s Journey was built around it.
Compromise vs conquest
The Hero wins one battle – one outcome. This is enormously satisfying in a film and almost completely useless as a model for the kind of transformation your clients are actually going through.
The Heroine’s Journey ends in compromise – a third way, found together, that acknowledges the ongoing and imperfect nature of real change. Some things remain unresolved, some things need revisiting. The resolution is shared rather than individual, and it doesn’t pretend that everything is fixed.
What this means for your messaging: The before/after transformation story your marketing has been pushing you toward is a product of the Hero’s Journey’s obsession with clean endings. Your clients know their transformation doesn’t work like that. Messaging that reflects the reality of open-ended, collective, ongoing change builds the kind of trust that a polished before/after never will.
What is the Regenerative Story Framework?
The Regenerative Story Framework is a brand storytelling framework built on the Heroine’s Journey, developed specifically for values-led, relational, community-centred work. It translates the Heroine’s Journey into five phases that map the kind of change your clients are actually going through: Uprooting, Composting, Germination, Sprouting, and Rooting.
After coming across Carriger’s work, I spent a considerable amount of time (even my teenager would tell me to go touch grass amount of time) looking at her ten stages through the lens of brand storytelling. Specifically for the kind of work that doesn’t fit neatly into a before/after, problem/solution box.
Five things kept coming up that followed the kind of change my clients help people through. So I mapped them, named them, and built a framework around them.
Here’s what they look like:
Uprooting is where your audience recognises that the system they’ve been operating inside no longer fits – and begins to leave it behind. Their exhaustion is a structural mismatch. And your messaging at this stage needs to name what they’re walking away from accurately enough that they finally feel seen.
Composting is the messy in-between. Things are breaking down, but nothing new has quite taken root yet. Old identities are softening. And the old solutions keep whispering. Your audience is toggling between “I’m ready for something different” and “maybe I should just go back.” This is a key part of transformation
Germination is where the deep, invisible work happens. The unlearning, and the examination of inherited narratives about success, money, ambition, and who gets to take up space. This work happens beneath the surface, in community, before anyone can see any evidence of it. It’s the phase that’s hardest to talk about and most important to acknowledge.
Sprouting is where your audience begins tentatively trying new ways of working alongside others, with permission to get it wrong. A sprout isn’t a tree. It doesn’t need scaling or monetising. It needs certain conditions to thrive: space, warmth, shared learning, and absolutely nobody standing over it demanding to know when it’s going to start generating revenue.
Rooting is where stability comes not from standing apart from your community, but from belonging to it. Deep networks, mutual support, strength that comes from connection rather than isolation, and success that’s measured differently. The focus is on the quality of relationships and the health of the ecosystem, rather than revenue milestones and follower counts,
No mountain, or sword. And nobody galloping off into the sunset wondering why it feels so lonely at the top.
Just a truer story about how change happens in real life, and how your work fits into it.
How to use the Regenerative Story Framework in your messaging
The Regenerative Story Framework is a lens for understanding where your audience actually is, what they’re carrying, and what your messaging needs to do at each stage of their journey. Working through it helps you locate the context your clients are living in, name it accurately, and build the kind of trust that brings them to your work when they’re ready.
Most brand messaging tools ask you to start with your customer’s problem. The Regenerative Story Framework asks you to start earlier – with what your audience is quietly opting out of, what systems they’re trying to leave behind, what context they’re operating in before they’ve even articulated a “problem” in the way a marketing template would recognise.
Working through the five phases will help you:
- Understand what your audience is carrying when they find you. Not just the surface-level problem, but the structural mismatch underneath it
- See what they actually need at each stage of the journey, rather than what a marketing template assumes they should need
- Position your work as part of a wider ecosystem of change, rather than the definitive solution to a neatly packaged problem
- Write messaging that tells the truth about what you do, without flattening it into a soundbite or squeezing it into a framework that was never designed for it
It ends with what I call an Impact Statement – a way of articulating your work built around two questions:
What changes for my people because we exist?
And how does that change happen?
These questions keep the focus on impact rather than performance. On collective movement rather than individual triumph. On the conditions you create, the community you hold, the slow and invisible work you make possible.
If you want to work through it properly, with questions at every phase to help you locate where your audience actually is – I’ve made something for you.
Download the Regenerative Story Map here
Frequently asked questions about the Hero’s Journey and brand messaging
What is the Hero’s Journey in marketing?
The Hero’s Journey in marketing is a brand storytelling framework popularised by Donald Miller’s Storybrand methodology, itself based on Christopher Vogler’s adaptation of Joseph Campbell’s monomyth. In marketing terms, your customer is the hero on a quest, your brand is the guide who gives them a plan, and the story ends with the customer achieving success or avoiding failure. It’s embedded in most brand messaging frameworks used today.
Why doesn’t the Hero’s Journey work for community-led businesses?
The Hero’s Journey doesn’t work for community-led businesses because its core structure requires the protagonist to eventually go it alone. Community, relationships, and collective effort are treated as distractions on the path to individual triumph. If your work is built around the idea that people are stronger together (through group programmes, memberships, peer support, or community), the Hero’s Journey actively contradicts what you do.
What is the Heroine’s Journey?
The Heroine’s Journey is a narrative structure identified by author and archaeologist Gail Carriger in her 2020 book of the same name. Where the Hero’s Journey centres individual triumph, the Heroine’s Journey centres community and connection. The heroine’s strength comes from the people she gathers around her. She asks for help as a strategy, delegates to people whose skills complement hers, and ends the story restored to her community rather than standing apart from it. The Heroine’s Journey appears in commercially successful fiction across genres – including stories with male protagonists, like Harry Potter and Ted Lasso.
What is the difference between the Hero’s Journey and the Heroine’s Journey?
The key differences are: the Hero goes it alone and becomes more isolated as he succeeds; the Heroine builds her community and becomes more connected. The Hero’s Journey ignores the systems and structures people operate inside; the Heroine’s Journey acknowledges them. The Hero’s Journey ends with a clean victory; the Heroine’s Journey ends with compromise and reunion. The Hero’s Journey defines strength as independence; the Heroine’s Journey defines strength as the capacity to ask for and receive help.
What is the Regenerative Story Framework?
The Regenerative Story Framework is a brand storytelling framework built on the Heroine’s Journey, developed by brand messaging strategist Peta O’Brien-Day specifically for values-led, relational, community-centred work. It has five phases (Uprooting, Composting, Germination, Sprouting, and Rooting) that map the kind of change typically experienced by people leaving broken systems, doing the slow work of unlearning, building new ways of working alongside others, and finding stability through community rather than isolation.
Is the Hero’s Journey the same as Storybrand?
Storybrand is a brand messaging framework built on the Hero’s Journey. Donald Miller adapted Joseph Campbell’s monomyth and Christopher Vogler’s twelve-stage version of it into a seven-part framework for brand storytelling. The two are not identical (Storybrand has specific mechanics around the guide/hero relationship), but the underlying story structure and values are the same. If you find Storybrand doesn’t fit your work, it’s likely because the Hero’s Journey architecture underneath it doesn’t fit either.
What kind of businesses should use the Heroine’s Journey framework?
The Heroine’s Journey framework is most useful for businesses whose work is relational, community-led, or built around collective transformation. This includes coaches running group programmes, course creators whose value comes from peer learning and shared experience, service providers working with clients navigating systemic issues or inherited beliefs, and any founder who wants their messaging to reflect the reality that their clients’ lives are full of people and commitments – not a lone quest for individual triumph.
Ready to tell a truer story about your work?
If you’ve spent time trying to fit what you do into frameworks that were clearly built for someone else’s business, the Regenerative Story Map is where to go next.
It’s something to sit with, annotate, and keep coming back to. It takes you through all five phases of the Regenerative Story Framework with questions at each stage, and ends with a scaffold for writing an Impact Statement that tells the truth about what you do.
Access the Regenerative Story Map
And if you want to talk about whether your messaging is actually telling the right story about your work, my Messaging Reset is probably the place to start.
Peta O’Brien-Day is a brand messaging strategist and conversion copywriter. She helps founders rethink how they tell the story of their work – specifically the founders whose work is too relational, too collective, and too complicated for most marketing templates to handle. Find her at wordsbypeta.com and on Instagram @allwordsbypeta.
Some useful links
“The Heroine’s Journey” by Gail Carriger
Joseph Campbell and The Hero’s Journey