Make the customer the hero

Marketing should make the buyer feel capable, not make the supplier look clever. Get that the wrong way round and even good work falls flat.

Most marketing makes the seller the hero of the story. Look at our awards. Look at our clever technology. Look how long we have been going. Look how big our team is. It is all about the supplier, and it is natural, because you are proud of what you have built. But the customer does not read your marketing to admire you. They read it to find out whether you can solve their problem and make them look good doing it. The moment your marketing is about you, you have lost them, however impressive you are.

Here is the shift that matters. The customer wants to be the hero of their own story. They have a problem, a goal, a boss to please, a result they need. The best thing you can be in that story is the guide who helps them win, not a rival hero competing for the spotlight. When your marketing says “here is how you solve this and look brilliant”, the customer leans in, because it is about them. When it says “here is how clever we are”, they tune out, because it is not.

I saw this clearly with a security firm rewriting its website. The first version was a monument to the company. Twenty years of experience, a fleet of vehicles, a wall of accreditations. Accurate, and completely about them. We rewrote it around the customer. What keeps you up at night about your site. Here is how you stop worrying about it. Here is how you look in control to your own board. Same firm, same facts, but now the customer was the hero and the firm was the guide. Enquiries went up, because people could finally see themselves in it.

The sharper way to think about it is to count the heroes in your own copy. Read your homepage, your proposal, your last pitch. Who is the story about. If it is mostly “we” and “our”, it is about you. If it is mostly “you” and “your”, and the result the customer gets, it is about them. The fix is rarely new facts. It is turning the same facts around so they point at the customer’s win rather than your pride.

This is more important now, not less, because AI makes it easy to produce reams of supplier-centred marketing at the press of a button. The web is filling up with confident copy about how great companies are. The firms that stand out will be the ones whose marketing makes the reader feel understood and capable, and that is a human instinct the tool will not supply unless you direct it to. You have to decide the customer is the hero. The tool will not decide it for you.

There is a quiet commercial point underneath this. People buy from suppliers who make them feel capable, not small. If your marketing leaves the customer feeling that you are clever and they are lucky to have found you, you have created a power gap, and people resist buying from a position of feeling lesser. If it leaves them feeling that with your help they can clearly win, you have made the sale easy, because you have given them the better version of themselves.

The practical takeaway. Take one piece of your marketing and rewrite it so the customer is the hero and you are the guide who helps them win. Cut the boasting. Lead with their problem and their result. Keep your credibility, but frame it as proof you can help them, not as a trophy cabinet. Make the buyer the hero of the story, and you will find a lot more of them want to be in it.