The Guide Positioning Model
Position your brand as the empathetic, authoritative guide in your customer's story — not the hero.
The fatal mistake most brands make is positioning themselves as the hero of the story. When a brand talks about how great it is, customers perceive a competitor for scarce resources rather than a helper. In every great story, the hero (customer) needs a guide (brand) who has two qualities: empathy and authority. Empathy means expressing genuine understanding of the customer's pain and frustration. Authority means demonstrating competence through testimonials, statistics, awards, and logos — without bragging. Together, empathy and authority mirror the two questions people subconsciously ask when meeting someone new: 'Can I trust this person?' and 'Can I respect this person?' When a brand communicates both, customers recognize it as the guide they've been looking for.
- The customer is always the hero — your brand is always the guide
- Every human being wakes up seeing the world through the lens of a protagonist
- Brands that position themselves as heroes unknowingly compete with their potential customers
- The guide has already 'been there and done that' and conquered the hero's challenge in their own backstory
- Empathy creates trust; authority creates respect — you need both
- The story is never about the guide — it is always about the hero
- Those who realize the epic story of life is not about them but about the people around them somehow win in the end
- Express EmpathyCommunicate that you understand your customer's pain, frustration, and internal problem. Use statements like 'We understand how it feels to...', 'Nobody should have to experience...', or 'Like you, we are frustrated by...' Empathy shows customers you see them as you see yourself.Pro tipCommonality is a powerful marketing tool. When a customer realizes they have something in common with a brand, they fill in all the unknown nuances with trust.WarningEmpathy without authority makes you seem like a peer who can't actually help. It's like a nutritionist who says 'Me too!' when you say you want to lose weight.
- Demonstrate AuthorityShow competence through four mechanisms: Testimonials (3 is a great starting number, keep them brief), Statistics (quantified results like '125,000 users trust our software'), Awards (small logos at the bottom of your page), and Logos (of known businesses you've helped). Authority should be demonstrated without bragging.Pro tipYou don't need to make a big deal about authority. Three brief testimonials, a few stats, and some award logos are enough for customers to mentally check the 'trust' box.WarningStacking twenty testimonials or constantly talking about your expertise repositions you as the hero, which repels customers rather than attracting them.
- Audit Your Marketing for Hero LanguageReview all marketing materials and remove or reframe any messaging that positions your brand as the hero. Replace 'we are the best' language with language that shows how you help the customer win. Turn the focus from your story to the customer's story.Pro tipAsk yourself: does this sentence make the customer the main character, or does it make our brand the main character? If it's about you, rewrite it to be about them.
Jay Z invested $56 million and recruited sixteen famous musicians to stand shoulder-to-shoulder at a press conference explaining how Tidal would help artists get paid fairly. The public recoiled — they saw multimillionaire musicians guilt-tripping them into paying more for music. Tidal answered 'How do we help artists win?' instead of 'How do we help customers win?'
Discover Card ran a campaign featuring people who call customer service and end up talking to an exact replica of themselves. The message: Discover will take care of you the same way you'd take care of yourself.
Miller drew the Guide Positioning concept from universal story structure, where guides like Yoda, Gandalf, Haymitch, and Obi-Wan Kenobi appear in nearly every narrative. He connected this to Harvard professor Amy Cuddy's research on first impressions, which distilled trust and respect as the two qualities people evaluate immediately. He also studied failures like Jay Z's Tidal music service, which collapsed because it positioned the artists as heroes instead of making the customer the hero.