Educating the Marketplace

How to Become a Mentor on Your Customer’s Hero’s Journey

In a world saturated with content, pitches, and promises, the most powerful form of marketing isn’t persuasion—it’s education. Not the kind that lectures, but the kind that listens, understands, and illuminates. When a business truly grasps the job its customer is trying to get done—and offers insight that helps them overcome what feels like an intractable challenge—it transcends the role of vendor. It becomes a mentor. A companion. A trusted guide on the customer’s hero’s journey.

This article explores how educating the marketplace—specifically your ideal customer—is not just a branding exercise but a strategic imperative. By aligning your messaging with the Jobs to Be Done (JTBD) framework and positioning yourself as a mentor in your customer’s narrative arc, you create relevance, resonance, and results. We’ll unpack how JTBD reveals the deeper motivations behind purchasing decisions, how the Hero’s Journey offers a blueprint for emotional engagement, and why focusing on your ideal customers with relevant and helpful content amplifies your impact and authority.

Understanding the Job to Be Done: Beyond Demographics and Personas

The Jobs to Be Done framework, popularized by Clayton Christensen, shifts the focus from who the customer is to what they are trying to accomplish. It’s not about selling a drill—it’s about helping someone hang a family photo in their new home (Christensen, Know Your Customers’ “Jobs to Be Done”, Harvard Business Review, 2016).

Key Principles of JTBD:

• Functional, Emotional, and Social Dimensions: Customers hire products and services not just for utility, but for how they make them feel and how they affect their identity (Christensen Institute, Jobs to Be Done Theory, Christensen Institute, 2024).
• Contextual Triggers: JTBD analysis reveals the circumstances that lead to a purchase—moments of struggle, aspiration, or transition (Anthony et al., Identifying Jobs to Be Done, Harvard Business Press, 2008).
• Progress, Not Preference: JTBD is about helping customers make progress in their lives, not just satisfying preferences.

“People don’t want to buy a quarter-inch drill. They want a quarter-inch hole.” 

— Theodore Levitt, Harvard Business School

When you understand your customer’s job to be done, you stop guessing what they want. You start seeing the world through their eyes. And that’s where education begins—not with your expertise, but with their struggle.

The Hero’s Journey: Your Customer Is the Protagonist

Joseph Campbell’s Hero’s Journey, a narrative structure found in myths and stories across cultures, offers a powerful lens for understanding the emotional arc of your customer’s experience. In business, your customer is the hero. They face a challenge, seek a solution, and undergo transformation. Your role? You’re the mentor. The Obi-Wan. The Gandalf. The guide who helps them cross the threshold.
(Campbell, The Hero with a Thousand Faces, Princeton University Press, 1949)
(Campbell, The Hero’s Journey: Joseph Campbell on His Life and Work, Harper & Row, 1990).

Mapping the Journey to Business Context:

Hero’s Journey Stage	Business Equivalent
Ordinary World	Status quo before the challenge
Call to Adventure	Recognition of a problem or opportunity
Refusal of the Call	Hesitation, fear, or inertia
Meeting the Mentor	Discovery of your content (domain insights)
Crossing the Threshold	Decision to engage with content or brand
Trials and Challenges	Struggles with so many options in the marketplace and some DIY failues
Transformation	Recognizes the value of your solution
Return with the Elixir	Buys your product or service

By aligning your content and messaging with this journey, you don’t just inform—you inspire. You show your customer that you understand their path, and you offer tools, insights, and encouragement to help them succeed.

“In the best marketing, the customer is the hero. The brand is the guide.” 

— Donald Miller (Building a StoryBrand, HarperCollins Leadership, 2017)

Educate the Right Audience: Why Ideal Customers Matter Most

Not every customer is your customer. And that’s not just okay—it’s essential. Educating the marketplace only works when you’re speaking to the right people: those whose jobs to be done align with your strengths, whose values resonate with your brand, and whose success stories you want to help write.

Characteristics of Ideal Customers:

• Strategic Fit: Their needs align with your capabilities.
• High Stakes: Their job to be done is urgent, complex, or emotionally charged.
• Receptive to Insight: They value guidance and are open to transformation.
• Potential Advocates: They’re likely to share their success and refer others.

“The greater clarity you have with regard to your ideal customer, the more focused and effective your marketing efforts will be.” 

— Brian Tracy (Determining Your Ideal Customer, Entrepreneur, 2005)

Educating the wrong audience leads to diluted messaging, wasted effort, and misaligned expectations. But when you focus on your ideal customer, you create content that feels like it was written just for them—because it was.

“If you try to be everything to everyone, you’ll be nothing to no one.” 

— Dave McClure (500 Startups, 2012)

Educating Through Insight: From Vendor to Mentor

So how do you educate the marketplace in a way that positions you as a mentor? It starts with empathy and ends with empowerment.

Strategies for Educational Impact:

• Publish Insight-Rich Content: Feature articles, white papers, and videos that unpack complex problems and offer actionable solutions, even if your solution doesn’t do it and the customer can do it themselves (DIY)..
• Use Language from thier perspective: Frame your messaging around progress, struggle, and transformation—not features and benefits.
• Be a Mentor: Share case useful domain and pain specific informaton that aligns with their Hero’s Journey arc, showing how they can solve smaller challenges in the journey.
• Create Visual Frameworks: Diagrams, infographics, and panels that make abstract ideas tangible and memorable.
• Help them define their problem: Help customers self-identify their stage in the journey or articulate their job to be done and name their pain with definition.

When your content helps someone recognize and frame their problem, see a path forward, or feel understood, you’re not just marketing—you’re mentoring.

From Insight to Impact

In a marketplace flooded with noise, the brands that rise above aren’t the ones shouting the loudest—they’re the ones that listen the closest. When you educate with empathy, grounded in your customer’s job to be done, you stop being a vendor and start becoming a mentor. You’re no longer just selling a solution—you’re illuminating a path.

You become the trusted companion on your customer’s hero’s journey. The one who shows up when the challenge feels insurmountable. The one who offers clarity when the stakes are high. The one who helps them make meaningful progress.

And when you do this for your ideal customers—those whose stories you’re uniquely equipped to support—you don’t just earn attention. You earn trust. You don’t just drive conversions. You drive transformation.

Because the most powerful form of marketing isn’t persuasion. It’s education. And the most powerful form of education? It’s mentorship.

Educating the marketplace isn’t about being the loudest voice—it’s about being the most credible.

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Are you struggling to engage with your markplace meaningfully? Then why not try educating them.