Taste Note - Amazon Marketing Best Sellers
Building a StoryBrand: Make the Customer the Hero, Not Your Company
A Kurums Book Taste review of Building a StoryBrand for marketers whose websites explain everything and convert nothing.
Why this book fits Kurums
Most company websites fail a simple test: within five seconds, can a stranger say what you offer, how it makes their life better, and what they should do next? Miller's diagnosis is that companies position themselves as the hero of the story, when the customer only cares about one hero - themselves.
For the Kurums Marketing audience this is the most immediately actionable book on the shelf: the SB7 framework converts directly into homepage copy, email sequences, sales decks, and ad scripts, usually within a single working session.
What the book argues
Miller borrows the structure of every successful film: a character (your customer) has a problem, meets a guide (your brand), who gives them a plan, calls them to action, and helps them avoid failure and achieve success. Seven beats, in that order. The company's job is to play the guide - competent and empathetic - never the hero. Yoda, not Luke.
The middle of the book works through each beat with rewriting drills. The problem beat is split into external (the flat tire), internal (the frustration of feeling helpless), and philosophical (people deserve better) - and Miller's claim, easy to verify in your own funnel, is that customers buy solutions to internal problems while companies insist on selling solutions to external ones.
The final chapters turn the framework into assets: a one-liner formula, a wireframed homepage, a lead-generating PDF, and a nurture email sequence. It is unapologetically formulaic - and that is the point. Clarity converts; cleverness usually does not.
Key ideas, translated to your desk
The customer is the hero
Count the pronouns on your homepage. If 'we' beats 'you', the story is about the wrong person - rewrite every headline from the customer's side of the counter.
Sell the internal problem
People do not buy software; they buy relief from looking disorganized in front of their board. Name the feeling, then show the product as the way out.
If you confuse, you lose
Every extra message on a page taxes the reader's brain. One offer, one plan, one call to action, repeated - everything else moves to an inside page.
Use it at work
- Run the grunt test on your homepage: can an outsider state offer, benefit, and next step in five seconds?
- Rewrite your one-liner with the formula: problem + solution + result, and put it in every bio and deck.
- Split your value proposition into external, internal, and philosophical problems - then lead with the internal one.
- Give every page exactly one direct call to action and one transitional one; delete the other six buttons.
Read it if
- Your website traffic is decent but conversion is embarrassing.
- Sales says leads arrive not understanding what the product does.
- You need a shared messaging language across marketing, sales, and product.
You can skip it if
- Your messaging already tests well and you need channel tactics instead.
- You want brand theory with academic depth - this is a field manual.
- You sell to a technical audience that genuinely wants the spec sheet first.
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