You Are Not Your Customer

The Blind Spot in the Mirror

One of the most consistent breakdowns I see in marketing is projection. Leaders assume their customers think, decide, and value the same things they do. They project their own logic onto an audience that doesn’t share their context, priorities, or their same emotional triggers.

It’s human, but it’s also fatal to clarity. When you see the market through your own preferences, you design for yourself. You start optimizing the noise you’re comfortable with instead of attuning to the customer’s own signals.

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The Trap of Insider Logic

When I first worked with a technology firm in Texas, the founder was convinced every buyer wanted “maximum configurability.” It made sense to him because engineers and tech-heads love options. But their best customers were neither engineers or tech-heads. They wanted simplicity. They were overwhelmed by choices. Once we reduced complexity, sales cycle time shortened and sales increased almost immediately.

The same pattern shows up in retail, healthcare, SaaS, everywhere. Plenty of technology brands are rife with these types of fallacy followers. Internal teams fall in love with their own language, processes, and success stories. They forget that customers don’t share the same vocabulary or vantage point.

The result is marketing that sounds intelligent but feels irrelevant. It’s fluent in company, not customer.

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Signal Comes from the Outside

Getting closer to the customer doesn’t mean more surveys or personas. It means more perspective. I spend time in the field, in customer calls, in service centers, in the friction. That’s where signal lives.

When you listen long enough, patterns emerge. Customers talk about outcomes, not features. They describe emotion, not attributes. They tell you what life looks like after your solution, not what it does.

One manufacturing client once told me, “We realized our buyers don’t care about tolerances or torque ratings. They care about not getting yelled at when production stops.” That became the brand truth.

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Marketing Is a Translation Function

The marketer’s real job isn’t to amplify what leadership wants to say. It’s to translate what customers actually need to hear. That requires empathy and distance at the same time.

When I’m working inside a business, I constantly force that translation layer:

• How would this sound to someone with no context?
• Would a customer pay for this sentence?
• What would they think we mean versus what we’re trying to say?

That’s how marketing becomes strategic, by connecting operational reality to customer reality.

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When You Stop Mistaking Yourself for the Market

The moment you detach your identity from your audience’s, everything sharpens. Messaging simplifies. Decisions get easier. You stop trying to please yourself and start creating relevance.

One of my healthcare clients used to write taglines the CEO liked. Then we tested them. None resonated with patients. Once they started validating through the lens of real people, engagement jumped and referrals followed.

You can’t see your own blind spot from inside it. Perspective is a system, not a gut feel.

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The Real Work

Strategy starts with empathy and ends with evidence. You can’t build marketing systems on assumptions, only on observed behavior.

You are not your customer. You are the architect of the bridge between what they value and what you offer. The clearer that bridge, the stronger the signal.

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