We've spent the last decade obsessing over what we sell, while ignoring how people actually buy from us.

When revenue numbers disappoint, our de facto reaction is to blame plausible external factors.

We reach for these explanations because they don't require us to look at our own contribution to the current situation, which should probably tell us something.

The underlying logic of how we actually engage buyers probably hasn't been seriously pressure-tested in at least a decade.

The Cognitive Marketer

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Which page is your homepage?

When someone types a query into Google, or into AI, the algorithm goes looking for whichever page most closely matches what that person's looking for.

It could be a blog article on our site written 3 years ago. Something so old and located so deep that we’ve probably forgotten it was still there.

But the visitor lands there directly, with no preamble, and we have no say in it.

This has been true for as long as there’s been search, and most businesses still  haven’t really factored this into their information architecture maps, sitemaps, UX, or content strategy.

In effect our homepage isn’t (just) the homepage. EVERY page is the homepage.

The Cognitive Marketer

A B2B Marketing Podcast brought to you by KEXINO - https://kexino.com/

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Many businesses have an "immune system" that treats new ideas in a similar way to how our bodies deal with a virus.

Something gets proposed, but before anyone gets a chance to evaluate whether it'll work, the organizational antibodies kick in.

Within these kinds of businesses ideas don't get killed, as much as studied and pulled apart until there's nothing left.

The cultural response to an idea within an organization often matters more than the idea itself.

We keep looking for better ideas when we might have a better-ideas problem, but most of us will never know which one we have.

The Cognitive Marketer

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Most of the time, what gets marketed as "breakthrough innovation" isn't anything of the sort. Strip away the glossy packaging and press release verbiage, you're left with marginal improvements to a product that already exists.

It's what I call "Innovation Cosplay".

The human memory doesn't work by cataloging marginal differences between similar options. The mind remembers things by noticing breaks in a particular pattern.

When we make our offering slightly better than competitors in predictable ways, we're making it harder for buyers to remember us, not easier.

We want to be the ‘different’ that repels the wrong buyers, and appeals to right ones. If our product doesn't force buyers to think differently about what they're solving, we’re competing on everyone else's terms.

The Cognitive Marketer

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Whether accidentally or deliberately, we're training buyers to distrust us. Then we wonder why our conversion rates are tanking.

Organizations build entire departments around managing customer perception, while continuing to ignore the actual experience.

The gap between what we claim and how we actually behave is where trust goes to die.

Someone can have the sharpest value proposition ever written, but if the experience of trying to buy from them introduces unnecessary obstacles or confusion, none of that matters.

The Cognitive Marketer

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Far too many businesses insist on leading with the same BS checklist: better features, lower prices, free trials.

It's as though they think buyers carefully weigh-up the pros and cons of every product in the category, before making a deliberate, labored, conscious buying decision.

But that isn't what happens.

It isn't even close to what happens.

People buy stories. Specifically, they buy stories about who they become after the purchase. Our product may solve a problem, but it's our story that solves the identity crisis.

Customers aren't waiting for better features. They're waiting for a better version of themselves.

The Cognitive Marketer

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We’re too full of our own ego.

We’re talking about ourselves, when the buyer is trying to solve something that has nothing to do with us yet.

Most times, the answer to the buyer's specific problem actually exists. But it gets buried under corporate speak and generic positioning because of a fear that getting too specific narrows the market.

Everyone is saying the same thing because everyone is afraid of saying something that might turn someone away.

The Cognitive Marketer

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Underpricing based on mistaking "customer acquisition" for "business growth" might be the most common strategic error in business.

When we set a price, we're not picking a numbers of the air. We’re not simply adding up costs per unit, slapping a percentage on top, and calling it a day.

We’re doing far more than that.

We're choosing our positioning. We’re defining what type of game we play, the buyers we’ll attract, and which competitors we’ll face.

To an accountant, economist, or a business owner, price is simply a number. 

But to a buyer, price is a feeling.

The Cognitive Marketer

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The use of AI tools in marketing opens up possibilities that we couldn't have imagined a few years ago. But it's also allowed us to produce lazy, sloppy, junk that reflects badly on how buyers view our brand.

Rather than use AI to make us and our brands "better" (whatever that means) we're focusing on its use to make us faster, even if our standards of quality take a nosedive as a result.

Poorly-produced AI-generated images are the clipart of the 2020s (don't know what "clipart" is? Ask your parents).

What we're doing is teaching people to recognize the corners we choose to cut. Every obviously AI-generated piece of content contributes to pattern recognition for our audience. After enough exposure, they don't need to consciously spot the signs. They can feel it, in the same way they learned to feel that a generic, overused stock image isn't trustworthy.

The Cognitive Marketer

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The problems we faced when we were building our business are very different to the problems we face as we continue to grow the business.

When a business gets to a certain size, a wave of complacency sets in. We con ourselves into thinking that we're worked out how this "business" thing works, and how to keep the plates spinning to keep generating revenue, pay the bills, and keep the lights on.

What got us here, won't get us there.

This is often where a combination of "doing what worked before", combined with a touch of blind panic and a sudden interest in religion, gets its way.

We try harder and harder to do what worked before, even though it's clear that it's not working. But since we don't have any new cards up our sleeves (and are too scared to try them anyway) we carry on looking in places we've already looked.

The Cognitive Marketer

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