The Cognitive Marketer

Customers make purchasing decisions emotionally and construct elaborate post-hoc justifications after the fact.

As marketers, the reason we exist is to sell them permission to want something.

Buyers purchase the elimination of doubt. They pay for the comfort of knowing they won't look foolish or have to explain themselves later.

Managing how a product is perceived relative to other options matters far more than optimizing the product itself.

Our job is to manufacture plausible excuses for emotional purchases.

Who’s really running your marketing?

Is it you? Or is it your boss?
Too many businesses (and business owners, to be honest) confuse marketing leadership with marketing operations.

Making ads, posting on social, recording podcasts, organizing events. All of this stuff is promotions. It's marketing operations.

That's not to say ops isn't important. Of course it is. But ops is tactical. It's the result of Strategy, Research, Objective, etc.

If you're not doing that high-level strategic stuff, and spend all your time ordering stress balls and building email sequences, you're not in charge of marketing.

Your boss is.

More effective marketing: kexino.com

Here we are in Q4 and most marketing budgets are being wasted, as we stupidly continue to chase people who have zero intention in buying this quarter.

Professor John Dawes from the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute put numbers to this back in 2021, which has now become known as the 95:5 rule:

Only around 5% of B2B buyers are actually looking to buy at the time they see our messaging. The other ±95% aren't in market and may not buy for weeks, months, or even years into the future.

Yet most businesses continue to throw everything they've got at converting that 5%, leaving the 95% with pretty much nothing.

We keep optimizing for the 5% because it shows up in this quarter's forecast. Meanwhile the 95% (i.e. the people determining whether we're still relevant next year) get stuck with whatever's left over.

More effective marketing: kexino.com

In most mature markets, we face rivals with the same tools, the same data, the same benchmarks. Features blur. Margins shrink. What decides outcomes is the frame through which decisions get made, and that frame is narrative.

We treat story as decoration. That’s costly. A clear narrative sets priorities, filters bets, and shapes how our product is judged before a demo starts. It turns pricing, onboarding, service, and the way we show up on LinkedIn into one coherent signal. Not flair. Coherence.

Innovation still matters. It rarely decides the category on its own. Capability is cheap. Distinctiveness is not. When options look interchangeable, brand becomes the decision shortcut. Not a logo. A system of meaning built from positioning, language, and cues we repeat until they feel inevitable.

There’s the awkward bit. We can spend millions making the product “better” and still lose the frame that steers choice. Or we can own it and let the market do some work for us.

If we ignore the story, the market will return the favor.

When a new option lands, our baseline moves.

We stop measuring parts and start noticing how the old choice now feels slow or awkward. The product hasn't changed ,but our reference point certainly has.

Markets price expectations, not features. The first mover resets what counts as acceptable and captures attention at a discount. The rest of us inherit a tougher comparison set.

Margin gets squeezed. Churn ticks up.

The story in the buyer’s head updates without asking our permission.

Innovation’s real return is reframing power. We are not only building utility. We are rewriting what normal looks like. That is why small experience shifts have oversized effects. They change comparisons, not just capabilities.

There is a cost we avoid admitting. Expectations compound faster than our budgets. Once people see a higher bar, promotions and loyalty points cannot pull the category back to yesterday’s frame.

Our job is to design the reference point and defend it. Because competing with an outdated baseline is not conservative. It is a slow bleed.

It seems that many businesses would rather bore everyone than risk offending anyone.

Even though we know we need to differentiate ourselves from others in our category, we end up crafting communications so benign they could work for anyone.

Years of focus groups, legal oversight, and risk-aversion has made us sand off any sharp edge that might give someone a reason to walk away.

We've become so afraid of excluding people, we've forgotten how to attract them.

But trying to create communication that resonates with everyone, resonates with no one.

Just as we're specific about who we serve, we should be equally specific about who we don't.

This means being comfortable that some people will look at our messaging and decide we're not for them.

Clear positioning doesn't drive away buyers. It drives away people who were never going to buy from us in the first place, while making it easier for actual customers to find us.

Persistent problems often require us to question our basic assumptions about how markets, customers, or organizations actually behave.

This is one reason why breakthrough innovations often come from market outsiders rather than incumbent players.

Outsiders don't know what 'no' means.

They haven't been preconditioned to avoid "obviously wrong" approaches that sometimes turn out to be obviously right.

Marketing optimizes for long-term value creation.

Promotion optimizes for immediate response.

Marketing asks "How do we help them succeed?"

Promotion asks "How do we get them to buy?"

Most purchases aren't about finding the perfect solution—they're about avoiding the worst problems.

Buyers pick the option that annoys them least, not the one that delights them most.

Understanding customer dislikes isn't just useful research—it's often the fastest path to growth. Sometimes the best way forward is removing what holds people back.

If our audience can tell our message has been created using AI tools, we've already lost their trust.

Most businesses don’t need an “AI strategy”. They need a business strategy that (might) use AI.

Without that, it’s all smoke and mirrors without any tangible impact.

Real wins come when our solution plugs into the messy irrationality of human workflows: intake, service, follow-up.