The Cognitive Marketer

Most lost sales don't go to the competition. They die because the buyer decided living with the problem is easier than solving it. A buyer who's been tolerating a problem for months or years has already built workarounds, adjusted expectations, and normalized the cost. That 'pain tolerance' is our actual competition - the status quo. No amount of us promising rainbows and unicorns...

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...

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 n...

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...

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...

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 wr...

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 b...

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...

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 t...

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 nosed...

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...

Margherita pizza exists because it offends no-one . It’s the choice you make when you don't know what everyone wants. Pineapple pizza, on the other hand, is polarizing . People either love it or hate it. Which is why it works as positioning - the people who love it really love it. When we try to appeal to everyone, we create messaging that could apply to anyone. We put out content that avoids taki...

We're wasting time and budget chasing people who won't buy from us today, instead of looking at people who may buy from us tomorrow. Future buyers are forming opinions right now about which brands seem familiar, credible, and worth remembering for the future. When they eventually need whatever we're selling, they'll begin with the brands they know and have already heard of. They&#3...

Too many business owners suffer from loss aversion . They tend to avoid a possible less, by sticking with the status quo - what’s worked in the past that got them to where they are. However, that also means they’re risking possible gain , by trying something new. Markets continue to do what they’re going to do, and won’t put things on hold for us while we try to catch up. Because if we won't d...

We're optimizing for subjective appeal rather than commercial effectiveness. Of course design, UX/UI, etc are all important. But they're not the *most* important. Buyers don't buy from us just because our website looks pretty. The main reason why a page converts is because of the copy . Yet we're apparently OK to spend thousands on frameworks, design engines, and brand guidelines w...

Buyers can't tell the difference between our widget and the competitor's widget because functionally there isn't one. We're perfecting features that look really cool in a demo but that the average user wouldn’t ever use. But these so-called “improvements” do nothing more than keep us in the game. They don't provide us with ways to win. I’m not saying that substance no longer ma...

We've professionalized ourselves into sameness. Bland messaging costs more than we think. Every generic touchpoint trains buyers to tune us out. We're not “building awareness”. We're teaching the market that our category doesn't deserve attention. We complain about commoditization. But we’re the ones who created it. Who actually breaks through? The businesses that are willing to so...

Marketing departments are full of people who can explain TikTok's algorithm but not what their company actually does, or what problem our product solves for our customer. We keep hoping the next tactic works. That the next hire cracks it. That there's some kind of a shortcut we haven't found yet. But there isn't one and, in our heart of hearts, I think we know that. The Cognitive M...

You're also competing against Coca-Cola, and Nike, and Disney, and Amazon, and every other brand that delivers an outstanding customer buying experience. The biggest brands in the world are setting the standard for how we, as consumers, expect to be treated. But this also means that your business is being judged by the same standard. Your eCommerce site's search function, product descripti...

Most teams publish more and get less. The fix isn’t another tool or bigger budget. It’s making our marketing a mirror that our buyers recognize. In this episode, we unpack how to find and use customer language, the few insights that actually move conversion, and why qualitative research beats “more content” in B2B.

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 mat...

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....

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&#3...

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, onbo...

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 squee...