Dear game changers,

The riskiest moment in marketing is when everyone is in agreement. Time and again, I’ve watched teams nod in perfect unison over ideas that later failed spectacularly. Meanwhile, a casual comment buried in social media ignites a viral trend nobody predicted.

Perhaps our industry's obsession with customer "personas" has gone too far. We've reduced contradictory humans to convenient cardboard cutouts. Real people are inconsistent—conservative in the morning, experimental by evening; price-sensitive on Tuesdays, extravagant on Fridays. But our models demand they pick a lane and stay in it. No wonder our predictions keep missing.

Most customers don't know what they want until we show it to them. That’s why we get the best insights from observing what excites people when they think nobody's keeping score. The smartest marketers I know understand this instinctively; they listen more than they ask. They know great products and campaigns aren’t built from loud opinions, but from quiet clues. After all, most innovations weren't requested; they were picked up from small frustrations and unspoken needs that only careful listeners could detect.