Available June 25, 2026

Episode 029: Beyond Demographics – Why Data Without Craft Fails and Craft Without Data Guesses

DURATION: 64 minutes
HOST: Kevin Novak

GUESTS: Deborah Patton and Justin Thorp

SHOW: The Human Factor Podcast

COLD OPEN

Kevin Novak: Here is something that should bother every leader responsible for organizational communication. You can have the most sophisticated data infrastructure in the world. You can segment your audience into dozens of behavioral cohorts. You can optimize every send time and every subject line, and your communication can still land with the emotional weight of a form letter. And on the other side, you can write the most compelling, psychologically resonant narrative ever crafted and send it to entirely the wrong people at the wrong moment. The first problem is what happens when you have data without craft. The second is what happens when you have craft without data. And most organizations are operating with one or the other, but never both.

Today we are going to explore what happens at the intersection of those two capabilities, why neither one alone is sufficient to move people during periods of change and transformation, and what the research tells us about the psychology of communication that actually changes behavior. I have two guests who embody this intersection. One has spent decades mastering the craft of language, narrative, and editorial strategy. The other operates data-driven communication at one of the largest technology companies in the world. They represent two halves of a capability that most organizations have never successfully integrated.

Introduction

Kevin Novak: I’m Kevin Novak, CEO of 2040 Digital, professor at the University of Maryland, and author of the book The Truth About Transformation: Leading in the Age of AI, Uncertainty, and Human Complexity, along with the Ideas and Innovations weekly newsletter. Welcome to the Human Factor Podcast, the show that explores the intersection of humanity, technology, and transformation, along with the psychology behind transformation success.

This is Season 2. We have spent this season building a diagnostic framework for why transformation fails at the human level. Identity crisis, emotional contagion, structural traps, the algorithmic mirror, the organizational immune system, structural silence, the psychological contract, generational fault lines, and the diagnostic map that showed how all of those dimensions interact as a system. Today we are applying that framework to a specific domain where these dynamics converge in ways that most organizations handle poorly. Communication.

Communication is how organizations attempt to move people. It is how leaders announce change, how associations engage members, how institutions maintain trust, and how transformation gets translated from strategy into action. And the research tells us that the way most organizations communicate is fundamentally misaligned with how people actually process information, form trust, and decide to act.

The data is sobering. Research published in the Journal of Consumer Research shows that psychographic driven campaigns outperform demographically targeted ones by up to 87 percent. Nielsen Consumer Research confirms that messaging aligned to psychological motivations generates two to three times the response rate compared to demographic targeting alone. And on the association side, MemberWise Digital Excellence research found that only 17 percent of association members describe the communications they receive as highly relevant. More than eight out of ten people feel like you are not really talking to them.

But here is what those statistics do not tell you. Psychographic targeting without editorial craft just means you are sending personalized mediocrity. And brilliant writing sent to an unsegmented list is a magnificent message that reaches the wrong people at the wrong time. The organizations that actually move people through communication have figured out how to integrate both. And that integration is what this episode is about.

Meet the guests

Kevin Novak: To explore this, I am joined by two people I have worked closely with who represent both sides of this equation. Deborah Patton is the senior content and editorial strategist at 2040 Digital and a co-author of my first book, The Truth About Transformation. Deborah has spent decades in publishing, editorial strategy, and brand communication, including her work with The Robin Report. She has helped revitalize traditional brands and launch new media businesses. She has worked with me for more than ten years, and she carries something that I think is increasingly rare in organizational communication: the ability to hear language the way the reader hears it, not the way the writer intended. That distinction is the difference between communication that connects and communication that performs. Deborah, welcome.

Deborah Patton: Thank you, Kevin. I am happy to be here.

Kevin Novak: And Justin Thorp is a director of email marketing and audience strategy at Oracle, where he runs communication strategy at an enterprise scale that most organizations simply cannot imagine. Before Oracle, Justin held roles at 500 Startups and HelloWallet. And before all of that, I recruited Justin to the Library of Congress when he graduated from RIT, which is where our professional relationship began many years ago. Justin brings something equally rare on the other side, the ability to read behavioral data and understand what it is actually telling you about why people engage, not just whether they do. Justin, welcome.

Justin Thorp: Thanks so much, Kevin. It is really a pleasure to be here.

Kevin Novak: Before we get into the research, I want to set the stage with a question that I think will surface where your perspectives converge and where they diverge. When an organization’s communications consistently underperform, what is the actual problem? Not the symptoms, not the metrics, but what is actually going wrong at the human level? Deborah.

What actually goes wrong

Deborah Patton: There are a lot of things. First, a lot of people write for themselves. They assume everyone thinks the same way they do and is interested in the same things they are. That puts you in a trap as a writer, because it has nothing to do with who you are writing for. It only has to do with yourself. So they end up selling, not telling, and they are not inviting people into what they are communicating. My mantra is always, what does it mean, why does it matter, and why does it matter to you. Why do you care personally about what I am telling you.

Another thing is that people focus on the wrong narrative. They are so proud of what they are saying and what they have to sell that they miss what connects with the audience. It is all about them, not the person they are trying to reach. And then the other thing is a little more ephemeral. People do not appeal to a higher sense of self. They do not find the purpose, the reason, the something that transcends the transactional aspect of what they are writing about. Where is the common ground? How do we connect? It is emotional messaging, and it is complicated because it changes every time you write. It is that mix of emotion, psychology, empathy, and higher purpose. So that is my take.

Kevin Novak: Thank you. Justin.

Justin Thorp: I completely agree with Deborah. There is a real gap in empathy. We are often too lazy to think about what we are communicating from the perspective of the reader and what they would find interesting. I think of marketing, whether it is an email or another channel, like a mirror. When the reader looks at that mirror, what do they see? In the best marketing I have seen, the reader sees themselves. Too often, less successful marketers put themselves at the center of the equation, so when the reader sees their marketing, they see the product or the company or the person doing the communicating. That does not land. When I send out marketing, my goal is that someone sees it and thinks, you understand me, you understand my problems. That creates a bond, a trust.

My channel is email, and we have the everything email, the email that tries to do all things for all people. It does not work. Having done this for almost two decades, I can tell you what the stats are going to be for those emails before they go out, because I have seen it so many times. They fail, every time.

Two failure modes

Kevin Novak: What you are both describing connects to a tension that most organizations have never resolved, and it maps directly to what psychologist Daphna Oyserman at USC has been studying through her work on identity-based motivation theory. Oyserman’s research tells us that people are more likely to take action when that action feels congruent with who they believe themselves to be, not who they are on paper, but who they see themselves as. Demographics tell you the who on paper. Psychographics tell you the who in their head. But neither one tells you how to speak to them in language that actually lands. That is the craft dimension you both mentioned.

I see two failure modes in organizational communication, and they are almost always presented as if one is more sophisticated than the other. The first is the organization that writes beautiful communications, well-crafted narratives, clear calls to action, professional tone, and sends them to everyone the same way. They have craft but no data. The second is the organization that has behavioral segments, engagement scores, predictive models, and A/B testing infrastructure, and uses all of it to deliver messages that read like they were written by a committee or generated by a template engine. In the age of AI, that is happening more often than it should. They have data but no craft.

Both fail, but for different reasons. The craft without data organization writes something compelling and then broadcasts it, hoping relevance will be achieved through quality alone. The data without craft organization targets precisely and delivers something psychologically inert. The engagement data looks optimized, but the downstream behavior, the actual change in what people do, never materializes.

Deborah, you have spent your career in the craft of editorial communication, understanding how language, structure, tone, and narrative actually move people. It is an expertise I have benefited from, and one that has slowly altered my own writing over time. When you look at organizations that have invested heavily in data and segmentation but are still producing communications that feel generic, what are they missing? What is the gap between knowing who your audience is and actually reaching them?

Deborah Patton: A couple of things. First, data is really useful information, but it is not storytelling. As cliche as it sounds, you need to figure out how to get into the hearts and minds of your audience. Sometimes organizations collect the wrong data. It is transactional, and it does not explain the motivation, why people do what they do. So you are probably asking the wrong questions in the first place.

You also need to separate needs from wants. Data is typically impersonal, and it does not go into those deeper realms of motivation. If you could figure out how to collect data that explains the benefit to somebody, instead of just trying to get their money, that would be smart. But it goes back to asking the right questions. You cannot write a script based on data. Data can give you insights, intuition, and benchmarks of where people are, but you have to come up with what is genuinely compelling, the touch points, as a writer. You can use data to inform that, but I always see data as after the fact, not before the fact. So it ends up in reverse order. And none of this is easy, because everyone is different, their touch points are different, and frankly, it is exhausting as a writer, because you have to morph into all different ways of thinking. So I go back to asking the right questions in the first place. The obverse is that you are probably asking the wrong questions with your data.

Kevin Novak: Justin, on the data side, and you can speak to craft too, because I know you spend a lot of time on it. When you look at organizations that produce genuinely well-written communications, but communicate to everyone, with no segmentation strategy, no behavioral data, no way to understand who is engaging and why, what does that failure look like at scale, and what are they leaving on the table?

Justin Thorp: This is where Deborah and I are similar but start to diverge. Where she comes to the data last, I come to the data first. The data I leverage is there to help me know my audience. If I look at the audience first, that helps me empathize with who I am getting in front of, so I can create relevancy. The difference between something landing and not landing is making sure the beautiful, artisanal product that Deborah or someone like her creates gets to the right people, at the right time, at the right stage of their relationship. I need the data so I can get the right message from Deborah to the right user at the right time. Otherwise, it will not work.

It is the opposite of love. The thing I do not worry about is unsubscribes. It is apathy. I worry about someone seeing it and not caring. I do not want to become part of the background noise. The difference between content and an advertisement is not whether it is paid. It is relevance. No one cares whether something was paid for if they find it interesting. It is all about targeting, and that is where the data is required. But it also requires that I give my audience something great, which is the part Deborah does day in and day out.

When craft and data work together

Kevin Novak: Here is an integration question. In the years we have collaborated, we have tried to bring these two capabilities together. Deborah, you write the communications. Justin, at Oracle you operate the systems that deliver them. When these two sides actually connect, what changes? Can you each describe a moment where you saw craft and data working together and the result was qualitatively different from either one alone?

Deborah Patton: Justin, you go first.

Justin Thorp: It both starts with the data and ends with the data, with the craft in the middle. Every time we send an email out, if craft and data are working in harmony, we wildly surpass every benchmark we advise people on. People want great content and great messages, and when you get the right message to the right person at the right time, they engage at extraordinary levels. You can drive human behavior, but you have to understand people with the data and provide them a quality product to do it.

Deborah Patton: I would add that my experience is sort of unique. It takes a very sophisticated company, a very sophisticated person like Justin, to help somebody like me enhance and amplify what I am writing. In my experience, most media companies and their marketing communications teams are clueless about what Justin is describing. They do not have the right software, the right database management systems, or a Justin who is sensitive to this information. So it is goodbye and good luck, and then after the fact it really tanked, and you do not know why, because you had no coaching to get you there in the first place. That is why I say most of my experience with data has been after the fact, not before.

Where AI changes everything

Justin Thorp: And that is where AI changes everything. With the power of AI, the people who have the base foundation, the well-organized data and a culture of curiosity, now powered with AI, are going to leapfrog everyone else. My ability to understand the data and then create copy with an artisan, not without an artisan, but with an artisan and with AI, lets me serve ninety percent of the quality at ten times the scale. I am going to dwarf everyone else in the process.

Deborah Patton: That brings up something we have not talked about, the actual writing itself. I am old school, and I cannot stand AI writing. To get to the point where you can prompt it so it becomes an avatar voice for yourself is very time-consuming. You have to be dedicated and passionate, and you have to have the technical expertise to do it. I field so much writing from people who write for me, and I can tell when it is AI. It is formulaic, it is boring, it has no soul, and it has basically nothing to do with the audience. So I agree with Justin, and we all know where this is headed. The people who succeed are the ones who work in tandem with AI and deploy it to make them better at what they do. But we are at an in-between point right now, a hinge point. People are either writing junk, or doing what Justin said but not massaging it, not owning it.

The talent gap and short tenures

Kevin Novak: Let me diverge a little, because you both hit on an interesting dynamic. You have small companies and large companies, and a very short tenure for most marketing communication professionals. Twelve to eighteen months, and then they move on to the next organization. You both mentioned the gap, gaps in what people focus on, gaps in what data is available, or not knowing what data is available and how to leverage it. How does that play in? Deborah, I will turn to you, because you mentioned the variety of media companies where the staff do not know what they are doing, and there is a lot of money and time spent on the effort but not necessarily the result.

Deborah Patton: Let me answer this way. At the Robin Report, which serves senior-level executives, I work with a lot of marvelous, smart, enthusiastic young people. They are convinced the best way to communicate is through reels, social media, short-form video, anything that moves and that you do not have to read for long. But when we did our reader survey, our executives wanted long-form journalism. They cannot stand podcasts or webinars, they do not have time to watch or listen, and if we do produce those, they want the transcripts so they can scan them. I am not vilifying generational differences, but this is a case of thinking you know best. If you do not know your audience, it is immaterial. Just because a new form of communication is cool does not mean it resonates with your audience. So it goes back to knowing who you are writing for, whether that knowledge comes from data or from actually talking to your audience rather than just studying them.

Justin Thorp: What would be fascinating, with the research you did for the Robin Report, would be to put both content types out and then look at the engagement data to see whether their expressed interest actually matches their implicit behavior.

Deborah Patton: It does. We do not collect the amount of data you do, but it is very clear. The opens, clicks, and page views are very small for all the broadcast communications we do compared to the written journalism. It is very old school, it is counter-trend, but it is real.

Justin Thorp: It is a bias people have, a bias toward what they think they want. Often explicit interests and implicit behavior are two different things. It is great that in your case they match up, but it is something you always want to check, because people think they know how they receive information, and then their actual behavior differs entirely.

Deborah Patton: I totally agree. In this case I can validate it, so it is not just my opinion or my bias, but it is also because I know the audience.

Justin Thorp: It is the Netflix queue phenomenon. Everyone has two Netflix queues. There is your aspirational queue, where I like to think I am the person who watches documentaries and arthouse shows, and then there is what I actually watch, which is Below Deck and various other things that are utterly mind-numbing. Your explicit interests and your implicit behavior are inherently different.

Three psychological drivers

Kevin Novak: Let me set this up. Several weeks ago I spoke at the ASAE Membership, Marketing, and Communications Conference in downtown DC, and much of what we are exploring here is what became that presentation. There are research frameworks that tie this together, and Justin, you hit on this with implicit and explicit behavior. There are three psychological drivers that determine whether someone genuinely engages with a communication or simply processes it and moves on. These are not abstract concepts. They are the mechanisms through which both craft and data succeed or fail.

The first driver is identity-based motivation, from Oyserman’s research. When a communication reinforces someone’s sense of who they are, engagement goes up. When it treats them as a line item in a database, engagement dies. Think about the difference between a renewal email that says your membership expires on July 31, click here to renew, versus one that says, as a member of this community you have helped shape these industry standards this year, that is not just a membership, it is a professional identity worth continuing. Completely different psychological framing. Oyserman’s research predicts, and our testing across many clients confirms, that the second version outperforms the first by a significant margin. But the critical point is that the second version requires both the data to know what the member actually contributed and the craft to frame it in language that resonates rather than flatters. Neither capability alone produces it.

The second driver is what I call trust architecture, drawing on Paul Zak’s neuroscience of trust research published in Harvard Business Review. Zak identified behaviors that stimulate oxytocin, the neurochemical foundation of trust. Three translate directly to communication, the recognition of excellence, information transparency, and autonomy. When your communications celebrate contributions, share information honestly, including challenges and uncertainties, and give people choices about how they engage rather than prescribing a single path, you are building neurochemical trust. Again, this requires both dimensions. The data tells you what to recognize. The craft determines whether the recognition feels genuine or performative, and the line between those two is entirely a function of language.

The third driver is behavioral activation, drawn from clinical psychology and adapted for organizational communication. The research on retention tells us the first ninety days determine whether someone stays, not because they evaluated the value proposition and found it lacking, but because they never activated the behavioral patterns that create what organizational psychologists Mitchell and Lee call psychological embeddedness. It is the links, the fit, and the sacrifice that weave someone into a community.

Deborah, these three drivers, identity, trust, and behavioral activation, are psychological mechanisms, but they only work if the language carries them. You cannot data engineer trust. You cannot algorithmically produce identity reinforcement. Someone has to write the words that make those mechanisms fire. How do you approach that? How do you get into people’s heads when you sit down to write a communication that needs to build identity and trust?

Deborah Patton: It is hard. You have to be almost like a chameleon. You have to let go of your ego and your bias. It takes a lot of empathy to understand how people think. And one thing we have not talked about is writing for what people want to become, which is another angle in writing for persuasion. The biggest unlock is to know at what stage these mindsets exist. Most of us do not have that kind of enhanced data, so we are doing it through logic and common sense. If you are really doing segmented communications and you do not have a Justin to tell you, and you are not measuring these psychological states through data, then it is guesswork. It is a fusion of art and science. I go back to having a strong data analytics team behind you that can guide you as a writer, telling you who you are writing for. But most of us do not have that level of specificity. It is wonderful that this research exists, but I would not say many databases segment that way.

Kevin Novak: Go ahead, Justin.

Justin Thorp: Persona development is a big thing for me. We create a lot of personas for the different types of people we are writing for, and then do a fair amount of research, either through qualitative conversations or, honestly, using AI to help build personas. ChatGPT can pull together posts from every subreddit on an esoteric topic in a way that I never could, and provide insight into the motivations behind someone who is, say, a chief medical informatics officer inside a major hospital system. That insight informs how I advise a specific team on their communication strategy, which then dovetails into how I pull the email segment to make sure the right message reaches the right audience.

Deborah Patton: I understand that, but if I could add one thing. Any writer who is paying attention can figure out the different career stages, the roles and responsibilities you are writing for. But what Kevin is talking about is much deeper than that, and it is very hard to ferret out whether someone is in a trust state, or an identity state, or what these psychographics are, because that does not necessarily conform to the role you play in business. It conforms more to where you are in a purchase decision, and how you value things. I just do not think many companies I have worked with are at that level of sophistication.

Kevin Novak: What is interesting is that those organizations forget that these are people. They have needs, wants, and preferences. They forget they are actually interacting with people, trying to get people to purchase, to join, to take some action, and they do not take the time to get to know those people.

Deborah Patton: Right. They could go on for two hours about this, because you need a super smart Justin to help you figure it out. But the bigger issue, from a macro cultural perspective, is that we live in a transactional mindset right now, at least in this country. Because it is so focused on the transaction, the need for empathy, for understanding motivation and the different psychologies, nobody cares. It is just, let us make a deal, let us close the deal. The leitmotif of what we have been talking about is that we have lost a sense of empathy. Marketers think, make my quota, sell it, sell the books, whatever it is, without understanding why anyone would want to do it in the first place.

Justin Thorp: There is a data aspect to it, but there is also common sense that gets forgotten. Fifteen years ago, I heard a legendary Silicon Valley product marketer say that great product marketing is not about how great your product is. It is about how you help me succeed. And it comes back to identity. I am here to make you a better version of yourself at work, to make you feel empowered, to make it feel like I am solving your problems. That is when the message becomes successful. When that gets lost, regardless of the channel, regardless of whether you have data, your message will not succeed.

Deborah Patton: It is a perfect example. When we work with retailers who only think about selling their stuff, they forget the customer is the one who has to buy it. If you are not customer-centric, whatever your industry, you have lost as soon as you walk out of the gate. Your focus is in the wrong place.

Measuring trust and identity at scale

Kevin Novak: Anyone who, since COVID, receives the quantity of emails from companies, and I do not think the quantity has lessened, sees that so many organizations continue to miss that connection, and they cannot be doing well. Justin, you work at a scale many people cannot conceptualize. You can measure opens and clicks, but how do you measure whether trust was built or identity was reinforced? At Oracle’s scale, what signals tell you a communication is connected at the psychological level versus just performing well on surface metrics?

Justin Thorp: It is not just looking at a single point in time; it is looking at a trend over time. I am not thinking about one communication or one program. I am thinking about how this progresses you in the sense of a relationship. I want to continue to evolve you, to nurture you, to make you trust Oracle, or whomever, a little more with every communication, so that at some point it matures into you wanting to purchase. You continuing to come back and engage acts as a proxy for that continued building of trust.

Kevin Novak: So you would correlate that trend analysis to a relationship?

Justin Thorp: Absolutely. All marketing is relationships. Every business is a people business, and digital marketing is just relationships at scale.

Kevin Novak: Deborah, from the editorial side, are there signals you pick up that the data misses? Things you notice in reader responses, the way people reference communications back to you, the language they use when they engage, that tell you something connected at a deeper level?

Deborah Patton: To be totally honest, you are lucky if people respond and give you a lot of feedback. They tend to self-select into the really happy people who love what you are doing, or the people who are very upset with you. For me, if I do not hear anything, I feel like I am probably doing okay, because I have not irritated anybody. But I do not have the sophisticated data Justin would provide to validate that. What is increasingly hard, especially in my position, is that nobody has time to respond unless there is a dedicated forum, a chat, a LinkedIn community. When you are doing marketing communications, you use all your tools, all your resources, all your intuition, everything we have talked about, to hit the mark. Even in corporate communications, when I was at Nielsen, you would hear that was great, I am so excited, and you would wonder if it was true or if they just wanted to stay on your good side. You do not get waves of response. You have to invite it. You have to ask for feedback, and you will not get it unless you really promote that there is a forum for it.

Kevin Novak: Is the lack of feedback a challenge in organizations, because then they feel they are doing well and do not recognize human reality, that most people are not going to comment or hit like? They have seen it, interacted with it, maybe read it, perhaps even taken action, but your only confirmation is that they took the action.

Deborah Patton: In Justin’s world, you can tell if people opened something, looked at it, and clicked through. That long-term pattern is about the only reliable tool you have in digital marketing, unless you have a really enthusiastic crowd that loves to talk to you. If you are going to a C-suite audience, forget it, they barely have time. So you have to know your audience and manage your expectations. If you are twenty-three and you think everybody will respond because it is a TikTok thing with a hundred thousand likes, someone running a retail department store is not going to do that. We know they read our material because they tell us anecdotally when we run into them, but they do not take the time to write. You have to have confidence and a thick skin; you cannot take it personally, but you do have to pay attention to your audience and understand the roles they play.

Confidence, vulnerability, and feedback

Justin Thorp: I think that confidence comes in parallel with vulnerability. That sounds counterintuitive; you cannot be confident and vulnerable at the same time, but I think they come together. To feel confident enough to put yourself out there, you have to be willing to put yourself out there.

Deborah Patton: You have to have faith. Faith that you understand who you are writing for, and faith in them that you are going to provide something worth their time. But that goes into a very ephemeral space, because faith is not easily measured by data.

Justin Thorp: The data on the back end pulls in whether it worked. And if not, why? I have done enough to start to see, okay, when I talk about this, it does not work, when I talk about that, it does work. Maybe that is telling me I should not talk about this, or that I should talk about this other thing differently. It is in interpreting the data and experimenting.

Deborah Patton: You are absolutely right. As the editor of a media brand, you can tell when nobody cares. It is obvious in the numbers. It does not show up overnight, but the long-term pattern does, and then you do a reader survey and find out it is not interesting. You can do it both ways.

Justin Thorp: You cannot always trust the data, though. It never ceases to amaze me. I put out content personally that no one engaged with on social media at all, and then someone tells me anecdotally that it was the best piece they ever read. And I think I thought I was talking to a black hole.

Kevin Novak: To personalize that, with the newsletter and even this podcast, I sometimes feel the same, that I am putting it into a black hole. And then I get the random email. Last week, there were three texts from three different people, and a couple of LinkedIn messages, saying it was incredibly helpful. To Deborah’s point, whether it is a time issue or they feel intimidated, it resonates with them, but they do not often let you know.

Deborah Patton: There is a lesson here. You need to get out. We get so stuck and so focused, heads down, while we are working. But whenever I go to events or conferences, everybody says it is the first thing they read every morning, that they could not live without it. You would never know that waiting for them to tell you while you are locked onto your computer. So it requires being in the world, being with people. People do not take the time to write, so you have to have the confidence that they are reading and sharing.

Justin Thorp: Building on that, you need curiosity. Enough curiosity baked into your culture that you have the desire to get out and see what the real world looks like, to talk to people, to ask questions, to look at the data. Creating that culture inside your organization is essential.

AI, agents, and the value of craft

Kevin Novak: Let me ask about AI, because you both hit on it earlier. In a world becoming more impersonal and more digital, if AI is writing the communications and monitoring the communications, where is the human comprehension, given your points about the necessity to get out and talk to people, while AI is theoretically taking care of the system?

Deborah Patton: Justin is better qualified to speak to this, but in my opinion, you have agents talking to agents. People do a search and their agent talks to another agent, talking to another agent, to accrue and aggregate all this information into something meaningful. As writers, as confident as we are, we feel extremely threatened by being disintermediated by systems talking to systems. You start to game it. You game your digital communications for the agents, not for the human being anymore. That is why I say we are at a hinge point, and I am not sure where it is going to go, but being in the middle of it is frustrating and confusing.

Justin Thorp: There is a reality to automation playing an increasing role in our lives. That said, from everything I have read historically, as automation has increased, including in the industrial revolution, the value of artisanship and the desire for craft goes up. I would think that, whether in marketing communications or in Hollywood, the desire for authentic communication and authentic craft is going to increase pretty dramatically as automation makes things easier. I truly think craft and AI can go hand in hand and will. But the heart still has to be there, the brain still has to be there. At least for the foreseeable future, I do not see AI doing it in the same way, or doing it without a Deborah in the mix.

Deborah Patton: We have trademarked something I think we are going to put on future communications, always human, never AI. I just have to make sure the writers honor that, because it is so tempting to do all this research and then not turn it into your own voice. We are all new to this, but I can spot AI writing immediately, and it is very hard to edit, because it is so perfect. The grammar is perfect, the spelling is perfect, except that it does not sound real; it is not opinionated or insightful, it has no perspective. So, back to my hinge point, we are muddling our way through where this takes us editorially.

The four mindsets

Kevin Novak: Let me flip back to psychological segmentation, which categorizes people by who they are and how they relate to an organization psychologically. There are four primary mindsets. The first is the identity seeker, someone for whom belonging is the primary driver. They join, engage, purchase, and stay because it reinforces who they see themselves as, personally or professionally. The second is the knowledge acquirer, driven by trust, specifically the information transparency dimension. They want depth, exclusivity, and expertise they cannot find elsewhere, which sounds like your readers, Deborah. The third is the network builder, driven by behavioral activation through social connection. They are in it for the people, not the content. And the passive consumer is someone whose identity salience has faded, whose trust has not been activated, and whose behavioral patterns have not been established. Critically, passive consumers are always a temporal state, not a personality type.

The power of these categories is that they change what both sides of the equation need to do. The data side needs to identify which mindset each person is operating from and detect when they shift. The craft side needs to write communications that speak to each mindset differently, not with different facts, but with different emotional architecture. Deborah, this is where your expertise becomes most visible. When you sit down to write four versions of the same communication for four different mindsets, and the ask is the same, a renewal, an event invitation, a transformation announcement, but the craft is completely different, how does the language change? How does the emotional architecture shift?

Deborah Patton: It sounds like a cliche, but you have to walk in their heads and in their shoes. You have to understand what motivates each of these mindsets, or archetypes. It is everything we have been talking about, hearing people, not just listening to them, understanding how human behavior works. Anyone who is really good at this studies people, from pop culture to intellectual material to the news. You cannot isolate yourself and still communicate. You channel them. You are not you. What are their triggers, their touch points? The only thing I worry about with this convenient model is that people can be any of those things in the same person. It depends on the situation. I could be a passive consumer about one thing and the complete opposite about something else. So it gets tricky to write for a static mindset, unless you have Justin and his team to identify, for that particular product at that particular moment, what mindset the person is living in. That is an ideal world for me as a writer. You have to be incredibly sophisticated to sell based on that kind of information.

Kevin Novak: Justin mentioned the Netflix queue earlier, and I tried to find a different example for the presentation, but Netflix checked all the boxes, because Netflix uses data, your behavioral patterns of what you have watched, to predict what you will watch next.

Deborah Patton: Like Amazon.

Kevin Novak: Yes, Amazon is the same. Many organizations that are struggling are not looking at what they themselves experience with companies like Amazon and Netflix, which map your psychology based on your prior behaviors, your likes, and dislikes. And to your earlier point about talking to people about the benefits, and Justin’s Silicon Valley example, it keeps being forgotten. Maybe people are just so busy, head down, trying to do their job, marketing and communicating without building that connection.

Deborah Patton: This gets us into predictability and whether you can really measure it. Everybody talks about measuring intent rather than reverse-engineering the transaction history. There is a new field within data, psychographic data and analytics, with an overlay to understand choice and intent. Mostly, we just have transaction data, and then you make logical conclusions based either on a persona system you have built or on common sense. But it is still a lot of guesswork, in my opinion.

Justin Thorp: The reason I am in digital marketing and not an open-heart surgeon is that they cannot make mistakes, and I make mistakes all the time. I have been doing this for twenty years, and you start to pick up on what people respond to. If I put introducing or announcing in a subject line, it intrigues people, and I see the open rate go up, because that is a psychological keyword that says something big is happening. People read left to right, so the first word they read is announcing, and that gives them a hint of something about to happen. There is a head knowledge you can read about as theory in a book, but there is also the fact that I have sent a lot of emails, tried everything, failed a lot, and figured out what works. You see the data, you do it again, it still happens, and that is a trend. The data starts to cue me to human behavior and to the psychological cues that drive someone to take action.

Deborah Patton: All of this is true, but time is not necessarily on our side. To fail, to experiment, to find that sweet spot, usually we are so time-constrained by deadlines and targets that you do not have much latitude to fail or experiment too often. That is what ends up creating the equilibrium of mediocre communications. You are out of time, out of options, and you get lazy, and it becomes a self-defeating prophecy.

Kevin Novak: Is that because of the system, whether a small media company or a large corporation, where there is a calendar, and all the products, services, offerings, and events are on that calendar? Many of those things are trying to reach the largest group and then segment to encourage action based on interests or benefits. It is a machine, a very large system. Is the system itself preventing the critical thinking needed to make improvements?

Justin Thorp: We talked about feedback and the importance of soliciting it yourself. I push a cultural value of questioning everything productively. Inside my team and the teams I work with, it is about asking, did this work, did this not work, what could I do better next time. I had a boss who would say, let us try to suck one percent less every single day. That compounding improvement drives a lot. But you need a culture where you are never resting on your laurels, always trying to improve and take it one step further. It comes back to hunger and curiosity, including curiosity about people, more data, and more life experience.

Deborah Patton: There is another thing we have not talked about. The people who are good at this are systems thinkers. They connect things holistically; they see how everything is interconnected. Data does not always fall into that conveniently, because data is in discrete silos, and making the connections between all those data points is the hard part. How does it fit into a larger system? People live in complex systems. They do not live in siloed ways of thinking or behaving. That is an opportunity for the creative team and the data team to interact, to embrace the fact that it is not transaction, transaction, transaction, but how all these things connect into a larger system, because that is how people actually behave.

Top advice for organizations

Kevin Novak: What would your top three pieces of advice be for an organization trying to make improvements?

Justin Thorp: In the end, it comes back to the basics. Put your audience first. Understand your audience. Use the data, at least initially, as a way to understand who you are going after, in order to inform the craft of the communication and make it as effective as possible. Getting out, as we talked about, is a great tip. And be open to asking questions and to challenging each other directly. Care personally, but challenge directly. The reason I can challenge my colleagues is that they know I care about them and that we are all trying to grow. You would think it is some flashy tool, AI or data, and yes to all of those, but the biggest things that decide whether something succeeds are much more basic. Do you know who you are talking to? Are you taking the extra effort to get to know them? Did it work like you thought it would? Did you have a clear understanding of your goal from the onset? These are the basics, and that solid foundation determines most of whether you will be successful. It is fun to talk about design and aesthetics, and those matter, but if you do not even know your audience or what you are trying to do, you are not starting off on the right foot.

Deborah Patton: I agree. Ask the right questions, because we usually ask the wrong ones. Check your bias far, far away. Do not think you know better than everyone else, and encourage your teams to think that way too. Another thing is to embrace the outliers. The people who ask a lot of these questions are often seen as troublemakers. They are independent thinkers, the creative people willing to not accept the status quo, and sometimes the answers come from them in a more cogent way than even a marvelous set of data, because they have the courage and the will to ask questions differently, to be skeptical. That is really important in an organization, and it feeds the creative process. Be curious, be open, get rid of your personal bias, and think differently. Think like people think, not like your organization thinks.

Justin Thorp: To riff off Deborah, I love skepticism. I heard an interview with Dan Rather about the difference between skepticism and cynicism. Especially in bigger companies, it is easy for cynicism to breed, for everyone to assume negative intent, and that breeds status quo thinking. Skepticism is very different. We are asking questions and challenging the status quo as a way to drive growth and outcomes. It is a very different mindset.

The integration problem

Kevin Novak: My final question for you both. We have been talking about the integration of craft and data as if it is a natural partnership, and we have hit on the fact that it is not, because in most organizations these capabilities sit in different departments, report to different leaders, and rarely collaborate in any meaningful way. This podcast focuses on the human factor and on change and transformation. What has to change organizationally for this integration to actually happen? What have you each seen that either enables or prevents these two sides from working together?

Deborah Patton: This may be simplistic, but there is an assumption that creative people think very differently than analytics people. The creative bias is that data people think linearly, that they do not think holistically about how everything connects into a functional system. The outlooks and intellectual attitudes of these groups are so different that you need a way to bring them together and celebrate each other, not judge each other. To enable it, you have to have a team, and everybody needs a Justin who thinks both ways and can bridge that gap and help us understand, instead of being antagonistic. There is a friction that exists between groups that think so differently, the bias that I know I am right. In the end, organizational leadership has to set up the environment, the culture, and the permission for everyone to work together and to celebrate, or at least not judge, each other’s differences, and to take the best of both worlds.

Justin Thorp: Thank you for the kind words, Deborah. I think of it as a metaphor using oil. You have the raw, crude product, the data that just sits there. And on the other end, you have, well, I have recently gotten into Formula One, you have the Formula One car. You are the Max Verstappen of writers, or the Lewis Hamilton. You are a legend at what you do. But there has to be someone refining the crude product to bridge the gap between the artisan, the crafter who is executing, and the raw data. Bridging that gap has been a big part of my career, helping the data dwellers take what they have, where there is so much potential, and connect it with the people doing the craft, who are making beautiful things but whose work no one sees, who have brilliant ideas and stories but cannot connect them with the right people. When you connect the data and the craft together, it is magic. That is one of the joys of my career. The Library of Congress, twenty years ago, was a marriage of technology and storytelling that made magic happen, and it is a perfect example.

Deborah Patton: True things are true things. We just tend to ignore and forget them.

Justin Thorp: That is the common-sense part. You take a great story and use technology to put it in front of the right people, and people eat it up. What was true twenty years ago is most of what I talk about today, now with an AI and data sweetener on top.

Deborah Patton: It is a cliché to talk about storytelling because it seems to be the fashionable solution to everything, but it was always what connected us. It started around the fires in Neolithic times, and it has not stopped. It is the one piece where we feel connected, find common ground, and learn to care about each other. But you have to be a really good storyteller to do it.

Closing

Kevin Novak: We often forget the human side, the human factor of it all. Deborah, Justin, thank you both for this conversation. What I hope our audience takes away is that effective communication during change, transformation, or any effort is not a data problem or a writing problem. It is an integration problem, and solving it requires both capabilities in the room, not in sequence, but in genuine partnership.

Here is the core insight from today’s episode. Every communication your organization sends either reinforces or erodes the psychological connection between you and the people you are trying to reach. There is no neutral communication. Every email, every announcement, every newsletter is either building identity, trust, and behavioral embeddedness, or allowing those connections to fade. The organizations that communicate effectively during transformation are not the ones with the best data or the best writers. They are the ones who have figured out how to make those two capabilities work as a single system. Data without craft delivers precision without resonance. Craft without data delivers resonance without precision. Neither one alone moves people. Together, they change behavior.

If you found today’s episode valuable, subscribe to the Human Factor Podcast wherever you watch or listen, leave a rating and a comment, and share this episode with your communication and marketing teams, because this is the conversation they need to be having with each other. Subscribe to my Ideas and Innovations newsletter on 2040 Digital’s website or on Substack for weekly frameworks and research on why change succeeds or fails. Connect with me on LinkedIn, where I post regularly about the psychology of transformation. And take the Transformation Readiness Assessment at TransformationAssessment.com.

Until next time, remember, change and transformation do not fail because of technology, strategy, or market conditions. It fails because of people. And the more deeply you understand the human factor, the more likely your transformation is to succeed. I’m Kevin Novak. Thanks for watching or listening.

End of Episode

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