Smart Marketing Is a Mirror, Not a Megaphone
Issue 225, August 14, 2025
Too many marketers are holding onto the past, mistaking marketing for broadcasting. They default to the megaphone—amplifying messages, shouting out value props, and pushing campaigns into the world with the hope that someone, somewhere, will care. Too often, this is what digital marketing feels like: We cover our eyes, hit send and hope it works. One message for all (the buckshot model) is antiquated. Just like broadcast TV has become an albatross in a robust media landscape of customizable, personalized advertising. Many professionals seem to have forgotten the basics of great marketing. They have become lazy, disconnected, and transactional.
Perfect Posture
Real connection doesn’t come from volume. It comes from reflection and personal relevance. Great marketing holds up a mirror to the audience. It reflects their hopes, dreams, pain points, and worldviews. It speaks their language. When it resonates, it’s because the person on the receiving end recognizes themselves in it. They feel seen. Understood. Known.
That doesn’t happen by accident. It happens through intentional posture. It is powered by unbiased critical thinking and propelled by common sense. The best marketers don’t start with personas or platforms. They start with empathy and curiosity. They don’t assume their customers are “just like them.” In fact, they realize their customers are probably nothing like them. They view their customers as a mystery and trust they’re missing something vital about the people they’re trying to reach. Their intellectual, emotional, and psychological mission is to discover what will unlock access to their customers through authenticity, not expediency.
Practicing posture is not that of a marketing strategist, but of a student. A learner. Someone who’s willing to slow down, ask better questions, and stay with a problem long enough to uncover something true. Above all, it requires an objective mindset, willing to abandon personal bias for a compassionate and deep understanding of a group of people who are seeking solutions, information, and services that could make their professional (and personal) lives better.
Fusing Art and Science
Let’s consider digital marketing, specifically email. Smart marketers have a simple and effective gut check based on understanding the zeitgeist of their audience: “Would I care if I got this?” If the answer is no, go back to the drawing board. Effective marketing isn’t seen; it is felt. It doesn’t have to be clever, loud, or optimized to death. It is resonant—something that makes a person pause and think, “You get me.” At 2040 our mantra with clients is always, “What does it mean and why does it matter?” Savvy marketing starts with the customer, not the client. It requires active listening to the needs and wants of stakeholders. With the tools available to enhance digital marketing, the empathetic balances with the scientific. To achieve this level of resonance, you have to do real investigative work. All too often, institutional filters and preconceived notions inform and structure a message. The result is a misfire as to what customers actually need, want, and what resonates with them.
Let’s say you are creating a marketing campaign for membership renewal. You have a solid database with plenty of information about customers. These individuals naturally fall into segments, for example, interest/specialty, length of membership, geolocation, and stage in career. These attributes are assets for the savvy marketer. They look closely at the actual data and ask: Who’s really in this segment? What behavior are we seeing? How can we use this analytical information to reach our audience in a way they want to be reached?
But then they go to the next level. They ask, “What do we not know?” They go deeper with qualitative research—interviews, customer calls, and on-the-ground listening. It’s not rocket science; sometimes the best thing you can do is talk directly to a person and hear their story. This is a surefire way to prevent making assumptions and lumping your audience into one homogeneous group. As we have written repeatedly, bias (confirmation, personal, affinity, conformity) is the principal weakness of leadership and informed decision-making.
Understanding your customers takes a lot of work. And it takes a shift in mindset, especially for quant marketers. Empathy isn’t soft, it’s strategic. Understanding what motivates your audience sharpens your message, clarifies your positioning, and gives you a better read on what’s worth saying versus what’s just noise. And key to this process is to identify what makes your stakeholders indifferent and ambivalent. What turns them off is often more important than what resonates with them. In digital marketing, the wrong tone, wording, and intent won’t get them to click on your message, let alone, by association, care about your organization. It can make them hostile, the last thing any marketer wants.
Fusing the art and science of marketing is basic to smart professionals. With a portfolio of digital tools, messaging can be massaged to resonate with individual customers. Tools like generative AI can help brainstorm, test, and scale faster. Access to a known digital universe of behavioral history is invaluable in testing marketing hypotheses. Many organizations are relying on prompt engineers, experts in shaping and honing AI to anticipate the effectiveness of marketing messaging.
Operationalizing Insights in Mirror Marketing
It’s one thing to gather insights to mirror your audience, but another to operationalize them into marketing campaigns that actually work. Converting empathy into execution needs a systematic approach. Start by creating three levels of understanding based on your customer insights about how they feel, what they believe, and the evidence that supports these behaviors.
- Emotional Foundation: What does your customer fundamentally need to feel confident, understood, in control, and not alone?
- Functional Bridge: What do they need to believe about your solution? This will work, it fits my situation, it won’t waste my time.
- Tactical Proof: What specific evidence supports the marketing approach — case studies, features, guarantees?
Most campaigns fail because they start with level three and hope it creates level one. Mirror marketing works in reverse—the emotional foundation drives everything else.
Then, before writing a single line of copy, audit your customer research for actual language patterns.
- What words do they use to describe their problems (not how you describe their problems)?
- What phrases signal relief or frustration in their feedback?
- How do they talk about success in their world?
Then apply the 60/40 rule: 60% of your messaging should use their language, 40% can be your brand voice. This prevents you from sounding like them, trying to sound like you.
Next, create a simple vetting process for each campaign element.
- Mirror Test: Does this reflect something true about their experience?
- Relevance Test: Does this connect to something they actually care about right now?
- Recognition Test: Would they say, “This is for someone like me”?
If any element fails these tests, replace it. And finally, don’t ignore business needs, but find ways to meet them that serve the customer first. When customer insights conflict with business priorities, use these guidelines:
- Customer timing transcends campaign timing
- Customer language is more authentic than brand lingo and consistency
- Customer channel preference wins over media efficiency
Measuring the Value of Empathy
One of the biggest obstacles to operationalizing mirror marketing isn’t philosophical; it’s practical. How do you measure authentic connection? How do you prove that empathy drives revenue? Measuring what matters is one of the hardest conversations to have internally. The answer lies in understanding the difference between leading and lagging indicators of genuine engagement.
Traditional metrics like open and click-through rates are lagging indicators—they tell you what happened after your message was already sent. Those indicators are what most organizations and most marketers pay attention to in assessing reach and resonance. But an authentic connection has leading indicators that predict long-term customer value. The goal is to recognize that long-tail engagement is created when empathy is a foundation of any communication and produces a better return over time. You know your customers, empathize with them, communicate in their language, and help them solve their problems. If you master this level of understanding, performance naturally improves.
Once you understand the leading indicators, you can leverage them to drive authentic engagement. We have curated a few meaningful digital measurements to validate your empathetic marketing efforts.
- Response quality over quantity: A 15% open rate with thoughtful replies and forwards to colleagues signals deeper resonance than a 30% open rate with immediate deletions.
- Immersion versus scroll: Using tools to measure customer attention and immersion in the message are better measures than open and click rates. Immediate deletions based on scanning or scrolling an email are a near-death experience of ineffective resonance.
- Organic amplification: When customers share your content without being asked, or reference your messaging in their own communications, you’ve achieved mirror status success.
- Customer-initiated contact: Inbound inquiries that reference specific messaging points and customers who reach out to continue conversations started by your marketing mean high engagement.
There are also other qualitative metrics that matter. These measures are no less critical than quantitative benchmarks. Think of it as ROE – return on experience. There is also value in reversing the ROI equation and mindset. Rather than thinking “this empathy research cost $50K,” frame it as “this research prevented a $500K campaign from missing the mark.” A few more ROE measures:
- Are customers frustrated or appreciative when they contact your support systems? Their feedback reflects how well your marketing and communications set expectations.
- What questions do customers ask? If they’re asking about features you emphasized but not the benefits they need, you are not connecting. We beat the drum over and over again via this newsletter and in our work with our clients, that value relates to the benefits one receives, not features and functions.
- Post-purchase surveys that ask, “What made you feel confident in this decision?” Reveal which messaging truly resonated versus what merely informed. Often, establishing these feedback loops seems daunting. After all, who really has time to challenge internal institutional thinking? Or the mentality of “We’ll get to that next year, once we are beyond this series of events or product launches.” Well, bad news: Putting off to tomorrow what should be done today leaves an organization out of the loop with its customers.
Common Failure Patterns: When Mirror Marketing Goes Wrong
Even well-intentioned attempts at empathetic marketing can fail spectacularly. Recognizing these patterns can save organizations from costly mistakes.
- Empathy theater is the most common failure. Organizations go through elaborate customer research processes—focus groups, surveys, journey mapping workshops—but when it comes time to create messaging, they default to what they’ve always done, pretending to be empathetic. Why? The real work seems too hard or complex to pay off in the short term. The research too often becomes a check-the-box exercise, forgotten within six months, rather than a foundation for transformation.
Here’s a test case. A tech company spent six months researching why its enterprise software adoption was declining. When the marketing team did research to identify the retention issues, customers repeatedly said the onboarding process felt “overwhelming” and “impersonal.” However, the revised retention campaign still relied on feature-heavy messaging and complex tutorials that caused the disconnect in the first place. They heard their customers but hadn’t actually listened.
- Ubiquitous segmenting occurs when organizations become so obsessed with personalization that they create dozens of micro-segments, each with its own messaging strategy. The challenges are clear: A professional association tried to create “perfectly targeted” content for 23 different member segments based on various attributes and behaviors. What they overlooked was that many members fit into multiple segments. The result was a fragmented brand voice and a content calendar so complex that nothing got published on time. What’s worse, their members began receiving inconsistent, sometimes contradictory messages. The cure became worse than the disease.
- Bias corrupts even the most carefully designed customer research. We see this far too often. Organizations often do not consider the language being used and often want to structure the research answers with a bias for predictable results. You may get what you asked for in research validation, but not the information you really need for intelligent decision-making. We have seen staff unconsciously ask leading questions such as “How frustrated are you with current solutions?” Instead of asking, “Tell me about your current experience.” Not asking the right questions confirms biased assumptions.
The antidote to these failures is building checks-and-balances informational systems, not just conducting research. Successful mirror marketing is the result of ongoing customer advisory boards and regular cross-functional reviews where customer voices are literally played back to the team. Measurement systems can track whether customer language shows up in your messaging, not whether your language defines the message.
Over the years, we have promoted the necessity for organizational leaders and staff to get out into the field and spend a day in the life of their customers. The direct experience pays dividends by generating empathy, true connection and resonance. The marketing mirror doesn’t just reflect your customers—it reflects your willingness to change based on what you understand.
Making Marketing Matter
It’s important to keep in mind that digital tools, data and analytics are accelerants. If the foundation isn’t grounded in empathy and curiosity, you’re just speeding up something that may not matter in the first place. Yes, tools matter. But posture matters more. In a world of infinite content, the work that breaks through will be the work that reflects something human and true. Because the job isn’t to shout louder, it’s to hold up a mirror and say, “I see you. We made this with you in mind.” Remember, customers who engage authentically typically have 40-60% higher retention rates and refer a brand three times more often than those who convert through traditional push marketing. Maintaining your posture and marketing with mirror principles is marketing worth doing.
The Truth About Transformation: Why Most Change Initiatives Fail (And How Yours Can Succeed)
Why do 70% of organizational transformations fail?
The brutal truth: It’s not about strategy, technology, or resources. Organizations fail because they fundamentally misunderstand what drives change—the human factor.
While leaders obsess over digital tools, process improvements, and operational efficiency, they’re missing the most critical element: the psychological, behavioral, and cultural dynamics that actually determine whether transformation takes hold or crashes and burns.
The 2040 Framework reveals what really works:
- Why your workforce unconsciously sabotages change (and how to prevent it)
- The hidden biases that derail even the best-laid transformation plans
- How to build psychological safety that accelerates rather than impedes progress
- The difference between performative change and transformative change that sticks
This isn’t theory—it’s a battle-tested playbook. We’ve compiled real-world insights from organizations of all sizes, revealing the elements that comprise genuine change. Through provocative case studies, you’ll see exactly how transformations derail—and more importantly, how to ensure yours doesn’t.
What makes this different: While most change management books focus on process and tools, The Truth About Transformation tackles the messy, complex, utterly human reality of organizational change. You’ll discover why honoring, respecting, and acknowledging the human factor isn’t just nice—it’s the difference between transformation and expensive reorganization.
Perfect for: CEOs, change leaders, consultants, and anyone tired of watching transformation initiatives fizzle out despite massive investment.
Now available in paperback—because real transformation requires real understanding.
Ready to stop failing at change? Your organization’s future depends on getting this right.
