Forget Everything
Why good marketing starts with unlearning everything you know about your product
Empathy in marketing is only half the job
If you’re new to marketing, someone will tell you soon enough to “put yourself in your customer’s shoes”.
In theory, it’s good advice. The idea is to build empathy. Think about how people live their lives, what motivates them, and what might make them care about what you’re selling. That stuff matters. It always will. So it’s a good place to start.
But after years of working on messaging and positioning strategies at companies of all sizes, I’ve realised the whole concept is slightly misunderstood, or at least missing a key piece.
Because even when you’re looking at things from the customer’s perspective, you’re still bringing all your own knowledge with you. You know how the product works. You know the category. You know the jargon, the entire backstory, the reason it got built in the first place and how it fits in with all your other products.
Believe it or not, your customers have managed to live full, happy lives without knowing, or caring, about any of this. Which is why one of the most important skills in messaging isn’t knowing what to say. It’s forgetting what you already know and starting from there.
The curse of knowing too much
When you take a step back from your messaging, you’ll probably notice it’s littered with assumptions about what people do or don’t know.
While understanding who they are and what they want to achieve is still pretty fundamental, obviously still do these things, it’s important to start asking yourself things like what do they even know? Not what they want. Not what they do on weekends. Not their personality type.
I mean, literally, what do they understand about products like yours?
It's everywhere once you see it
It’s easy for me to say ‘just forget what you know’ but in practice it’s not quite so simple. It’s not just that you know too much. It’s that you literally cannot imagine a world where you don’t know what you know.
And so, without meaning to, you build creative and position products on a foundation that only exists in your own head.
When I was at Wise, we launched a multi-currency account alongside our existing money transfer product. You could hold money in different currencies in one, and send money abroad with the other.
It made perfect sense to us so our messaging reflected so much of what we already knew. But customers had no idea why they were separate or how they worked together. It was obvious internally and confusing to everyone else. Which, as it turns out, is a terrible marketing strategy.
We’ve had similar challenges at Yonder too. We launched a feature early on called “Earn or Redeem” where you could choose to either spend your points or pay normally and earn them faster. It felt so clear to us and it solved a clear customer problem for when customer’s wanted to choose whether to use their points or not at one of our partners. Job done.
It turns out, before anyone could understand “Earn or Redeem,” they had to understand so much about Yonder for those words to actually make sense. Things like:
How credit cards work
That you earn points when you spend on them
The difference between earning and redeeming points
What “redeem” even means
And, crucially, what points are in the first place
We’d assumed way too much because we already knew the answer to all of those things. Our messaging was perched on top of a scaffolding of customer knowledge that, frankly, didn’t exist.
The entire crypto industry is a masterclass in assuming knowledge nobody has. “Hedge your BTC by staking it on the chain to earn 5% interest!” For anyone outside the degen echo chamber, these are just words.
A little more humility, a little more forgetting, and maybe some of these products might have made the jump from Discord to the real world. (Side note: if your onboarding needs a YouTube tutorial, you’ve probably missed the mark.)
So what do you actually do about it?
It’s not glamorous, but I think the lesson here is to practice forgetting what we know when we talk about what we’re selling.
Every time you write copy, build a landing page, or work on some ad creative, ask yourself: what does someone need to know, and in what order, before any of this makes sense? Then just list it all out.
If you have the time, try run your drafts past people who don’t work with you. Watch them read it, then ask them to explain it back to you. If they can’t, there’s your answer mate.
Ultimately, no one lives and breathes your product like you do. Most people are busy, distracted, and won’t bother trying to understand your jargon, assumptions, or anything else that isn’t immediately clear to them.
So forget everything, and start from there.
While I’ve got you…
About me
My name is Tom. I’ve launched and grown products at some of the UK’s most loved consumer brands and I’m part of the founding team and VP Marketing at Yonder, a modern day rewards card. Since starting at Yonder, I’ve written about all my marketing learnings along the way.
If you're a senior marketer at a startup, this Substack is for you. I write about what actually works in startup marketing (and what definitely doesn't) for marketers on the verge of breakdown.
You can find me on LinkedIn congratulating my mates on their new jobs, trolling Forbes articles about billionaires, and occasionally sharing something useful when absolutely forced to. Say hello.
I do some 1:1 consulting from time to time where my speciality is helping you understand why your brilliant product isn't selling itself. Contact me on LinkedIn if you're into that sort of thing.
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