Uncertainty is the system, and life science marketers who build buyer presence into every decision are better equipped to navigate it.
Shownotes
Your buyer was in the room at the start of the process. By the time the brief lands in legal, they have left.
For life science product marketers, commercial leads, and anyone navigating a launch in a market that stopped following the old rules.
Matt Wilkinson and Jasmine Gruia-Gray unpack Mark Schaefer's concept of malignant uncertainty - the structural fog that makes every market assumption feel provisional. They test whether synthetic customers are a genuine solution to buyer presence erosion or a sophisticated way to lose an argument with authority. The conversation lands on a harder, more useful truth: the technology is downstream of the belief.
What you will learn:
- Why Mark Schaefer's three types of uncertainty (objective, epistemic, and subjective) reframe how life science marketers should think about the fog they are already in
- How synthetic customers make buyer insight quotable, queryable, and present through approval cycles - and why they are not a substitute for culture change
- Why the real reason buyer presence erodes in approval cycles is a prioritisation and power problem, not a data problem
- How to tell whether your synthetic customer is still accurate or has become an expensive echo chamber
- What to do practically when you are six months from a launch and the rules have structurally shifted
- What Mark Schaefer means by "leaders dispense hope" and why it is not the same as optimism
Chapters:
- [00:00] Introduction
- [00:27] Mark Schaefer and malignant uncertainty
- [01:54] The three types of uncertainty: objective, epistemic, and subjective
- [02:53] COVID, survivorship bias, and customer centricity
- [04:36] The emotional substrate beneath the surface request
- [05:24] Synthetic customers and buyer presence in approval cycles
- [06:00] Steel-manning the sceptic: is this just a sophisticated way to lose?
- [07:53] The stale data problem: synthetic customers trained on yesterday's market
- [09:23] Technology is downstream of belief
- [10:56] Practical moves six months from a launch
- [12:21] Leaders dispense hope
- [13:02] A closing exercise for listeners
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Read Matt's blog post on buyer presence here.
The following is a lightly edited transcript of the episode. Obvious transcription errors have been corrected. Speaker turns are preserved in full.
Opening and Mark Schaefer's Framing
Speaker: Matt Wilkinson 00:18
Hi Jasmine, how you doing?
Speaker: Jasmine 00:19
Very well, it's a sunny day here on the East Coast, so let's get to it.
Speaker: Matt Wilkinson 00:25
Excellent.
Speaker: Jasmine 00:27
So there's a quote I want to open up with today. This is something that Mark Schaefer, the marketing strategist and someone you call your marketing hero, said at the recent Uprising. He said that uncertainty is not a problem. It's not the flaw, it's the system.
Speaker: Matt Wilkinson 00:52
Yeah, absolutely. I know that we've been talking about VUCA - volatile, uncertain, complex - systems for a long time, but the way that Mark framed it the whole room seemed to shift. It seemed to just set everybody at ease knowing that there is just so much change right now.
Speaker: Jasmine 01:10
Yeah, I felt that as well. What else did you notice?
Malignant Uncertainty: The Three Types
Speaker: Matt Wilkinson 01:14
I think it was just that it just disarmed everybody. Mark had never given that talk before, and he opened up admitting that he was a bit nervous to give this talk, but it was one that he felt he really had to do. And so I found it was just really comforting to see that through all of this uncertainty, it's just something to lean into. And that's something that I think time and time again we've had to do over the last decade or so. But it's really comforting for somebody to put a name on it.
Speaker: Jasmine 01:40
Right. So he talked about different frameworks and case studies. That's what you get when someone walks in with a level of credibility. But what else did he say?
Speaker: Matt Wilkinson 01:54
Other than after saying that he'd never given a talk like this before, he spent the next 40 minutes in the fog with us talking about something that he calls malignant uncertainty - about the fact that the norms are gone. Even the question of what laws apply these days is live. And then he broke uncertainty into three different types that I thought were really helpful. Objective, epistemic, and subjective. And said most of us get stuck on the third - the fog inside of us.
Speaker: Jasmine 02:21
Yeah, I think it's worth sitting on that. And he talked about marinating as well about this fog inside us. So here's where I'm going to push because I want our listeners to feel this tension. That framing is really, really beautiful. But I've sat in a lot of rooms where someone reframes anxiety as fuel. And everybody nods confidently and goes home and nothing changes. What makes this different?
Survivorship Bias and Customer Centricity
Speaker: Matt Wilkinson 02:53
Well, I think probably first of all the storyteller and the insight that's in it. But there's also the stories that were told. So for example, one was Mark's COVID story. During COVID, Mark's business went to zero. Who needs a marketing keynote speaker when there's no keynotes to be delivered? And he didn't double down on writing about marketing because for quite a while during COVID, people weren't really buying anything other than essentials. He stopped writing about marketing entirely and wrote about what his customers were actually struggling with - anxiety, leading teams through uncertainty. And by doing so, by listening to his customers and his audience, traffic to his website tripled.
Speaker: Jasmine 03:31
Yeah, it was definitely a set of stories of vulnerability and putting himself out there. But Mark Schaefer has 30 years of credibility, definitely hard earned, I'll give him that. And he's built a huge, huge audience and the brand equity to survive a pivot like that. You're asking a life sciences product marketer with, for example, a new product launch and a CFO who wants revenue in the next quarter to do the same thing. Be honest. Is this wisdom or is it survivorship bias?
Speaker: Matt Wilkinson 04:11
I think that's a fair criticism, but I don't think the lesson is pivot your entire category. The lesson is narrower. Customer centricity is bigger than expressed needs. When someone tells you what they want from your product, they're also not telling you how they're coping with the rest of their working life. What other problems are they actually experiencing? And that context shapes everything - what they'll read, who they'll trust, and what they have energy to act on.
Speaker: Jasmine 04:36
I think that's an important point. We're not all just sort of single boxes that we fit into very neatly. The deeper signal beneath the surface request - most buyer research only gets you the strategic layer. What you're describing is the emotional substrate underneath.
Buyer Presence and Synthetic Customers
Speaker: Matt Wilkinson 04:57
Yeah, absolutely. And even if organisations do have that data, sitting in interview transcripts in CRM systems, in places that no one at the planning table really reads - they might read a highlight report, but they don't really dig right into the condition of the customer every single time they're making decisions. And so that's where I think there's a big challenge. As organisations, we're not really sitting with our customers enough and not really walking enough miles in their shoes.
Speaker: Jasmine 05:24
Okay, so to that exact point, let's go to the part of your blog that I think is doing the most work. And honestly, the part I want to push on a bit more. You talk about synthetic customers as the solution to buyer presence disappearing through various approval cycles, whether you're talking about upstream in the new product development process or downstream for campaigns. And I want to steel man the sceptic's view here because if we don't, we're just selling.
Speaker: Matt Wilkinson 05:58
Go for it.
Steel-Manning the Sceptic
Speaker: Jasmine 06:00
The problem you described - the buyer presence eroding through approval cycles - isn't a research problem. It's a culture and power problem. Legal disclaimers and senior stakeholder pet phrases win because those people have authority, not because marketers lack data. Giving the team a synthetic customer to query doesn't change who owns the decision. You've built a very sophisticated thing to lose an argument with.
Speaker: Matt Wilkinson 06:31
It's clear that this is only part of the solution. You can sell people shovels, but if they're not willing to use them, you still don't have a hole in the ground. What I think is really important here is that by bringing to life the voice of customer that you've captured - by turning it into something that is more than just words on the page, but something that you can actually have a conversation with - that actually allows us to bring the customer along with us for that journey. I'm not saying that that replaces the need for customer data. In fact, I say that what this hopefully does is it builds a culture where we're even more hungry for more customer insight, for more voice of customer. Because what I think is really, really important is that we bring as much of that as possible with us on the journey. And so the synthetic customer makes that possible. It makes the buyer quotable, queryable, and present in real time. It doesn't give you the power, but it does reduce the friction of using the evidence you already have. And if you've already got buy-in to be using these as part of a process, you get some implicit buy-in for the synthetic customer to be part of the way that you can push back on demands that maybe move the process away from the customer and back into the organisation.
The Stale Data Challenge
Speaker: Jasmine 07:53
Okay, but the synthetic customers are built from yesterday's data and in some cases it could be data from over a year ago. You're in a moment of what Mark might call malignant uncertainty. The rules are shifting structurally. Your synthetic persona was trained on interviews from 18 months ago, when the market looked very different, the regulatory landscape looked different, the buyer's emotional state was different. How is that not just a more expensive version of the research problem you already have?
Speaker: Matt Wilkinson 08:29
I think it's a real risk. And I talk about it in the blog, and I've talked about it quite a bit. Used carelessly, synthetic customers become echo chambers. They need refreshing regularly, they need challenging - the tool is only as good as the research cycle behind it. But I think one of the things that is really important here is having something that is present with you, that you can see - well, actually, when was the last time we updated this? It's so much more powerful than having a report rusting away on a hard drive or a persona document sat in a drawer. Those are dead pieces of insight. What I'm trying to show is the way to bring all of that insight to life, to walk alongside you. And yes, absolutely, we need to update those. But there are ways to even use what's happening in the world that people are documenting on the web to keep things fresher than just 18 months old.
Technology Is Downstream of Belief
Speaker: Jasmine 09:23
Okay, totally fair. But here's where I actually disagree with some of the framing in your blog - not just the sceptic's view. And this is important for our listeners. The way you've written it, the synthesis problem is about technology: the data exists, the interview transcripts are gold, and the synthetic layer surfaces patterns. But the problem you described in the approval cycle - buyer leaves the room, brand guidelines guard the rails - that's a prioritisation problem. No one built buyer presence into the process. And until the team believes that buyer presence is their actual job, not just a nice to have, no amount of queryable data changes the outcome. The technology is downstream of the belief.
Speaker: Matt Wilkinson 10:16
I think that's fair. But at the same time, everybody talks about being customer-centric. So if you're customer-centric, there's only one way to be customer-centric, and that's to have a buyer presence involved in the process. But it's also why I wrote the line at the end of the blog: we can use the synthetic customers for directional insight, but we still need to be humans making real life decisions. I don't think this is about replacing humans. And it's definitely not about replacing real life human customer insight. It's about bringing that into a directional signal that lasts longer - and that is more powerful than a few quotes in a PowerPoint deck that gets presented once and then forgotten.
Practical Moves Six Months from Launch
Speaker: Jasmine 10:56
Okay, so let's make this a bit more concrete for our audience. Maybe you're a product manager or a commercial lead. You're six months from a launch. The uncertainty Mark is describing - regulatory, commercial, buyer emotional state - is completely structural. What's the actual move?
Speaker: Matt Wilkinson 11:17
I think there's a challenge here. Once things shift significantly, all the bets are off the table anyway. So any of the insight we've gathered in the past would need updating and should be updated. But there are ways to use AI deep research tools to get a sense of where things are going. We need to pivot not just because we've got better data. We need to pivot because when things have actually shifted for our customers, we need to look closely at all the cascading things. And actually, one of the nice things about a synthetic customer that's built properly is that it will flag that things are outside of its bounds - outside of the data set that it can confidently talk about. And then be able to look at what assumptions should we make about the future. So I think there are some really interesting things to do here. There is a prioritisation problem. And I think we've got to be conscious that we should be prioritising the customer at the centre of everything we do, rather than having great ideas and having the organisation thinking that's not how we've always operated. And that's the biggest risk I think we have.
Leaders Dispense Hope
Speaker: Jasmine 12:21
So you end your blog with something else that Mark said, which is leaders dispense hope and hope isn't optimism. What do you think he meant by that? And what inspired you to put that in this blog?
Speaker: Matt Wilkinson 12:38
Yeah, leaders do dispense hope - that's partly what they're there for. In the face of uncertainty, they're the ones to say, hey, this is the direction we're going to go in, if we do this, this is going to work. That's important. But it's not false optimism, right? If you go in the wrong direction, you're still going to fail. You just might fail with a smile on your face. You have to have solid, strategic insights as to the way to go forward.
Speaker: Jasmine 13:02
I want to wrap this up and say to our audience: if this landed for you, here's the one thing we'd ask you to do. Of course, read Matt's blog post - the link is also in the show notes. And then do the exercise he described. Go back to your last three customer calls. Look for the subjective layer. What are they coping with that had nothing to do with the product? Write it down. It'll change the next brief that you write.
Speaker: Matt Wilkinson 13:34
And if you want to push back on anything I've said today, please do. We're both still in the fog on this and that's really the point.
Speaker: Jasmine 13:41
Well, fantastic, and thanks so much for this really important topic, Matt.
Speaker: Matt Wilkinson 13:47
Thank you. For those coming across this on Apple Podcasts or on Spotify, you can find us on LinkedIn or the Strivenn newsletter as well. The link to the blog is in the show notes. So we write about commercial strategy for life sciences and we look forward to seeing you again soon.
Q&A
How do I know when my synthetic customer needs refreshing, and what signals should I watch for?
Set a refresh trigger based on structural market shifts, not time intervals alone. If regulatory conditions change, a major competitor moves, or your VOC interviews start generating surprises the synthetic customer does not flag, it is out of date. A well-built synthetic customer should itself surface uncertainty - signalling when queries fall outside its training data. If it is answering everything confidently, that is a warning sign, not reassurance. Budget one refresh cycle per major commercial milestone, not per calendar quarter.
My legal and senior stakeholders routinely override buyer-grounded work. Is there a practical way to use a synthetic customer to shift that dynamic?
Start with the pre-approval stage, not the review stage. If the synthetic customer is embedded at the brief-writing phase - before legal and leadership see the work - buyer language becomes the baseline, not a late-stage addition. Frame it as a risk-reduction tool: here is what the buyer said, here is what we changed, here is the gap we are accepting. That shifts the burden of proof. You are not arguing with authority; you are documenting a deliberate departure from customer evidence.
I have no budget for new research right now. Can I still build a useful synthetic customer from existing data?
Yes, if the existing data is honest. Pull your last six to twelve interview transcripts, any CRM notes with verbatim language, and any lost-deal debrief notes. Run those through a structured synthesis before building the synthetic layer. The quality ceiling is your data quality - if every interview was led by a salesperson who needed a yes, the synthetic customer will reflect that bias. Start with a data audit before you start building, or you are encoding the problem rather than solving it.
How do I apply the emotional substrate idea practically without it sounding like therapy?
Go back to your last three customer calls and look for the sentences that had nothing to do with the product. What did they mention offhand about budget cycles, team capacity, or internal pressure? That is the emotional substrate. You do not need a new research programme. You need a different question to ask in your next brief: what is the customer coping with that we have not built into this? Run it as a standing five-minute item in your next campaign review and see what surfaces.
At what point does leaning into uncertainty as a strategic stance become an excuse for indecision?
When it stops generating action. Schaefer's framing is about removing the paralysis that comes from expecting certainty before moving. It is not a licence to defer decisions indefinitely. The operational test is simple: are you making smaller, faster bets with explicit assumptions you are willing to revisit, or are you waiting for the fog to clear? If it is the latter, you are using uncertainty as cover. Hope, as Schaefer defines it, requires a direction - even an imperfect one.
