S2 Ep 39 The Ghost in Your Marketing Machine

This is the full transcript of A Splice of Life Science Marketing, in which Jasmine Gruia-Gray and Matt Wilkinson discuss Matt's blog The Ghost in Your Marketing Machine: how a buyer's words disappear between the research deck and the campaign launch, what organisational gravity is, and what it takes for a grounded synthetic customer to bring the buyer back into the room.

Opening: soft markets and broken telephone

Speaker: Jasmine Gruia-Gray [00:20]

Hey Matt, how are you today?

Speaker: Matt Wilkinson [00:22]

I'm good, thank you. How you doing?

Speaker: Jasmine Gruia-Gray [00:24]

Good. Shall we jump in?

Speaker: Matt Wilkinson [00:26]

Sounds good to me.

Speaker: Jasmine Gruia-Gray [00:27]

Okay, so this time around, we're talking about your recent blog, where you can feel it when a market goes cold. Demo requests slow to a trickle. Boy, I've definitely been there. Reps come back from key accounts with polite nods, no next steps. Then someone at the quarterly review says "soft market", in air quotes, and the whole room relaxes, because a soft market isn't anybody's fault and we're good to go.

Here's why I don't trust that phrase. In 2015, Mehdi Moussaïd, Henry Brighton and Wolfgang Gaissmaier published a PNAS study that amounted to a game of broken telephone, but with real science. The first person in each ten-person chain read articles on the benefits and harms of triclosan, which is an antibacterial in toothpaste, and then passed what they learned down the line. So, broken telephone. By the end, the message was shorter, less accurate and more alarming, and people had shaped the facts to fit what they already believed.

Now picture that chain inside a product launch. Customer interviews, persona, campaign brief, claims review, sales decks. Four handoffs, all made in good faith, and the customer's day gets shorter at every step. And what survives is the room's belief about what matters. The explanation for a bad quarter travels the same kind of chain, and nobody walks into the quarterly review believing their own launch lost the customer. So "soft market" survives every retelling and arrives sounding like a finding.

Matt, you told this as a ghost story and you borrowed The Sixth Sense to do it. Where did it start for you?

How Ivy disappeared

Speaker: Matt Wilkinson [02:35]

It all started with Ann Handley. She very kindly reviewed my book, The Buyer in the Loop. And when she did, the quote she gave me for the blurb that appears on the back of the book is: "Matt Wilkinson has named one of the scariest hauntings in modern marketing: the buyer disappears like a ghost between the research deck and the campaign launch." Now, Ann is one of my favourite writers, and that vivid imagery painted a picture that meant I started writing this pretty much straight away as a ghost story. And then I realised I had to save it for Halloween. And I wrote about six versions of this before settling on the one that I ended up publishing. I tried different ghost stories before settling on The Sixth Sense.

Now, the people in the blog are, of course, a composite. They're entirely fictional, built to make the mechanism visible.

Helen, we'll call her, runs strategic marketing for a diagnostics portfolio. And 18 months before a product update launches, she sits in on 12 customer interviews and one stays with her. There was an interview with somebody called Ivy, who manages a hospital lab, and Ivy talks about the run that fails at four in the afternoon, with samples queued and clinicians waiting on her.

She says she doesn't need the analyser to be faster. She just needs to believe the result without double-checking it. Helen writes that line on the whiteboard herself. And then for a few weeks, Ivy is the most present person in the building for her. And then the process goes to work. Product management needs a feature hierarchy for the stage gate. So Ivy's need to trust the result becomes "enhanced reliability". At launch review, somebody says, what would that mean in a regulated document? And so the line gets cut. By the time sales gets its deck, Ivy is a logo on slide nine and a stock photo of a woman holding a pipette the wrong way.

Nobody decided to shut her out. Each cut just looked like good housekeeping. But throughout that process, what she actually said and what she actually needs has completely disappeared.

Sam's sightings

Speaker: Jasmine Gruia-Gray [04:51]

So someone in your story does notice, actually. Sam, who runs customer insight for Helen, keeps reporting sightings. What did Sam see, and why did nobody listen to him?

Speaker: Matt Wilkinson [05:06]

Well, I think it's the fact that these sightings, they're much like ghost sightings. We claim them, but who believes them? A lab manager on a forum complaining about late-afternoon reruns in words that could have come straight from the transcripts, but it's just a one-off comment. A rep from a key account saying the customer had asked whether they could really trust the result. A competitor's new homepage leading on confidence at the end of the shift. The organisation explaining it away as anecdotal evidence. Maybe it was just a rep having a bad week. The strange part is when those words keep coming back as an echo. They go into the brief, but they get edited out slowly but surely.

Slowly becoming what the organisation believes rather than what the customer actually says. In The Sixth Sense, Malcolm comes home to a wife who no longer answers him and decides that the marriage has gone cold. Helen read the quarter the same way. The market had stopped answering, so the market must have changed, but actually it was the company that had changed their message, and they weren't aware of it.

Organisational gravity

Speaker: Jasmine Gruia-Gray [06:11]

Yeah, so that makes me think that changes what we should be auditing. If the room's belief is what survives, the assets with the most handoffs are the most distorted. And those are usually things like the website, the brochure, that the buyer reads on their own. Aren't we saying that the most heavily reviewed assets are, by design and definition, the ones least likely to sound like the customer?

Speaker: Matt Wilkinson [06:43]

Yes. In the book I call this organisational gravity. It's a force that pulls every message away from the buyer's truth and towards the safe internal consensus. It gathers where approval authority sits, which is usually furthest from the buyer. It doesn't need a villain. It's more of a physics problem than a pointing-fingers one. But it's a process issue.

At each of those points, there's nobody individual to blame. Every single change is perfectly reasonable. It's just by the time that an organisation has been through those approval processes, the customer's been edited away. And so they no longer see themselves and their problems in that. And it's not that it's an aggregate of a market need. It's just that it actually turns into being something that the organisation feels safe to say and talk about.

Speaker: Jasmine Gruia-Gray [07:37]

Right. I think some of it is that folks need to feel like they're contributing, obviously contributing from their roles and responsibilities, without weighing, on the other hand, is this really going to be valuable to the customer, and is this going to resonate with the customer?

Speaker: Matt Wilkinson [07:58]

Yeah, I think that there's definitely that challenge of the institutional safety, what we believe internally versus actually asking what's important to the customer. And far too often we do the research at the beginning, we think we've got it, and we don't actually end up going back to the customer and asking them again at the end of those projects. Sometimes we do, and it's good practice to do so.

But even if we do, are we going back to the right customers? Or are we just going back to friendlies that may actually just be echoing back to us what we already think? I think it's really important that we start being far more appreciative of the words that we hear, of the signals that we receive, and of the ghosts that might be hanging around in the system.

Turning up the volume

Speaker: Jasmine Gruia-Gray [08:44]

Totally agree. So going back to your scenario, how did Helen finally see it? In the blog you lean on the scene where Malcolm replays an old tape.

Speaker: Matt Wilkinson [08:54]

Yeah, so in that replaying of the old patient session, in a stretch of silence he turns the volume all the way up, and a voice he never heard at the time comes through the hiss. Now, it had been on the tape all along. Helen's version, of course, is less cinematic. I'm no M. Night Shyamalan. But Sam's team went back to the raw material underneath the research, underneath the persona, the slides, the brief, the deck, and all 12 interviews and every lost-deal call. If you start looking at all that information again, you can start building that into a representation of those customers, of what they say, something that we call a grounded synthetic customer.

And then we can start tracing those signals back to what we hear, rather than what we think we've heard, what's been edited away safely.

Speaker: Jasmine Gruia-Gray [09:41]

Okay, and so when Helen asked what Ivy would make of the campaign, what came back?

Speaker: Matt Wilkinson [09:49]

Well, if you're using a grounded synthetic customer, you're able to come back with the answers that the customer said, along with the sources attached to it. You can measure it against research itself. And I think that's the most powerful thing that we can do with AI, is to really be able to use it to try to better understand what we hear from our customers, to build better representations of them and try to serve the customer better. Like Malcolm, it can really help us try to hear things in the hiss that would have got lost otherwise.

Does the fix escape organisational gravity?

Speaker: Jasmine Gruia-Gray [10:23]

So does the fix, fix being synthetic customers, escape the same organisational gravity? The synthetic customer sits at the stage gate, so reviewers can ask what Ivy would make of a line before it ships. But your own chain was interview, persona, brief, deck, and a model looks like one more handoff.

Worse, the same research team ran simulations showing that even when the original message contradicts what people actually believe, small biases keep growing. Why wouldn't the synthetic customer become slide nine with better grammar, something people cite to win an argument without even checking what she said?

Speaker: Matt Wilkinson [11:10]

Well, I think there's the design rules around how you build those. The model can only answer from what the buyers said. But I think there's a bigger challenge here, and that is the challenge of organisational gravity itself. So, one, you can build a tool, but that's like building the rocket engine. What we really need to do is to be able to give it fuel, and that's where we then start redesigning processes around what we've already learned from the customer.

And I think the really important thing is that we have to give that organisational redesign the fuel, to build the rest of the process around the customer. It's one part of it. It's a way to give us the capability to escape organisational gravity, but it's not the whole of the fix. The rest of it becomes organisational will. Organisational gravity will beat the best rocket if we don't give it enough fuel.

Listening for the silent majority

Speaker: Jasmine Gruia-Gray [11:59]

So your synthetic customer is built from, for example, 12 interviews and lost-deal calls. So everyone in it talked to the company. Many of the buyers behind a bad quarter never actually say a word to a company representative. They read the product page, decide you didn't understand their day, and bought from someone else. If the tool can't hear those people, can it tell you whether the market went soft or rather your message did?

Speaker: Matt Wilkinson [12:35]

Well, there is the challenge of the silent majority. And listening to silence is incredibly difficult. But what you can listen to are the signals around that silence. So what is happening on either side of it? What do you listen to, or what are other people you speak to actually saying? But then there's: what are people saying in the market as well? And again, you're not going to hear the silent majority.

But you are going to hear the people on the edges. You can learn a lot from what people are saying on social media, in conversations that you might hear. And being able to fold that into your model of what the customer thinks, needs and wants is really important. And so there's a lot of data that we can't capture, but there's a lot of data that we already do capture that we're not tapping into, that can at least add a little bit of gain to that very faint signal that's there, that we can't hear unless we really, really listen closely.

Where to start without a budget

Speaker: Jasmine Gruia-Gray [13:26]

Okay. So say I run a marketing group for a portfolio of products. I suspect that my last product launch does have a ghost problem, and I won't get budget for a synthetic customer this quarter. What's the first thing I do, and what will it tell me?

Speaker: Matt Wilkinson [13:47]

So, run a small version of what it is. Synthetic customers don't have to be expensive. Most teams already own the raw material. They already have the transcripts, the interviews, the lost-deal calls, and you can start to analyse that data and pull out lines that surprise you, that stop the room.

Those are the important things. Then look at the messaging that you're using at the moment and weigh that against what you've heard. I think it'll be a pretty eye-opening experience for most teams to be able to look at the difference and the delta between those two.

Read the blog and the book

Speaker: Jasmine Gruia-Gray [14:23]

I think that's a really good tip. And maybe we should end on that. If you want the full story of Helen, Ivy and the four o'clock run, it's called The Ghost in Your Marketing Machine, at strivenn.com forward slash thinking. Read it for the moment Helen works out which way round the haunting runs. It will change how you hear the next quiet quarter.

Speaker: Matt Wilkinson [14:48]

Yeah, organisational gravity is one of the key subjects in my book, The Buyer in the Loop, and it's about how your best customer insights turn into a ghost unless you really, really pay attention to preserving them. There's a link to it on the website, and it's available at Amazon and other booksellers. But if you'd rather work through it on your own portfolio, feel free to get in touch through the website.

Speaker: Jasmine Gruia-Gray [15:10]

And thanks again for another interesting discussion, Matt. And I look forward to hearing input from some of our listeners.

Speaker: Matt Wilkinson [15:19]

Likewise, Jasmine. Thank you again for today, and look forward to seeing you all again soon.

Speaker: Jasmine Gruia-Gray [15:24]

Bye for now.

Q&A

What is organisational gravity in life science marketing?

Organisational gravity is the force that pulls every message away from what the buyer said and towards what the organisation feels safe saying. It gathers where approval authority sits, usually furthest from the buyer, and it needs no villain, because each cut in the brief, claims review or sales deck is reasonable on its own. Next week, take one live asset and trace a single customer line through each approval stage. Note where it changed and who changed it. That map shows you where gravity pulls hardest.

What is a grounded synthetic customer?

A grounded synthetic customer is a model built only from what real buyers said, drawn from interview transcripts and lost-deal calls, with every answer traced back to its source. Because each answer arrives with the original words attached, a reviewer can check the quote before a line ships. One person can start small: gather the transcripts your team already owns into one folder and tag each line by buyer role and date. That tagged set is the raw material any model will need.

Why is a synthetic customer not enough on its own?

A tool is only the engine. Organisational gravity will beat the best rocket if nobody gives it fuel, and the fuel is process redesign backed by organisational will. If the model sits outside your stage gate, nobody has to answer to it. With a small budget, pick one decision point, such as launch review, and agree a single rule: anyone proposing to cut a customer line reads the source quote aloud first. That one rule turns the engine into part of the process.

How can we hear buyers who never talked to us?

The silent majority leaves no recording. What you can hear are the signals around that silence: what people say on forums and social media, what reps pick up in passing, and what competitors start saying on their homepages. Next week, spend one hour collecting ten public comments from your target buyers about the problem your product solves. Add them to your transcript set, labelled clearly as public signals, so they strengthen a faint signal without being mistaken for interview evidence.

What can I do this week with no budget for a synthetic customer?

Run a small version. Most teams already own the raw material in their interview transcripts and lost-deal calls. Read through them and pull out five lines that surprised you or stopped the room. Then put your current product page, brochure and sales deck next to those lines and mark where each one appears, if at all. The delta between what buyers said and what you now say is your evidence for redesigning the process, and the business case for building the engine.