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The Buyer in the Loop by Matt Wilkinson, a number one Amazon Hot New Release

The Buyer in the Loop

How synthetic customers stop your buyer disappearing between research and market

 

For marketing, product and commercial leaders who build from buyer evidence, then watch it fade before launch.

 

"A compelling and fascinating take on a problem lurking below the surface of most companies."
Mark Schaefer, bestselling marketing author

 

Purchase on Amazon US

 

Purchase on Amazon UK

 

Invite Matt for a podcast or talk

Matt Wilkinson

By Matt Wilkinson, PhD, MBA

Founder and CEO, Strivenn · Forbes Agency Council member · Marketing Week CX50 2026, life sciences · BSI AI Management Practitioner (ISO/IEC 42001)

Featured in

ForbesMarketing WeekThe Association for Key Account Management

Is this book for you?

The problem

Your team researches the buyer well, then loses them somewhere between the brief and the market.

The promise

A grounded synthetic customer keeps the buyer present at inception, at launch and at the pitch.

The proof

Endorsed by Mark Schaefer, Ann Handley, Joe Pulizzi and Joeri Billast.

Who it's for

Life science and complex B2B leaders, whether you run a team of one or a team of thirty.

Why trust it

Matt is a PhD chemist and MBA, named to Marketing Week's CX50 for life sciences.

Your next step

Buy the book, or invite Matt to bring the ideas to your stage, podcast or team.

You did everything right. The buyer still disappeared.


The research was sound. The brief was written in the buyer's own words. Then legal softened the claim, the VP added the heritage line, and the message that reached the market sounded like it was written for someone else. The open rate told the rest.

What is a synthetic customer?

A synthetic customer is an AI representation of your customer, built using your specific buyer data: interviews, VOC research, sales call transcripts and competitive intelligence. Once built, it responds to questions, challenges messaging and simulates buying decisions as your actual buyers would.


Grounded in your own evidence, it speaks in the language your buyers use. Your team can question it at every decision, so the buyer stays in the room long after the research deck is filed.

A force with a name

You build the positioning from real buyer evidence. By the time it reaches the sales deck, it reads like an internal brochure, and you are the one defending the gap to the CEO again.

 

Matt Wilkinson calls the force behind this organizational gravity: the structural force that pulls every decision and commercial message away from buyer truth and toward internal consensus. It acts on the strongest teams as hard as the weakest, and it does its damage quietly. The launch that misses its number because the value proposition was written from the inside out. The competitive evaluation lost to a rival with a more specific, more credible message. The six-week review cycle that grinds because there is no shared agreement on what the buyer actually cares about. The sales team that stops using the materials because they do not match the conversations they are having. None of it looks like a single failure. All of it traces back to the same force.

 

More research does not fix it. More stakeholders make it worse, each one adding their own internal language and their own distance from the buyer. Every new AI content tool widens the gap, because scaling a process that was already losing the buyer just loses the buyer faster.

 

The Buyer in the Loop names the force and sets out the structural fix: a grounded synthetic customer, built from your own evidence, that stays in the room and pushes back in the language your real buyers use. So the message that reaches the market still sounds like it was written for one specific person, because it was.

 

This is not a case for replacing human research. The principle runs the other way: synthetic for directional, human for decisional. The book is precise about where the technology fails and why some decisions still need real people.

 

This book is not:

  • a case for replacing customer research
  • a hype piece about automating marketing
  • a pitch for trusting AI blindly
Organizational gravity

Praise for The Buyer in the Loop

 

“

"A compelling and fascinating take on a problem lurking below the surface of most companies." 

Mark Schaefer, author of How AI Changes Your Customers

 

“

"One of the biggest hidden problems in marketing: companies drifting away from the buyer while believing they are customer-centric."

Joeri Billast, author of The Future CMO

 

“

"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."

Ann Handley, author of Everybody Writes

 

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"Synthetic customers are not here to replace real buyers. They are here to keep real buyers from disappearing inside the organization."

Joe Pulizzi, author of Burn the Playbook

 

Already read it? Put it to work

Keep the thinking coming

Bring the buyer back into your process

The Strivenn newsletter picks up where the last chapter ends, with new thinking on keeping the buyer present in commercial decisions.

Book a 30-minute strategy call to find where your buyer drops out and what it would take to keep them present.

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About the author



Matt Wilkinson is Founder and CEO of Strivenn and writes for Forbes as The AI Marketing Scientist. In 2026, he was named to Marketing Week's CX50 for the life sciences sector.

 

He holds a PhD in Chemistry from the University of Bristol, an MBA and a Visiting Fellowship from Cranfield School of Management, and a BSI practitioner credential in AI Management Systems to the ISO/IEC 42001:2023 standard.

 

Book Matt for a podcast, talk or article

 

To contact the author, please email: matt@strivenn.com

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