At the end of April, I sat in a beautiful meeting room in Tennessee and watched my marketing hero take a risk.
Mark Schaefer was opening his Uprising event, an intimate gathering of thirty or so marketers he runs each year at a ranch. He had the room. He had the credibility. He could have walked us through frameworks, case studies, the safe stuff.
Instead, he leaned in and said something I won't forget.
"I've never given a speech like this before."
What followed was a talk about uncertainty, anxiety, and what to do when the world keeps shifting under your feet. The deeper question beneath the marketing playbook. The thing most of us are wrestling with privately while we publish LinkedIn posts.
It hit. Hard.
Uncertainty as fuel
Mark opened with a quote from Yola Bernet, SVP of consumer research at Ipsos, who described our current moment as a "holy crisis" and a "new world disorder." Mark called what we are living through malignant uncertainty. The norms and traditions are gone. We don't even know what laws apply to us anymore.
Then he offered the reframe.
"Uncertainty is not a problem. It is not the flaw. It is the system, especially when it comes to business and marketing. Uncertainty is our fuel. Uncertainty is the life force of marketing."
That landed.
Uncertainty, in other words, is the way.
Mark broke it into three types:
- objective (the stuff outside our control),
- epistemic (the stuff we don't know yet),
- and subjective (the fog inside us).
The first two have known responses. The third is where most of us get stuck.
His prescription for the fog was elegant. Wisdom, he said, is not getting smarter. It is knowing what to hold on to and what to let go.
Mark's pandemic answer
The story that stayed with me was Mark's COVID story.
When the pandemic hit, his business went to zero overnight. Speaking gigs cancelled. Consulting paused. He made a decision that, in hindsight, looks obvious. In the moment, it was anything but.
He stopped writing about marketing.
His customers wanted help with what was actually breaking them. How to stay sane. How to lead a team through panic. How to sell anything when the world had stopped buying. So Mark wrote about that. He published essays on anxiety, leadership through fear, and selling in a pandemic. He wrapped them into a free e-book called Fight to the Other Side. Web traffic tripled.
There is a lesson buried inside that pivot. Customer-centricity is bigger than expressed need.
Buyers will tell you what they want from your category. They rarely tell you how they are coping with the rest of their lives. And how they are coping shapes everything: what they hear, what they ignore, what they have energy to act on, who they trust.
Listen only to category-level signals and you will miss the human you are trying to help.
Buyer presence is the problem
Here is the question I left Tennessee thinking about.
If we know this lesson, why is it still so hard to keep customers truly present in our marketing?
The honest answer is that buyer presence is an organisational problem, not a research problem. By the time a piece of content has cleared three approval cycles, the buyer in the original brief has been replaced by internal preferences, brand guardrails, legal disclaimers, and a senior stakeholder's pet phrase. The buyer leaves the room. The marketing remains.
This is the problem we have been working on at Strivenn. Voice of customer research is rich. Sales calls are gold. Interview transcripts hold patterns nobody at the boardroom table has time to surface. The data piles up. The presence slips away.
Synthetic customers are representations of your buyers built from real research, structured so they can stay in the room throughout your commercial process. They hold the patterns from interviews, sales transcripts, and surveys. Your team can query them at any point in planning, drafting, or pressure-testing the work.
Synthetic for directional questions. Human for decisional ones. The point is to keep the buyer present when they would otherwise vanish.
No representation is the same as a live human. Synthetic customers can echo yesterday's data. They need refreshing. They need challenging. Used carelessly they become an echo chamber. Used well they hold the line of buyer presence through the long stretch where most marketing forgets who it is for.
Hope is the strategy
Mark closed with a story about a former boss who kept a clean desk and one sign on it. The sign read: "Leaders dispense hope."
He drew a useful distinction. Optimism puts a spin on a situation. Hope says there is potential here, something is possible here, and we are going to act on it. Hope is not soft. In a moment of malignant uncertainty it is the strategy behind the strategy.
You cannot dispense hope to people you are not paying attention to.
So here is what I took home.
The uncertainty around us is not easing. The pace of change in life sciences, in AI, in commercial models, is structural. The marketers who thrive will stay close to their customers through it. Close enough to hear what they are not saying. Close enough to spot the seam that opens when the rules shift.
That closeness has to be designed into how we work. Built in.
Last week, I watched my marketing hero take a risk and give a talk he had never given before. He let the room see he was wrestling with the same fog the rest of us are wrestling with. And he reminded me that the way through this is to stay useful to the people we serve.
Uncertainty is the way. Your customers are coping. The technology to keep them present in your work exists.
The only question is whether you are designing for it.
