Your ad is written for the wrong person. That is why nobody calls.

01The baby uses it. The parent pays for it.

Who is the consumer of a nappy? The baby. Who is the customer? The parent. The baby cannot be marketed to in any way. A baby does not shop, does not know the product exists as a product, and the only feedback a baby gives you is crying.

So every single piece of that market belongs to the parent. The packaging. The ad. The promise. The price. There is no second audience to worry about, so nobody in that business gets this wrong.

The baby uses it. The parent pays for it. All the marketing belongs to the parent.

Obvious with nappies. Much less obvious with your own work, where the person who will live with what you build and the person who signs for it have slowly become 1 person in your head. Nobody decided that. It just happens, because it is easier to picture 1 buyer than 2.

02The microphone that caught me out

Here is the version that got me. A lapel microphone. Am I a customer for one? No. I already have one, and my voice carries well enough in a room that I often do not bother wearing it.

But could I be a consumer for one? Yes, easily. My team runs workshops, and not everyone on the team projects the way I do. So I might end up paying for a microphone I will never wear myself. And nothing in an ad written for "people who need better sound" speaks to my real situation, which is "somebody on my team cannot be heard at the back of the room".

Different role, different pain, different ad. An ad about bass and treble reaches neither version of me.

And this is why it is dangerous and not just untidy. Correct research aimed at the wrong role gives you confidently wrong marketing. You have real pains, written in real words, pulled from real conversations. They are just the wrong person's pains. Every line reads well enough that nobody catches it for 3 months.

Every line true, every line well made, and all of it read out to an empty chair.

03In a service business it is almost always 2 people

The person who will use what you build is usually not the person who signs for it. An operations lead lives inside the system every day. A founder pays for it. They want genuinely different things, and they are scared of different things.

I watch this happen every week in the work we do. We put an AiOS command center and a few Telegram assistants into a company, and the company brain behind them. The owner signs because of a number they want to move. The team uses it every morning. If the team never opens it, the number never moves, and nobody blames the words that started the whole thing.

That bottom row is the expensive one. A customer who never signs is a lost deal you know about. A consumer who quietly does not use the thing is a client who leaves 6 months later, and by then you will blame something else.

04Write it on 1 sheet, 2 columns, 10 minutes

The fastest way to stop getting this wrong is to stop keeping it in your head. 1 sheet. 2 columns. 10 minutes. That is the whole job, and it is the step almost nobody does.

Now count how many of your ads, pages and first messages talk to the right hand column. In most businesses the answer is nearly all of them, because the customer is the one holding the card and that is the person a founder pictures while writing.

That is the leak. The consumer is usually the one who raises your name inside the company. If nothing you have written makes their day sound easier, the conversation never even starts. You did not lose that deal on price. It never reached the person with the budget, because the person sitting next to them never brought it up. So give each of the 2 their own short thing to read, written for them, which is the same reason a thick document loses to 1 page a person actually reads.

05When the 2 of them want different things

Sometimes the person who signs wants something the person who uses it does not want. A founder buying automation that the team reads as a threat is the clearest example, and it is in front of me often.

Pretending that tension is not in the room does not remove it. It only moves it to month 3. If you know both people, you can handle it inside the sale instead of discovering it during a rollout that fails. And saying it openly tends to make the customer trust you more, not less.

So we say it out loud before we start. The owner gets the number. The team gets an hour of their morning back and nobody loses a job to a bot. If I cannot say both of those honestly, we are not ready to begin, and the same goes for the posts and videos we make under STORM. Some of them are for the person who signs. Some are for the person who has to live with it.

If only 1 of the 2 is happy, you have a client who leaves later.

06The 1 line test before you write anything

Before you write a single ad, page or first message, ask 1 question. Is the person reading this going to use it, pay for it, or both?

If you cannot answer that in 1 sentence, you are not ready to write yet. No amount of clever copy makes up for pointing at the wrong human, and the cleverer it is, the longer it takes anybody to notice.

And when a deal goes quiet, work out which of the 2 people went quiet first. The fix is completely different depending on the answer. The one who uses it needs an easier day. The one who pays needs a safer bet.

07Questions, answered