Marketing exists to create movement – from disinterest to curiosity, from curiosity to confidence, and from confidence to action, and then, hopefully, evangelism. Leverage is the ability to create this movement.
I first started thinking about leverage through a graduate school trading case study taught by Professor Ned Wellman. In the case study, a man named Bill learns that his city plans to spend $450,000 to demolish a magnificent 125-year-old building downtown.
Bill asks a simple question: “What if we could save the building for less than that?” » He convinced the city not to demolish the building, obtained incentives and found a commercial buyer. At the end of the transaction, he saves the building and pockets six figures.
History proves that it doesn’t take “money to make money.” You need leverage. For marketers, leverage changes everything. No amount of ad spend, content production, brand awareness, or funny one-liners can make up for the lack of leverage. Believe me. I tried.
Unfortunately, most marketing teams don’t realize they’re running out of leverage until it’s too late and the change is too costly. They have confused things that look like leverage with the real thing.
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5 false signals of marketing leverage
Here are some things I’ve seen marketing teams confuse with leverage.
False lever 1: Complexity masquerades as clarity
Some teams convinced themselves that they were explaining things simply when that was not the case. At this point, it’s easy to view the customer as the problem. The real problem is that marketing knows the product too well for clarity and assumes that customers are just as familiar.
I previously worked at a generative AI company. In their minds, their product was the simplest thing in the world. It took me three calls with the founder to understand what he was actually doing. Their prospects gave up well before the third call.
False Lever 2: Data masquerading as understanding
Marketers live in a fast-paced, data-driven world. But the more data is available, the easier it is to confuse observation with understanding. It’s like thinking you understand relationships because you attended a speed-dating event.
False lever 3: experience disguised as market understanding
If you were in sales in the 80s and 90s, you used ACT! contact management software. Then Salesforce and HubSpot came along and left them behind.
The success convinced ACT! they understood what customers would always want when they only understood what customers wanted at that moment.
False lever 4: brand awareness masquerades as trust
I’ve seen campaigns go viral for years and learned the hard way that being noticed is not the same as being trusted. Notoriety can attract attention to a brand and even make it memorable. But attention and movement are two different things. People move when they believe you understand their world.
False lever 5: intelligence disguised as persuasion
If there’s one thing marketers love, it’s a good phrase. But I’ve noticed that there are a lot of funny ads that don’t drive sales. The problem is when intelligence becomes the goal.
Clever ads attract attention, but attention is not movement. Marketing that moves people tends to say something true, accurate, or resonant enough to make customers feel seen, perhaps a little exposed. This builds confidence.
How to Build Leverage Commodities
The difficulty with leverage is that it is extremely context dependent. Marketers who can constantly move customers around tend to be obsessed with understanding them: what they want, what they’re afraid of, and the trade-offs they weigh.
They don’t try to get to know the audience. They study clients like a coach studies game film. They piece together this understanding from a handful of places, because no single system captures the complete picture.
Talk to customers
The best marketers I know spend a surprising amount of time talking to their customers. These conversations often have structure, such as tasks to be accomplished, voice of the customer, or CX mapping. The goal is to spot patterns in motivations and ideal outcomes that shape decisions but are otherwise easy to miss. I’m always amazed at what people reveal to someone who is curious enough to ask and patient enough to listen.
It’s more than surveys or personas. It’s about sitting down in front of them, in person, and talking with them one-on-one. I’ve seen major insights come from less than 15 customer interviews. One thing that made me forget that frameworks are like GPS. They are useful, but they are not always accurate. Better to keep your eyes on the road.
Look at what people actually do
I used to think customer interviews were the be-all and end-all. I softened this point because I realized that the picture they give is incomplete without seeing what customers actually do. Words are great, but behavior shows intent.
People mean what they say, but there is usually a reason why actions and words don’t match. That’s why the marketers I’ve seen develop an unusually deep understanding of customers don’t stop at interviews.
They combine them with careful observation of what customers choose to do. They use tools like analytics, heatmaps, product usage, and customer reviews to uncover what people struggle to express.
Borrowing the lives of others
Marketers who seem “lucky” often have proximity to their customers. Their world overlaps enough with the customer’s to create an intuition about what matters.
Plumbers can relate to HVAC technicians because their lives are similar. This type of intuition becomes more difficult when marketers have little direct exposure to the customer’s world.
I also learned that the same proximity that helps marketers understand customers can tempt them into overconfidence. “I am the customer” sounds clever, but it can create insular thinking. A person is a data point, not the market.
Listen to people who are already talking to customers
I’ve always found it a bit ironic how much big companies spend on understanding their customers while neglecting the people who already talk with customers every day. Each department spends its days collecting feedback on different parts of the customer experience, like the blind man and the elephant. Everyone experiences something true, but rarely sees the whole.
Good ideas come from a janitor, a frustrated sales rep, or a customer success manager who notices a trend. The challenge is usually not the effort. It’s about bringing all these partial truths together into a coherent picture of the customer.
Stay curious
ACT! The software felt comfortable being right. After all, they were right for 20 years. Why should Salesforce know the market better than them? They didn’t realize that their customers’ understanding had a short shelf life.
This is why the marketers best able to create leverage view customer understanding as temporary. They always listen, test hypotheses, and stay curious once everyone thinks they understand.
Get people moving
Now, if you’re still with me, what I fear you’ve learned from all of this is that understanding customers = having leverage. This is not the case.
This only becomes a lever when it is demonstrated and customers recognize themselves in what is communicated. This is when trust is formed and people open up to the move. That’s how Bill did it.
Good marketing works the same way. He says, “We see you. We understand your pain. We can help you.” It’s leverage: demonstrating understanding and building trust so that another human being chooses to move.
