Consumer psychology: most marketers know a buyer persona, not a customer

Do you know the classic one? "Our audience is María, 28, a marketer, she likes yoga and conscious consumption." That's it, the portrait is ready, we can start pushing traffic.

That "María" has had me fed up for ten years now. Because behind her there isn't a single living person - only the fantasy of a department that has never in its life spoken to the people it sells to. That is not a description of an audience. It's a civil registry record onto which somebody, for some reason, has stitched yoga.

And the funniest part is that with that record you cannot make a single marketing decision. Age doesn't tell you what the person is afraid of one second before paying. Gender doesn't suggest why they closed the tab. "Likes conscious consumption" doesn't explain which specific fear or which desire will finally make them get the card out. And that is precisely the job.

Demographics is not psychology

The big swap when working with an audience is when, instead of understanding the person, you take their form. Age, gender, geo, income, interests. All of that sometimes serves for setting up targeting, but with the question "why does he buy" it has almost nothing to do.

Purchases are not made by demographic segments. They are made by people who have a specific pain, a specific fear and a specific desire. A forty-year-old developer and a twenty-year-old student can buy the same product for exactly the same reason - and the other way round, two people identical on paper will go off in different directions, because one of them had the fear trigger and the other didn't.

While you look at the customer from the outside, you see a segment, a table and pretty buyer personas from the brand book. When you start looking from the inside, you see a living person with their doubts, their laziness and their distrust. They are two different levels, and the decisions that are born on the second one are simply unreachable from the first.

Three layers: what he says, what he does and what he feels

To understand the buyer you have to keep in your head that he runs on three levels at once, and they almost never coincide.

What he says. The least reliable layer. The person answers what is socially acceptable, rationalises, adjusts the answer to how he wants to be seen. Ask him point-blank "why did you buy" and he will give you the version for the gallery, not the truth.

What he does. This is more honest already. Behaviour lies less than words. Where he got stuck, what he reopened, where he went back to, at which step he fell off - that says more about him than any survey.

What he feels. The deepest and most important layer. The decision is almost always born from an emotion - fear, desire, distrust - and only afterwards does the person assemble a rational explanation on top, to lie to himself that the purchase was "considered".

All the real work happens at the joint of those three layers. The marketer who only hears the first one loses before starting. This is where customer research either begins or never happens at all.

What the psychology of the buyer is really made of

If we break it down, in a person there are several things you have to understand, and none of them is in the brand book persona:

• Fear and risk. What he is afraid of losing. Money, time, face. The fear of looking like a fool is usually stronger than the wish to save.
• Desire. What he really wants - not "to buy the product", but to close a pain, to raise his status, to stop suffering. The product is the means, not the end. This is the whole point of jobs to be done: nobody buys a product, they hire it to get something closed.
• Social proof. Who else has bought it, who he trusts, who he looks at sideways before deciding.
• The moment of doubt. The specific point where he goes still and thinks "they aren't scamming me here, are they?". If you don't know it, you lose people exactly there.
• Later rationalisation. How he then explains to himself and to others why he bought. That matters for retention and for word of mouth.

That is a map you can work with. Not age with yoga. And customer pain points are not a bullet on the list here, they are what the whole communication gets assembled from.

How to really get inside the customer's head

Now the most practical part. Understanding the audience doesn't arrive from meditating over the brand book - it gets pulled out by hand. A specific set of tools that works:

1. Read the reviews, even the dumbest ones. Especially the negative ones. That's where the living language of pain is, the objections exactly as they are formulated, and the words with which the person himself describes his problem. Those words are the ones that should later go into your communication.
2. Get into the support chats. It's a live broadcast from the customer's head at the moment when something really jams for him. Free, honest and underrated.
3. Watch the session recordings. Where a real user fights with your "intuitive" interface and calls it every name in the book. It takes you down a peg.
4. Interview not only the happy ones. The survivor tells a different story. Go to the ones who dropped off and shake out of them at which exact moment and why you lost them. Customer development only makes sense when there are losers in the sample.
5. Collect the voice of the customer from outside. Forums, Reddit, topic chats - that's where people talk about their problem in their own words, without knowing you are listening.
6. And the main thing: use the product you promote yourself. Not as the expert who knows it by heart, but as a normal person off the street.

Becoming your own customer: the method

The last point deserves unfolding, because it gives more than any report.

At the exchange I sat down one day and went through the whole onboarding from zero - not as a CMO who knows the product by heart, but as a terrified guy who is taking his real money into some crypto for the first time and is waiting with every cell to be ripped off. And at the verification, where we proudly asked to "just upload the document", I got stuck myself: the app didn't tell me what for or how long to wait - and I, knowing the system from the inside, thought for a second "this isn't a scam, is it?". If I thought that, imagine what a real beginner was feeling, the kind we were losing by the shovelful at exactly that step.

That's what the method consists of. You stop being yourself for a while - the expert who understands everything - and you become a person who hasn't got a clue, is nervous and doesn't trust. And all at once you see all your "obvious" wordings through his eyes.

And let's call this by its name. It's not "soft skills" and it's not "empathy". What empathy, come off it. It's dirty, exhausting, thankless work - living somebody else's anxiety, somebody else's laziness and somebody else's distrust for hours instead of admiring your brilliant product.

Frequent mistakes everybody crashes on

• Worshipping demographics. The form instead of the understanding. We've already seen why it's a dead end.
• Talking only to the happy ones. The classic survivor bias: you listen to the ones who stayed and you don't hear the ones who left in silence - and they left for the most important reason.
• Confirming your own fantasies. When you go to the audience not to find out, but to hear what you had already made up. Then any interview turns into an echo chamber.
• Skipping the emotional layer. You count clicks and conversions, but you don't understand what emotion is behind them. The numbers show what is happening, not why.

Conclusion

Marketing without understanding psychology is not marketing. It's painting buttons and hoping that one day you get lucky.

You, as a marketer, lose the war for the customer exactly at the moment when you skip the work of understanding him. In the end we are like actors - we have to get into the role of our audience, and only afterwards smear numbers on top to rule out our own biases. That is all any set of customer insights is worth: it either changes a decision, or it decorates a slide.

That's why when people tell me "we know our audience well", I ask one single thing: when were you the audience last time? Not looked at it in a dashboard - actually were it.