We’ve spent years chasing people who don’t exist.
Fictional consumers with fictional lives making fictional choices. They live on pitch decks, not in the real world. We call them “personas” — Eco-minded Emma, Conscious Chris — complete with Spotify playlists, morning routines, and opinions about sustainable coffee. They feel human. They make the brief sound strategic. But they are theatre. Another illusion of control in a discipline that still struggles to face chaos honestly.
From Demographics to Delusion
Demographics were crude, but at least they were real. You could find them in readership data, TV schedules, and postcode clusters. Psychographics and personas were meant to refine them — to bring empathy and imagination to the numbers. Instead, they turned strategy into fan fiction.
We started building brands for characters rather than customers. We narrowed our aperture just when we needed to widen it. And in doing so, we began designing for relevance to a fantasy, not availability to reality.
The Law of Reality
The truth is far less romantic. Most of the people who buy your brand will never look like your persona. They won’t share its values or its habits. They won’t think deeply about your category, remember your tagline, or notice your campaign strategy. They will buy you once or twice a year — almost by accident.
Decades of empirical research tell us something marketers still resist: brands grow by acquiring more light buyers, not by deepening loyalty among a few heavy ones. The Ehrenberg-Bass Institute calls this the “Double Jeopardy Law” — smaller brands suffer twice: they have fewer buyers, and those buyers purchase less often. Loyalty doesn’t create scale. Scale creates loyalty.
That’s not a philosophical statement. It’s how markets behave. Because category buyers are promiscuous. They move between brands with ease. The difference between a leader and a challenger isn’t emotional depth. It’s reach — mental and physical availability.
Availability Beats Relevance
When you build work around a narrow persona, you’re optimising for precision at the expense of penetration. You’re designing messages that speak clearly to a few people who already care, rather than making it easy for everyone else to notice, remember, and buy.
Real growth happens when you make your brand easy to think of and easy to find — across as many buying situations as possible. That means showing up in contexts you didn’t plan for, in conversations you don’t control, and in memories formed long before someone knows they’re in the market.
It’s less about knowing the customer intimately and more about being impossible to ignore. That requires distinctiveness, not detail. Salience, not segmentation.
The Seduction of Specificity
Personas persist because they make complex systems feel manageable. They offer a comforting illusion: that the market can be tamed if we just understand it deeply enough. But marketing isn’t matchmaking. It’s probability management. The job isn’t to fall in love with the ideal customer — it’s to increase the odds of being chosen by anyone.
Your heaviest buyers, the ones who seem most “loyal”, are a small fraction of your potential market. They matter, but they cannot carry you. Growth depends on the distracted, disloyal, occasionally curious masses who will only ever give you a fleeting moment of their attention — if you’re lucky.
The Real Work of Empathy
This doesn’t mean abandoning empathy. It means redirecting it. Away from imagined individuals and towards the reality of how people actually buy — quickly, inconsistently, under cognitive load. Empathy in branding isn’t knowing your customer’s coffee order. It’s understanding their indifference and designing for it.
So, stop writing fiction. Stop treating marketing like a novel where every character has an arc. Instead, design for a world where attention is fractured, choices are impulsive, and loyalty is borrowed. Build a brand distinctive enough to be noticed by anyone, memorable enough to be recalled, and available enough to be chosen.
Your audience isn’t who you imagine. It’s whoever happens to notice you — briefly, incidentally, sometimes only once — and remembers you just long enough to buy.
That’s not cynicism. That’s reality. And the sooner we build for it, the more powerful our brands become.