The Variable Most Marketing Doesn’t Track

Why understanding who your customer is isn’t enough, and what actually determines whether your message works.

There is a variable that has been quietly engineered out of marketing and we need to bring it back.

It is not demographic depth, or psychographic layering, or the quality of the creative. Those matter, and enormous resources are spent perfecting them. But underneath all of it sits something more fundamental that the industry has quietly engineered out of the conversation: the question of who the customer actually is at the precise moment a message reaches them.

I call this receptivity state. It is the emotional and cognitive posture a person occupies in real time, which determines whether a message is processed, ignored, or resisted. And while it is the variable that most reliably predicts whether communication lands, it is almost never the one being measured.

Most marketing systems are organised around identity. They aggregate relatively stable signals: age, income, location, profession, behavioural patterns, inferred preferences. Even when psychographics are layered in, the underlying logic remains anchored to a fixed view of the individual, a profile that can appear highly precise and is nonetheless insensitive to the fact that this same individual will move through radically different states over the course of a single day. The profile captures who they are. It says nothing about who they are right now.

The Midnight Door

Here is the cleanest way I know to make this visible.

If someone knocks on your door at midnight with something to sell, your response has almost nothing to do with your demographic profile. It has everything to do with the fact that it is midnight and you were asleep. The same proposition that might land reasonably in the right moment becomes an intrusion in the wrong one. What changed was not you. What changed was your state.

Extend this across a working day. Several hours into sustained cognitive load, a person is either filtering aggressively to protect their remaining attention, or actively seeking relief from it. A message that adds friction is dismissed almost automatically. One that reduces cognitive demand can find its way in. The person’s data profile has not changed. Their state has, and that is sufficient to alter the outcome entirely.

I spent years reading this kind of signal in contexts where getting it wrong had real consequences. In intelligence work, the discipline of understanding not just what someone did, but what state they were in when they did it, was not a nice-to-have. It was the difference between understanding behaviour and misreading it completely. Marketing, for all its investment in data infrastructure, still largely misreads it.

Context Is Not a Detail

I am going to say something that will sound obvious once I say it, and that is precisely the point.

Last week, I tried to raise something logistically complex with Sohrab (husband) the moment he walked in the door, still carrying his bag, mid-transition from one part of his day to the next. The conversation did not go well, not because he disagreed with me, but because that was not a moment for processing complexity. I brought it up again over a walk in the evening, same content, different conditions, and we worked through it in about ten minutes. Nothing about what I was communicating had changed. Everything about the conditions under which I introduced it had.

My team does this intuitively. They know when to come to me with something that requires my full attention and when to wait, not because there is a protocol, but because they are reading the room. They shift timing, shift tone, sometimes defer a conversation entirely until the moment is more likely to produce clarity. This is not sophisticated management theory. It is basic human intelligence applied to communication.

What I find remarkable, and worth sitting with, is that as marketing has become more technologically advanced and increasingly described as personalised, this basic intelligence has been removed from the system. The industry has gotten more precise about who it is talking to while becoming less accurate about who that person actually is in the moment of contact.

Leaning Forward and Leaning Back

Rather than proposing an elaborate taxonomy of states, I find it more useful to work with two broad receptivity postures, because they are actionable and because most communications decisions can be mapped onto them with some rigour.

In a leaning-forward state, the individual is actively seeking information. Attention is available and directed. They are willing to process detail, compare options, read longer material, and justify a decision. Communication that provides clarity and specificity is rewarded here. In a leaning-back state, the individual is absorbing rather than evaluating. They remain receptive, but their analytical effort is low; they are responding more to tone, identity, and emotional resonance than to structured argument.

Most brands produce one form of communication and send it across both states. The result is a consistent mismatch: detailed information delivered when no one has the cognitive availability to engage with it, and atmospheric, high-level content delivered when someone was actively looking for specificity. The proposition may be entirely sound. The conditions required for it to be effective are absent.

What We Can Actually Know

This is usually the moment where someone says: you cannot know what state a person is in. And that is true, in the sense that internal states are not directly observable. But that does not mean they are inaccessible. The signals required to approximate them already exist within most data systems. They are simply not being interpreted this way.

Time of engagement is a proxy for cognitive availability. Platform context shapes behaviour and mode. Depth of interaction over time reveals intent more reliably than isolated actions. Purchase timing reflects the conditions under which decisions are made, and those conditions tend to repeat. The limitation is not a data problem. It is a model problem, specifically, the absence of any framework that treats state as a variable worth inferring.

This is, incidentally, where my actuarial background and my intelligence background converge in a way that I find endlessly useful in brand strategy. Both disciplines are fundamentally about drawing reliable inference from incomplete signals. You will never have complete information. The question is whether you have built a model that makes good use of the information you do have.

The Umbrella Story

The operational concern that usually surfaces at this point is proliferation: if you are accounting for receptivity state, do you not end up with an unmanageable number of messages that fragment the brand? It is a reasonable concern, and the answer is no, because it rests on a misunderstanding of what needs to change.

What needs to change is not the story. What needs to change is the entry point into the story.

The most effective brands maintain a central narrative that remains stable across conditions while allowing different surfaces of that narrative to be encountered depending on context. Nike is probably the clearest illustration. The core of what Nike says has not shifted meaningfully in decades: human potential, expressed through sport. But the way that narrative is accessed varies considerably. When the audience is leaning forward, the brand leads with performance: materials science, engineering, testing. When the audience is leaning back, it leads with identity and meaning: what discipline feels like, what effort means, what kind of person you are becoming.

The story is the same. The door is different.

Most communication problems that get diagnosed as creative or channel problems are actually state-alignment problems. The story was fine. It arrived through the wrong door.

Where This Lands in Practice

If alignment between message and state improves, the requirement for persuasion reduces. The message is no longer working against the conditions of its reception. Engagement becomes more consistent because the match is happening by design rather than intermittently by chance.

The structural question for any leader thinking seriously about this is not only who the customer is, which channel they prefer, or what creative approach works best. It is whether the organisation is capable of meeting the customer in the state they are actually in when they show up.

A content system built to do this is not dramatically more complex than one that exists already. It needs a single, clearly defined central narrative, multiple entry points mapped to different cognitive postures, and a distribution logic that is sensitive to timing, context, and observed behaviour. The brand remains coherent. The expression becomes responsive.

Most marketing effort, enormous amounts of it, is spent refining the picture of who the customer is. The more useful line of inquiry is who the customer is at the moment of contact, and whether the brand is actually equipped to engage that version of them.

That version changes constantly. The question is whether your communication does too.

I hope this helps reintroduce the concept of state in your work. Let me know how you do it? I’d love to figure this out together.

Cheers,

Your cross-legged clarity buddy 🐥