There is an old observation that if you ask the wrong question with enough sophistication, you simply become more efficient at arriving at the wrong answer. I have no idea who deserves credit for it, but I have always found the thought slightly unsettling. Intelligence, experience and good intentions do not necessarily protect us from beginning with a faulty premise. Sometimes they simply make us remarkably accomplished at pursuing it.

I have found myself returning to that thought as I have reflected on the role marketing plays before people become buyers. Not because I believe marketing has somehow lost its way, but because I have become increasingly persuaded that we have inherited an assumption that deserves another look. It is so familiar that we rarely notice it, yet it quietly shapes much of what we do: we assume our audience has already recognized that there is a decision worth making.

The previous two posts in what is a blog series explored what happens before that moment. We considered the possibility that people often live quite comfortably within explanations that make perfectly good sense to them, even when those explanations leave important things unexplored. We also considered the curious way explanations become settled over time. They stop feeling like interpretations and begin feeling like reality, which makes it increasingly unlikely that we will go looking for another way to understand the situation.

If those observations are even partly correct, they have rather significant implications for marketing. They suggest that some of the people we describe as prospects may not actually be prospective buyers at all — not because they have rejected what we offer, but because nothing has yet caused them to reconsider whether their existing understanding is sufficient.

We Have Become Experts at Supporting Decisions

Modern marketing has become exceptionally sophisticated at helping people make choices. We understand buying committees, decision criteria, stakeholder dynamics and customer journeys. We have developed remarkable tools for establishing trust, reducing uncertainty, demonstrating value and helping buyers evaluate competing alternatives. There is no shortage of evidence that these things matter, and I have no interest in suggesting that they do not.

The difficulty is that almost all of those disciplines quietly assume something has already happened before they become useful. They assume the prospective buyer has recognized a meaningful issue and begun considering whether something should be done about it. Once that occurs, marketing has a wonderfully rich collection of tools for helping the buyer move forward. Much of the market, however, may be standing somewhere else entirely.

When I think back over organizations I have worked with, I realize the greatest challenge was often not persuading people that one solution was better than another. More commonly, thoughtful and experienced leaders had developed explanations for their circumstances that were entirely sufficient to make further exploration unnecessary. Staff turnover was simply a difficult labour market. Poor meetings were the inevitable price of collaboration. Capability problems required more training. Culture was largely a matter of values.

The explanations were rarely absurd and frequently contained a considerable amount of truth, which was precisely what made them so durable. If an explanation feels complete enough, there is no obvious reason to go shopping for another one. In fact, from the perspective of the person holding that explanation, doing so might seem like a rather strange use of time.

Seeing Before Choosing

Imagine walking into a familiar room where the lighting is dim enough that everything appears perfectly ordinary. You can navigate comfortably, recognize the furniture and find whatever you came looking for. Nothing about the room gives you reason to question whether you understand what is there.

Then someone opens a curtain, and the room itself remains exactly as it was while your experience of it changes considerably. You notice a mark on the wall, a colour you had mistaken for another, perhaps an object sitting quietly in a corner that somehow escaped your attention every other time you entered. The additional light has not told you what to think about the room, but it has made it possible to think something you could not quite think before.

I have begun to suspect that many important buying journeys start in much the same way. People do not necessarily become curious because they encounter a more persuasive advertisement or receive another piece of information. Curiosity often begins because something causes the existing explanation to feel slightly less complete.

What once appeared inevitable begins to look conditional. What seemed like an isolated inconvenience reveals itself as part of a larger pattern. A distinction that had never seemed important suddenly changes the way familiar evidence fits together. The most important thing that happens in that moment may be surprisingly modest: a question occurs to the person that had not occurred to them before.

Perhaps it is, What if turnover isn't entirely a labour-market problem? Or, What if training isn't the only thing affecting capability? Someone considering organizational culture might suddenly wonder, What if the values we declare are less influential than the behaviours we repeatedly reward? None of those questions creates a buyer, at least not immediately. They do something earlier and, for the purposes of this musing, more interesting: they reopen an explanation that had previously felt sufficiently settled to require no further attention.

Creating the Conditions for the Next Question

That realization has slowly led me toward an idea that I believe deserves its own place within marketing. I call it FrameStretch, and the name describes something that belongs to the prospective buyer rather than something the marketer does to them.

Every one of us understands circumstances through frames that help determine what deserves attention, what can safely be ignored and which explanations appear most plausible. These frames are indispensable because they turn an overwhelmingly complicated world into something we can understand and act upon. Like every useful simplification, however, they inevitably leave something outside the picture or assign less importance to some elements than a fuller understanding might warrant.

FrameStretch begins with the possibility that marketing can create circumstances in which people become curious about those edges. Its purpose is not to replace someone's explanation with ours, nor to manufacture anxiety in the hope that discomfort will produce a sale. It is to introduce an observation, distinction, comparison, consequence or perspective that allows a thoughtful person to wonder whether there may be more to understand.

That gives FrameStretch an unusually simple central objective: create the circumstances in which the next question naturally occurs to the prospect. There is an important restraint embedded in that idea because the marketer does not get to decide that the frame has been stretched simply because a clever message was delivered. People stretch their own frames. Our role is limited to creating the conditions in which curiosity becomes possible, then respecting the intelligence of the audience enough to let them decide what to do with it.

That changes the planning question considerably. Instead of beginning with, How do we persuade this audience?, we might ask, What explanation currently makes further exploration unnecessary, and what question might cause someone to look at it again? Once that becomes the starting point, the work begins to look rather different.

A Question Is Not a Sales Pitch in Disguise

There is a temptation here that deserves some attention. Marketers are perfectly capable of turning questions into assertions wearing question marks, and we have all encountered examples that make the intention painfully obvious. Are you tired of wasting thousands of dollars every year? is technically a question, but nobody is likely to mistake it for genuine curiosity.

The kind of question I am describing works differently because it occurs within the prospect rather than being imposed upon them. The marketing intervention may never explicitly ask it. A comparison between two organizations might prompt it. A previously unseen consequence might do the same, as might a surprising distinction, a piece of evidence or an observation about something everyone has learned to accept as normal.

The marketer's craft, then, lies in designing the conditions rather than scripting the conclusion. That distinction also provides an important ethical boundary because FrameStretch should not depend upon making people less confident merely so that we can sell them something. If the expanded frame ultimately confirms that their current approach remains entirely sensible, so be it. The objective is enlarged understanding, not predetermined agreement.

Curiosity earned by revealing something genuinely worth considering is useful. Anxiety manufactured for commercial advantage is something else altogether, and marketing already has quite enough of that without my contribution. If FrameStretch is to be useful as a discipline rather than merely another clever way of describing persuasion, that distinction needs to matter.

Before the Buying Journey

This way of thinking has also helped me understand why FrameStretch needs to remain distinct from the marketing work that follows it. Once someone recognizes that their existing explanation may be incomplete, new questions tend to generate others. They begin exploring consequences, possibilities, approaches and eventually solutions. At some point, curiosity becomes problem recognition, and a person who was previously satisfied begins participating in something we can reasonably describe as a buying journey.

The challenge then changes. Buyers need sufficient confidence to navigate complexity, assess alternatives and continue toward action, which is the territory I have explored elsewhere through Confidence Leverage Marketing. FrameStretch occupies the earlier terrain, when there may be no buyer yet and therefore no buying confidence to strengthen.

That boundary matters because it prevents us from asking FrameStretch to do too much. Its success is not a signed contract, a booked demonstration or even necessarily a qualified lead. Its first success is considerably quieter: someone leaves an encounter with our marketing asking a worthwhile question they were not asking when they arrived.

At first glance, that may sound like a rather modest ambition for a marketing discipline. I am beginning to think it is anything but modest when we consider how much of any market consists of people who are perfectly satisfied not to think about us at all. Reaching those people may require something quite different from better persuasion because there is, as yet, nothing for them to be persuaded about.

The final post in this series, up next, will turn more deliberately toward practice. If the purpose of FrameStretch is to create the circumstances in which the next question naturally occurs, then we need to become much better at recognizing the explanations that keep people satisfied, finding the edges where those explanations no longer account for everything, and designing marketing that invites curiosity without rushing immediately to answer it.

Perhaps marketing has not been solving the wrong problem after all. It may simply be that we have become exceptionally good at solving a problem that occurs later than we thought — and that there is an important piece of marketing work waiting for us just before it.

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