In my previous post, I suggested something that may have sounded a little odd to experienced marketers. I questioned whether we are too quick to assume that the people in our target audience are already on a buying journey. That observation has stayed with me, not because it overturns everything we know about marketing, but because it invites us to look a little earlier in the process than we usually do.

Before people compare alternatives, they first have to conclude that their current understanding of the world is somehow incomplete. Until that happens, there is very little reason to begin looking for a different answer. The more I have reflected on that idea, the more convinced I have become that we spend surprisingly little time thinking about the explanations people already carry with them.

We devote enormous energy to understanding demographics, psychographics, buying triggers and decision criteria, yet we rarely pause to ask a deceptively simple question: what explanation is already helping this person make sense of their world? It turns out that question may prove rather important.

We Don't Simply Observe the World. We Explain It.

Human beings have this neat ability to create coherent stories from incomplete information. We notice patterns, connect experiences and gradually assemble explanations that help us navigate work, relationships and everyday life. Without those explanations, our days would become mentally exhausting. We would constantly be reconsidering decisions we have already made and reopening questions we thought had long since been answered. (Some of us, sadly, tire ourselves with exactly that!)

Most of the time, those explanations serve us extraordinarily well. They reduce complexity, allow us to act with confidence and help us make reasonably good decisions without having to analyse every situation from first principles. Experience becomes useful precisely because it enables us to recognize familiar situations and respond without endlessly starting over.

The challenge is that useful explanations have a habit of becoming settled explanations. After a while, they stop feeling like interpretations and begin feeling like reality itself. We no longer think "this is one way of understanding the situation". Instead, we quietly conclude "this is simply the way things are". The transition is so subtle that we rarely notice it happening, which is perhaps part of what gives settled explanations their staying power.

When Familiar Becomes Final

I see this in organizations with surprising regularity. A leadership team concludes that innovation has slowed because employees have become more risk-averse. A municipality assumes declining participation in civic life reflects changing expectations among residents. A business accepts that customer loyalty is simply harder to earn than it was a decade ago. An executive explains persistent turnover as an unavoidable consequence of today's labour market.

None of those explanations are inherently unreasonable. In fact, they often contain a significant measure of truth, which is precisely what makes them so persuasive. The difficulty is not necessarily that they are wrong. It is that they become complete enough to discourage further curiosity. Once an explanation appears to account adequately for what we are observing, we naturally become less inclined to search for alternatives.

That, I think, is one of the quieter ways organizations become stuck. Very few leadership teams deliberately decide to stop learning. Most remain deeply interested in improvement. They read, attend conferences, engage consultants and encourage innovation. Yet even highly capable organizations accumulate explanations that gradually become part of the organizational furniture: familiar enough that nobody notices them anymore, but influential enough to shape what people see.

Eventually, those explanations can begin answering questions before anyone has the opportunity to ask whether a different explanation might lead somewhere more interesting. What appears from the outside to be complacency may, in fact, be something much more ordinary: a perfectly sensible explanation that has been allowed to do more work than it should.

Looking back, I suspect I have been guilty of exactly the same thing. Like many consultants, I have occasionally assumed that when an organization failed to pursue an opportunity, it must not have understood the opportunity clearly enough. The solution, therefore, was better communication, stronger evidence or a more compelling business case.

Those are not unreasonable responses, but they quietly assume that the audience has already decided the underlying issue deserves fresh attention. Increasingly, I wonder whether that assumption is where some of our marketing efforts begin to go astray.

The Quiet Opponent of Curiosity

When we speak about curiosity, we often describe it as though it were a personality trait. Some people are curious, while others are not. Some organizations embrace learning, while others become complacent. I have begun to think the reality is more complicated.

Curiosity does not usually disappear because people lose interest in learning. More often, it fades because their existing explanation seems to be doing an adequate job. If yesterday's explanation still appears to account for today's experience, there is little incentive to invest energy searching for another one. The mind conserves effort, not because it lacks intelligence, but because efficiency is generally a very sensible strategy.

That realization has changed the way I think about organizational change as well. Many change initiatives assume people resist new ideas because they dislike change. Sometimes that is undoubtedly true, and anyone who has tried to introduce a new expense-reporting system can probably provide supporting evidence.

More often, however, I suspect people are simply unconvinced that their current understanding requires revision. If the existing explanation still feels complete, why would they begin searching for another? From their perspective, there may be no unresolved question and therefore no obvious reason to invest attention in a new answer.

The distinction matters. One situation suggests opposition; the other suggests settled confidence. They may look remarkably similar from the outside, particularly to someone trying to sell an idea, lead a change or introduce a new way of working. Yet they call for very different approaches.

A Different Starting Point for Marketing

This brings us back to marketing, and perhaps to the point at which our familiar models begin just a little too late.

Traditional marketing does many things exceptionally well. It transfers trust, reduces uncertainty, demonstrates capability, differentiates competing approaches and helps buyers feel more confident about moving forward. None of that becomes less valuable because of what I have been describing. It simply raises the possibility that those strengths become relevant a little later than we usually imagine.

Before any of those activities matter, something quieter has to happen. A thoughtful person has to experience the faint but important realization that their current explanation may not tell the whole story. That moment rarely arrives because someone was overwhelmed with facts or subjected to increasingly energetic promotion. More often, it begins with an observation, a contradiction, a question or an unexpected perspective that gently reopens thinking that had quietly settled into certainty.

As marketers, we may be far more influential in that moment than we have traditionally recognized. We may have an opportunity to create thoughtful curiosity long before we attempt to influence thoughtful choice. That is a different kind of marketing work, and it begins not with asking how persuasive our message is, but with asking what might cause an intelligent person to look again.

That possibility has occupied much of my thinking over recent months because it feels like the beginning of a different paradigm for marketing. Before we ask how to move buyers through a journey, perhaps we should first ask what causes thoughtful people to conclude that no journey is necessary at all. And if their current explanation is what keeps that journey from beginning, then the marketer's first task may be to understand that explanation before attempting to replace it with anything else.

In my next post, I want to introduce the framework that I've begun systematizing from those reflections. It is built on a surprisingly simple premise: before we can expand markets, we often need to expand the frame through which people understand the problems they are trying to solve.

That may be where our next advances in marketing begins.