There is a question that has been quietly bothering me for some time now, and I suspect I'm not the only one who has wrestled with it. Have you ever looked at a marketing campaign that was genuinely well conceived, thoughtfully executed and well supported, only to watch it generate little more than polite indifference? Not outrage or active rejection. Just... almost nothing.

Most marketers have a well-stocked collection of explanations for moments like these. The audience wasn't ready. The value proposition wasn't sufficiently differentiated. The timing was unfortunate. The campaign needed more reach, better creative or a stronger call to action. If we're feeling particularly self-aware, we might even concede that we simply missed the mark.

Sometimes those explanations are exactly right. Marketing is, after all, an imperfect craft practised in an imperfect world, and campaigns fail for all sorts of understandable reasons. Lately, however, I've begun wondering whether there is another explanation hiding in plain sight—one that we rarely discuss because we almost never think to question the assumption beneath it.

The Assumption We Rarely Notice

Marketing has become remarkably good at understanding buyer journeys. We map them, measure them, optimize them and build entire campaigns around moving people from one stage to the next. Awareness gives way to consideration. Consideration becomes evaluation. Evaluation becomes purchase. Entire software platforms have been built around helping us manage that progression.

The model is useful, but I wonder whether we sometimes ask it to explain more than it actually can. Hidden inside almost every discussion about buyer journeys is a quiet assumption that deserves a little more attention: we behave as though the people in our target audience are already somewhere on that journey.

They may be near the beginning. They may be comparing alternatives. They may simply need another conversation or another piece of evidence before making a decision. Whatever their position, we tend to assume that the journey itself has already begun. But what if it hasn't?

That sounds like a subtle distinction, although I am increasingly convinced it is a consequential one. There is a profound difference between someone who is deciding among solutions and someone who has never recognized a reason to begin looking for one in the first place.

Those two people may occupy exactly the same demographic profile, hold the same job title and face the same organizational challenges. Yet one is shopping, while the other walks past your message without the slightest inclination to stop. We may see an unresponsive prospect; they may simply see no decision requiring their attention.

A Curious Conversation

Not long ago I found myself speaking with an executive whose organization, at least from my perspective, had an obvious opportunity for improvement. The symptoms were familiar. Knowledge was becoming fragmented. Teams were solving similar problems without learning from one another. Capable people were spending remarkable amounts of time reinventing work that already existed somewhere else in the organization.

If you have spent much time in organizational development, you have probably seen some version of that story yourself. I certainly had, which may have been part of the problem.

As we talked, it became clear that the executive saw something entirely different. From his perspective, the organization was functioning reasonably well. Were there inefficiencies? Certainly. Could communication improve? Of course. Did any of those issues justify changing direction or investing in a new approach? Not really.

Neither of us was being unreasonable. We were simply working from different explanations of the same reality.

Driving home afterwards, it struck me that I had quietly made a mistake. I had assumed I was speaking with someone who was considering whether my solution represented a better path forward. In truth, he had not yet concluded that there was a meaningful problem requiring a different path at all. He wasn't resisting my idea because, in any meaningful sense, he wasn't evaluating it yet. I had arrived with an answer to a question he had not begun asking. That distinction has stayed with me.

When Explanations Become Comfortable

The more I reflected on that conversation, the more I began noticing similar patterns elsewhere. Organizations convince themselves that staff turnover is simply the nature of today's labour market. Municipal leaders conclude that declining public participation is inevitable. Managers accept poor meetings as the unavoidable cost of bringing busy people together. Marketing teams assume declining response rates are simply evidence that audiences have become harder to reach.

Some of those explanations may contain a great deal of truth. The difficulty is that explanations have an interesting habit: once they seem to account adequately for what we are observing, they also begin to shape what we no longer bother looking for.

They quietly determine which questions deserve further attention and which ones can safely be left alone. Before long, curiosity gives way to familiarity, and familiar explanations acquire a surprising amount of staying power. This does not require stubbornness or resistance. It may simply reflect the remarkably human tendency to stop re-examining an explanation that appears to be serving us reasonably well.

In many respects, that tendency is a gift. If we questioned every assumption every morning before our first cup of coffee, very little would ever get accomplished. Stable explanations allow us to move through the world with some confidence instead of constantly rebuilding our understanding from scratch.

Occasionally, however, those same explanations become so comfortable that they prevent us from noticing possibilities sitting just beyond the edge of our current thinking. The explanation still works well enough, so there seems little reason to look beyond it. From the outside, that can resemble resistance. From the inside, there may be nothing to resist.

Perhaps Marketing Begins Earlier Than We Think

This has left me wondering whether marketers have sometimes been standing in the wrong place - a place, I might add, in which salespeople often feel pretty comfortable.

Marketers spend enormous amounts of time refining messages for people who are already evaluating alternatives. We work hard to establish trust, clarify value, reduce uncertainty and help buyers feel confident in the choices before them. Those remain important responsibilities, and I have no intention of abandoning them.

Yet a rather different problem emerges if many of the people we hope to reach never arrive at that point. Our first responsibility may not always be helping them choose differently. Sometimes it may be helping them see enough differently that a choice becomes necessary in the first place.

That possibility has slowly led me toward an emerging body of work that I will explore over the next few articles. It begins with a simple observation that feels increasingly difficult for me to ignore: before people compare solutions, they first have to encounter some reason to wonder whether their existing explanation of the situation is still sufficient.

That reason does not have to be dramatic. It may be no more than a contradiction they had not noticed, a consequence they had not connected or a question that had never quite occurred to them. But something changes. The settled explanation becomes slightly less settled, curiosity returns, and another possibility becomes thinkable.

Only then, perhaps, does something resembling a buying journey truly begin.

If that is right, our challenge as marketers is not simply to become better at guiding buyers through decisions. There may be an earlier task: creating the conditions under which thoughtful people become curious enough to ask one more question.

For me, that possibility is considerably more interesting than another conversation about click-through rates.

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