The Curse of Knowledge. Why Is Your Marketing Talking to You, Not to the Customer?

When a copywriter looks at the same text for 10 days in a row, they eventually stop noticing typos. The mental autocorrect fixes errors before they even reach consciousness, and on the 11th day of checking the same piece of text, the copywriter simply subconsciously ignores the mistakes.

The same thing can happen with your marketing, content, or SEO strategy. It’s all due to so-called “Expert Blindness“. It occurs when an expert with years of experience cannot distance themselves from their product or service and simultaneously considers many things surrounding it as “obvious.” The result? They use jargon and language that doesn’t answer the customer’s most important question: “How is this product/service going to help me solve my problem?”

Being stuck in your industry and “bubble” for a long time, you might not realize that you are designing communication for someone with the same product knowledge as you. The problem is that such a customer does not exist, and sometimes “obvious” things need to be stated explicitly to get through to the other side.

The aforementioned phenomenon in customer communication is very common and simply stems from cognitive bias. Let’s take a closer look at what psychology has to say about it.

The Curse of Knowledge

The curse of knowledge is a term popularized by economists (Camerer, Weber, Loewenstein). It refers to a state where your knowledge on a given topic is so well-established and broad that you cannot imagine what it’s like not to know it.

How can this manifest in a Marketing Manager? You can no longer “unsee” the benefits of your product because they are obvious to you, which means you might omit them in your communication. As a result, you don’t step into the shoes of a layperson interacting with your product for the first time, and you fail to convince them with your message.

Marketing Myopia

Another phenomenon that fits into what we are discussing is Marketing Myopia. It manifests when you focus so much on your product that you describe its features or complex technical specifications in great detail, while ignoring the most important thing – the customer’s needs.

Déformation Professionnelle (Professional Deformation)

Déformation professionnelle probably needs no introduction, as many experts suffer from it, regardless of the industry. After years spent specializing in a given topic, it’s hard to look at a product or service as an outsider.

How can this manifest in SEO? Let’s assume your product is a CRM. Because of this, you try to rank for various industry phrases, such as “cloud-based CRM with API”. The problem is that such terms are known in the industry, but your customer might not know this is the name of the solution they are looking for. By focusing solely on industry phrases, you also miss out on problem-based keywords, e.g., “How to organize a customer database?”, which usually have much higher search volumes, meaning greater potential to reach customers.

The psychological phenomena mentioned above can cause a “disconnect” between what you communicate as a Marketing Manager and what the customer would prefer to hear. In such a situation, a so-called “Translation Gap” arises – you think you are communicating the most important benefits of your product. At the same time, the customer cannot find the elements that would convince them to buy.

To verify and improve your communication or strategy, it’s worth using the Jobs to Be Done theory (Clayton Christensen). It’s about thinking of purchasing a product and service from the perspective that the customer “hires” your product to do a specific job. This allows you to understand what the potential customer actually wants to hear. Let’s look at the comparison below:

Google research shows that between the impulse followed by a purchasing need and the actual purchase, there is a so-called “exploration” phase. It is precisely at this stage that the user, using natural language, seeks answers to their questions and confirmation of the kind of product they need to address their problem.

Answering bluntly: because you can’t read the label when you’re sitting inside the bottle. A Marketing Manager often needs an external partner to benchmark their communication, not because they “don’t know how to write,” but because they are too involved and possess “too broad” knowledge of their product.

A task for the Marketing Manager for today? Test your content using the so-called “mirror test.” Put yourself in the customer’s shoes and ask questions about your content to check if you are clearly communicating your message. How to do it?

Take your latest blog article or product description and do “The ‘So What?’ Test“:

1. You read one sentence, e.g., “Our solution is scalable.”
2. You ask yourself: “So what does that mean?” (The titular: “So what?”)
3. Answer: “You can handle more customers.”
4. Another question: “And so what?”
5. Answer: “You won’t lose money during the peak season.” -> THIS IS EXACTLY THE CUSTOMER’S LANGUAGE. By asking such questions, you will arrive at what should be the most important.