02/06/2026
Your customer is nearly always wrong.
That’s the argument makes in this TED talk.
His point is that customers know the future they want, but they don’t know what gets them there. If they did, they’d already be there.
And that changes what your copy has to do, because if the reader is wrong about the road, your marketing has to be the thing that corrects them.
Phil has a phrase for how to do that, saying you need to be objectively disruptive.
Which means staying rooted in what’s true for the person you’re talking to, and willing to challenge them on the parts they’d rather not look at.
So If you look at what your business has been putting out over the past few months, how much of it is doing that?
How much of it reframes what the reader believes and challenges them where it counts?
Because it’s easy to drift into subjective territory.
Writing from inside your own experience, in language that sounds right to you and your team, with the service getting described the way you see it …
Or, watering things down because challenging a prospect feels too aggressive.
But both will produce copy that sounds “fine” and moves nobody towards the desired actions you want them taking.
