There's a Force Pulling Your Message Away From Your Buyer

You did the research. The interviews, the coded transcripts, the brief written in the buyer's own words. Then the approval process took hold, and the message that reached the market sounded like it was written for someone else. This book is about why that happens, and how to stop it.

A Force With a Name

You built the positioning from real buyer evidence. By the time it reached the sales deck, it read like an internal brochure, and you had to defend the gap to the CEO again.

Matt Wilkinson calls the force behind this organizational gravity: the structural pull that drags every commercial message away from buyer truth and toward internal consensus. It acts on the strongest teams as hard as the weakest. More research does not fix it. More stakeholders make it worse. The book names the force, then sets out the structural countermeasure.

Praise for the Book

"A compelling and fascinating take on a problem lurking below the surface of most companies." Mark Schaefer, author of Audacious and How AI Changes Your Customers

"One of the biggest hidden problems in marketing: companies drifting away from the buyer while believing they are customer-centric." Joeri Billast, author of The Future CMO

"Matt Wilkinson has named one of the scariest hauntings in modern marketing: the buyer disappears like a ghost between the research deck and the campaign launch." Ann Handley, author of Everybody Writes

"Synthetic customers are not here to replace real buyers. They are here to keep real buyers from disappearing inside the organization." Joe Pulizzi, Founder, Content Marketing Institute

The Diagnosis.

Where your buyer disappears between research and market, and why more research and more reviewers make it worse rather than better.

The Concept.

What a synthetic customer is: a representation of your buyer built from your own primary evidence, queryable at every stage, not a static deliverable that goes out of date in a drawer.

The Limits.

An honest account of where the technology breaks, and where it must not be trusted. The governing principle: synthetic for directional, human for decisional.

The First Move.

A concrete starting point for every commercial role, from the person writing the brief to the person accountable for the number.