Your Marketing Is Designed for You. That's Why It Doesn't Work.

"I can't imagine eating durian ice cream," Seth Godin wrote this week, "is not the same as 'no one likes durian ice cream.'"

If you've ever watched tourists queue at a Bengawan Solo counter while a local rolls their eyes, you know exactly what he means.

Key Takeaway: Most SME marketing fails not because of budget or execution, but because it was designed for the founder rather than the customer. Closing the empathy gap: understanding what your customers actually think, search for, and respond to, is the highest-leverage marketing move available to any small business.

Written by Derek Chua, digital marketing consultant and founder of Magnified Technologies. Derek has spent over a decade helping businesses build marketing systems that attract the right customers, not just the ones they imagine exist.

It's a small observation with a large implication. We fail as marketers, Godin argues, "when we can't find the empathy to bridge the gap. It's a lovely shortcut to make things for yourself, to imagine that you are the client, the reader or the customer. But most of the time, you're not."

Most of the time, you're not.

That sentence should bother any business owner who's ever approved a campaign based on gut instinct, written copy in their own voice, or chosen a marketing channel because they personally use it.

You Are Not Your Customer

The empathy gap is the distance between what you'd respond to and what your customer actually responds to. It sounds obvious when said out loud. In practice, it's one of the most persistent problems in SME marketing.

Here's what it looks like in the real world.

A professional services firm hires a copywriter and reviews the draft. The owner rewrites every headline to sound more "authoritative" and removes the conversational question that was performing well in early testing. Reason given: "It doesn't sound like us."

A retail business owner runs Instagram Reels because she personally enjoys short-form video. Her actual customer base skews 45-60, spends the most time on Facebook, and has clicked the "Shop" button on exactly zero Reels in three years. When the numbers disappoint, the diagnosis is "Instagram just doesn't work for our industry."

A F&B operator designs a loyalty app with features he'd want as a frequent customer. His regulars, many of whom are not particularly tech-comfortable, quietly stop visiting because the new ordering flow is confusing. He attributes the drop to post-COVID dining habits.

In each case, the marketing decision was made by someone who was not the customer. The product was built for the founder's imagination of what a customer should be.

Three Ways the Empathy Gap Shows Up in Your Marketing

Your copy is written in a register your customers don't use. Founders often write formal, polished copy because that's what feels "professional" to them. Their customers, given the choice, respond to clarity and directness. Simple, specific language tends to outperform carefully crafted brand narrative. Not always. But often enough to test.

You're on the channels you use personally, not where your customers are. This one is nearly universal. Business owners who use LinkedIn professionally assume their B2B customers are there. Business owners on TikTok think it's the future of all marketing. Neither is necessarily wrong, but the starting point should be "where are my customers?" not "where am I?"

You're optimising for the customers who already look like you. Every business has a customer they enjoy serving. Usually someone relatable, someone who immediately gets the value proposition, someone who doesn't negotiate on price. That customer exists. They're also rarely the growth opportunity. If your marketing only resonates with people who are already pre-sold, you've built a ceiling into your own acquisition.

How to Close the Empathy Gap Without Expensive Research

The good news is that closing the empathy gap doesn't require a research budget. It requires talking to people and paying attention to what they actually say.

Start with five customer interviews. Not surveys. Not Net Promoter Score forms. Actual conversations, 20 to 30 minutes each, with customers who bought recently. Ask three things: what prompted them to start looking in the first place, what nearly stopped them from buying, and what they'd tell a friend considering your business. Five of these conversations will change how you think about your marketing more than six months of analytics.

Mine your reviews for the exact language customers use. Google reviews, Facebook comments, WhatsApp messages from satisfied clients. The exact phrases customers use to describe your product and what it did for them are the phrases other prospective customers are typing into search. "Air con servicing" is not how your customer searches. "Air con making noise how to fix" or "aircon leak dripping water Singapore" often is. The gap between how you describe your service and how your customer describes their problem is both an SEO gap and a copywriting gap.

Let data override instinct on channel and creative decisions. If you can only run one A/B test this quarter, test the thing you feel most certain about. High-confidence decisions are the ones that never get questioned, and that's precisely when they should be. Run the LinkedIn post and the Facebook post. Compare reach and clicks. Let the numbers have a say before you declare one channel dead.

At Magnified, We See This Pattern in Almost Every Audit

When we work with a new client, one of the first things we look at is the gap between how the business describes itself and how its customers describe it. The difference is nearly always significant.

A professional services firm using "bespoke, high-touch advisory" in its positioning is often being searched for by clients typing "accountant help IRAS audit" or "corporate secretary how much does it cost." A wedding business describing "timeless, curated experiences" has clients searching "wedding package all-in price Singapore." The value proposition and the actual search intent do not always align.

The most practical thing we do early in any engagement is show the client what their customers are actually searching for. It's not research for its own sake. It's a shortcut to empathy.

Once you see the gap, you can't unsee it. The marketing decisions that follow tend to be noticeably better, and usually cheaper, because you're spending on what actually moves people rather than what you'd personally find persuasive.

If you'd like to understand where your marketing has an empathy gap, our digital marketing services start with exactly this kind of audit.

Frequently Asked Questions

How do I know if my marketing has an empathy gap? The clearest sign is when your campaigns get engagement from people who already know you but consistently fail to attract new customers. If your content resonates with your existing audience but doesn't convert strangers, you may be speaking in a register that only makes sense to people who already share your frame of reference. Look at your best-performing content and ask: could someone who has never heard of you find this genuinely useful or relevant? If the answer is mostly no, you have an empathy gap.

Do I need to hire a researcher or agency to close it? No. Five customer interviews will give you more usable insight than most formal research projects. The goal isn't a statistically significant sample; it's enough context to understand how your customers actually think about the problem you solve. Voice-of-customer mining from existing reviews costs nothing and takes a few hours. Start there before spending on tools or external research.

What's the fastest way to start closing the empathy gap today? Go to your Google Business Profile or Facebook page and read your last ten reviews. Copy out the exact phrases customers used to describe your business and what it did for them. Compare those phrases to the language on your website homepage. If they don't match, update your homepage copy. This takes one afternoon and tends to improve both your SEO performance and your conversion rate simultaneously.

Should I rewrite all my marketing copy once I find the gap? Not all at once. Start with the highest-traffic page on your website, usually the homepage or your main service page, and update the headline and first two paragraphs to reflect customer language. Measure over four to six weeks, then move to the next page. Doing it incrementally means you can observe what's actually working instead of making a large change and being unable to attribute the results.

How often does the empathy gap come back after you fix it? Constantly. Customer behaviour evolves, new segments enter your market, and the founder's frame of reference keeps drifting away from the customer's lived experience the longer the business runs. The fix isn't a one-time exercise. The habit is staying curious about customers and regularly checking your assumptions against evidence. Businesses that do this consistently tend to spend less on marketing for the same return, because they're allocating to what actually works rather than what they feel good about.