Projective empathy

Most marketing is written from inside the founder's value system and pointed outward. The team writes what would persuade them, and ships it to people who are not them. Projective empathy runs the other direction. You take a seat inside the buyer's worldview and let the company's own homepage, ad, and pitch make their case to you from there.

My training for this draws on Spiral Dynamics, a developmental model of value systems. The practical skill it builds is second-tier perspective-taking: holding several incompatible worldviews in mind at once without resolving them into your own. You sit as the optimizer, then the skeptic, then the clinician, and the same page reads differently from each seat. A line that reassures one drains trust from another. A look that signals care to one signals carelessness to the next.

The method depends on a distinction most research skips. What a buyer states is partly performance, including performance for themselves. Stated values sit on top of lived values, which sit on top of plainer desires, down to belonging and safety. Luxury, stated, is taste. Lived, it is wanting to be seen as having taste. Underneath, it is the fear of being seen as less. Reading the full column, rather than the line a survey collects, is what lets you choose how deep to pitch, deliberately, per medium and moment.

None of this changes what the product does or what you claim about it. The product does what it does. Projective empathy changes which honest fact you put first, for whom, so the right buyer recognizes the thing as built for them. That is the whole discipline, and it is the part of marketing that is hardest to hire one task at a time.