Sixteen: Uncovering the Knowable

The authors describe the concept of gestalt: a whole that is more meaningful than merely the sum of its parts. Persuasion Architecture is such a gestalt tat brings together various bits of information (demographic, psychographic, behavioral) to create personas that provide a solid sense of the needs and criteria applied by a given segment of the market.

From the personas, a marketer can develop a strategy to speak to the needs of the customer, though various messages and channels, and to manage the customer relationship intelligently.

Especially since markets are composed of human beings, there is not only much that is unknown, but much that is unknowable, and cannot be discovered by any amount of investigation and research. We know at the onset that no two customers are exactly alike in every regard, and along the way discover characteristics in which they are generally similar, and that give us the ability to communicate messages that resound with large numbers of the audience.

An analogy is drawn to the construction of a building. It is unimaginable to approach such a large task without a detailed set of blueprints, but equally impractical to follow blueprints to the letter as construction proceeds and problems arise for which the plan failed to account.

(EN: The authors toy a bit with the difference in the definition of "discover" and "uncover" and I don't think they get it quite right. The lexical difference is that you can discover something you had previously not recognized, but to uncover it means someone else deliberately hid it from you. The distinction the authors mean to make is between discovering something in advance of taking action, and discovering it after the action has been initiated - both of which are discovering and not uncovering, and their misuse of words merely muddles the matter further.)

A bit more rumination on the blueprint analogy, and chewing on the same conclusion: that you should not act without a plan, nor cling so rigidly to a plan that you cannot make tactical changes as you discover the unexpected while in the process of executing on the original plan.