Brands fall into this same trap. They look at age, location, income, or whatever data point their dashboard spits out, and they build entire campaigns on top of it. They think they understand the person behind the number. Most of the time, they don’t come close.
I live alone. For some reason, as a kid, when people talked about what they saw in their future and what would make them feel happy if their lives had this in it, I always thought that having a small apartment where I could afford to live by myself, with no roommates, would be the greatest thing on earth. I have no idea where these feelings came from. I grew up in a nice home with a loving family. There were rough parts, like any family, but nothing that ruined my life or made me think I never want this set in my life. I just thought that having my own place and being able to live alone was what I dreamed of. And so, as I wandered through this life, as I still am, I live alone.
It never bothered me. My time with roommates and live-in girlfriends was fine. I had no trouble there, but even in romantic attachments, I still coveted the time when I was in the house alone. Not that I didn't love my partners or that I didn't have fun and enjoy my roommates. I just kept my eyes on the future, and someday I would live alone. I've been living alone for a long time now, and it still feels good.
Recently, though, I've been wondering about my choice because of all the scientific research that's being done on loneliness. Apparently, we have a loneliness issue not just in this country but all around the world. People are experiencing more prolonged bouts of loneliness than before. We're more connected than we've ever been as a people, and yet we're lonelier. Now, this could be a rant about computers making us feel isolated or the hate that gets spewed minute to minute online. It could be traced back to the push for the nuclear family as the be-all and end-all, but I have no idea. I do know that I’m feeling bad. I’m feeling upset and worried. But I’m not worried about being lonely. I’m worried that I don’t feel lonely.
At my age, I’m told I should have been settled with a wife and kids, a house with a mortgage, a garage full of tools, and plans for the future and my kids' futures. And when I don't have any of that, I’m supposed to feel lonely. But I don't. I don't care about any of it. I have my little apartment where I live alone, and it feels good. I feel fine. I have friends, I do shows, I meet people, I get out, and then, when all that’s done, I get to come home and be in my apartment by myself.
So I wonder who does these surveys and what this loneliness epidemic is doing to us as a people, and why it's happening.
The strange part is that none of this lines up with the story people assume about someone who lives alone. They hear the setup and skip right to the ending. Alone means lonely. Different means broken. Off the usual path means something went wrong. But that's not my reality. And the more I think about that gap between what people assume and what I actually feel, the more I realize that brands make this same mistake every day. They read a surface-level detail, fill in the blanks with whatever narrative is trending, and convince themselves they understand the whole person. They don't. And the cost of that misunderstanding shows up everywhere in their work.
The danger of marketing by assumption
People jump to conclusions fast. You mention one small thing about your life, and suddenly, they’ve filled in the rest for you. I tell someone I live alone, and you can almost see the gears turning as they decide what that must mean. They imagine a whole emotional landscape from one tiny fact. It’s strange when you pause and look at it, how fast we rush to finish someone else’s story for them.
Brands fall into this same trap. They look at age, location, income, or whatever data point their dashboard spits out, and they build entire campaigns on top of it. They think they understand the person behind the number. Most of the time, they don’t come close.
Assumptions feel efficient. They let teams move fast, make decisions, and act like they’re tapping into something true. But assumptions also flatten people. They turn real lives into cardboard cutouts. And when a brand builds its message on a cardboard cutout, the work almost always feels thin. It feels predictable. It feels like something written for a committee, not a human being.
There’s a deeper problem, too. Assumptions close doors. Once a team believes they know the customer, they stop asking questions. They stop being curious. They stop looking for surprises or contradictions or moments that tell a bigger story. They settle for the easy version of the truth because it fits the model they already built.
This is how brands miss opportunities that were right in front of them. They don’t see the people who don’t fit the expected pattern. They don’t hear the customers who aren’t speaking in the way the data predicted. They talk to an idea instead of an audience. And the work suffers for it.
Most bad marketing isn’t bad because someone lacked talent. Most bad marketing is bad because someone made the wrong assumption at the start and never questioned it again.
Real people rarely behave the way the brief says they will. Real people contradict themselves. Real people surprise you. Real people choose things for reasons they can’t even explain. And if a brand wants any chance of building real connection, it has to make room for all of that.
It has to start by admitting it might not know the whole story.
Why people behave in ways the data doesn’t predict
If you spend any time around research teams or strategy decks, you start to notice a pattern. Everything gets sliced into neat little categories. People in this age range behave this way. People in that income bracket choose these things. If someone buys this product, they must care about that value. It all looks tidy on the slide, and tidy feels safe.
But real life is nowhere near that tidy.
Most of us walk around as a mix of contradictions. We hold beliefs that don’t line up. We make choices that surprise even us. We fall in love with things we didn’t know we wanted and ignore things we were told we should care about. If you’ve ever watched yourself make a big decision and thought, I can’t really explain why I did that, then you already know how unreliable the usual models can be.
This is why so many predictions fall apart the moment they meet an actual human being. We’re not that simple. We’re shaped by childhood experiences, random encounters, private preferences, and long-held stories we rarely talk about. We’re shaped by friends, fears, old instincts, new hopes, and a whole list of things that never show up in a spreadsheet.
If the data had been looking at me as a kid, it would have predicted a very different life: nice home, supportive family, and education. The line would point toward the usual adult milestones. Marriage, kids, a house with a backyard, and a garage full of weekend projects. That’s the path that shows up in a lot of surveys. But that wasn’t what I wanted, even before I had the words for it. Something in me gravitated toward a quiet apartment of my own. That wasn’t rebellion or trauma or some dramatic story. It was just who I was.
And that’s the part most data misses. It can capture what people do, but not always why they do it. It can notice patterns, but it can’t feel what pulls someone toward one choice and away from another. It can’t see the small instinct that grows into a lifelong habit. It can’t understand the comfort someone finds in something that looks unusual from the outside.
People behave in ways the data doesn’t predict because people aren’t built from data. They’re built from experience. They’re built from the things they wanted when they were young and the things they lost along the way. They’re built from small joys, private worries, sudden changes, and the slow shaping of time. You can’t reduce all that to a clean model.
Brands run into trouble when they forget this. They try to build for the average person, but the average person doesn’t exist. They try to build for the expected story, but the expected story fits almost no one. They end up speaking to a version of their audience that lives only on paper.
If you want to understand why people choose what they choose, you have to step past the dashboards. You have to look for the human part, the part that doesn’t follow any chart. You have to expect surprises. You have to let go of the idea that customers will behave in predictable little lines.
The truth is simpler and messier. People do what feels right to them in the moment. And anyone who wants to reach them has to honor the fact that their reasons may never fit inside a tidy demographic box.
Brands don’t need better data. They need better curiosity.
Every year, there’s some new tool that promises to fix the gap between what brands think people want and what people actually do: another platform, another dashboard, another layer of numbers. The pitch is always the same. If you just had more data, or cleaner data, or faster data, you’d finally understand your audience.
But more numbers don’t solve a misunderstanding. Curiosity does.
Most brands collect data the way someone collects souvenirs. They pile it up, show it off in meetings, and hope it means something. But data without curiosity is just decoration. It won’t tell you anything until you start asking real questions. Why did someone choose this and not that? What were they hoping for? What were they afraid of? What moment pushed them to act? What moment held them back? Those questions sit underneath the behavior, and you can’t get to them with metrics alone.
Curiosity is slower than dashboards and a little less glamorous. It asks you to notice the things people do without thinking. It asks you to look at your audience the same way you’d look at a friend. You pay attention to the small habits, the odd choices, the inconsistencies that make them who they are. You listen for the parts they’re not announcing. You watch what they repeat. You watch what they avoid. You pick up on the stuff that sits quietly in the background.
That’s where the truth is, not in the chart, but in the small human moments around it.
When a brand leads with curiosity, it stops assuming it already has the full story. It stops treating customers like a block of data. It stops writing messages that sound like they were built for a target instead of a person. The work starts to breathe a little. It becomes looser and warmer, and the edges feel more real.
Curiosity also changes the way teams talk to each other. Instead of defending old assumptions, they start asking for better questions. They look for patterns that feel alive instead of neat. They become more comfortable with the idea that people don’t always follow the expected path, and that this unpredictability isn’t a threat. It’s information. It’s insight. It’s the good part.
You don’t need a thousand new tools to get there. You need people who are willing to look closer at the lives behind the numbers. You need people who don’t rush to fill in the blanks. You need people who approach the audience with the same attention you’d give to someone you care about.
When a brand trades certainty for curiosity, the whole picture changes. You stop trying to force people into the story you already wrote for them. You let them tell you who they are. And once you understand that, the work gets a lot more honest.
What happens when brands get people wrong
When a brand misunderstands its audience, the mistake shows up fast. You can feel it in the work long before you try to analyze it. Something feels off. Something feels thin. The message sits there like it’s waiting for a reaction that never arrives. It’s not that the idea was terrible. It’s that it was pointed at the wrong truth.
People can sense that. They know when a brand is speaking to a version of them that doesn’t match who they really are. They know when the message feels scripted, forced, or built on a guess. And once that feeling settles in, everything the brand says after that lands with less weight.
Teams usually respond by turning up the volume. They add more lines, more visuals, more claims. They try to compensate for the miss with noise. But volume doesn’t fix misunderstanding. It just makes the gap louder. The work starts to feel like it’s trying too hard because it is trying too hard. It’s trying to reach someone who isn’t there.
When a brand gets people wrong, it also burns time. Entire campaigns get built around assumptions that should have been questioned early on. Teams spend weeks polishing something that didn’t start from a real insight. It’s like building a house on soft ground. The foundation was never solid, so everything on top of it wobbles.
There’s another cost people don’t talk about enough. When a brand misunderstands its audience, it misses the chance to make real connection. That’s the part that hurts the most. You had someone’s attention, even for a moment, and you could have spoken to something they cared about. You could have met them where they actually live. Instead, you handed them a message that belonged to someone else.
The damage doesn’t always show up in dramatic ways. Sometimes it’s subtle. The brand feels forgettable. The work blends into the background. People scroll past it without thinking. A few months go by, and you realize the campaign never really lived. It never landed. It never grew into anything.
All because the starting point was wrong.
Most failed marketing isn’t a story about bad writing or bad design. It’s a story about misread people. It’s a story about a team that didn’t slow down long enough to learn who they were talking to. And once that first misunderstanding took hold, everything else followed.
The good news is that the reverse is also true. When you get people right, things start to click in ways you can’t fake.
And that’s where we head next.
What happens when brands get people right
When a brand finally understands the people it’s talking to, everything starts to feel easier. The work has more lift. The language lands without trying so hard. The message feels like it was meant for someone, not for a demographic chart. You can feel the difference the moment you read it.
People feel it too. They recognize themselves in the work. They hear something honest in the tone. They sense that the brand actually sees them instead of guessing at them. And once that happens, the whole relationship shifts. It stops being a broadcast and starts becoming a conversation.
Understanding people creates momentum. It gives the team a clear center to build from. Every decision gets simpler because the filter is real. Would our audience care about this? Would they laugh at this? Would this help them? Would this annoy them? The answers come faster when you’re not trying to impress a fictional version of your customer.
And when a brand gets people right, it stops relying on big dramatic gestures. It can speak with less, not more. A small line hits harder. A simple visual can carry more weight. The work becomes quieter in a good way because it doesn’t have to shout. It knows who it’s talking to.
It also builds trust. Not the fluffy kind, but the real kind. People trust brands that behave like they understand them. They trust brands that don’t talk down to them or make assumptions about their lives. They trust brands that take the time to learn something true about them. That trust doesn’t show up overnight, but it grows, and once it does, it becomes incredibly hard for a competitor to steal.
There’s a ripple effect inside the company, too. Teams feel more confident because the direction is grounded. They’re not guessing. They’re not scrambling. They’re building from insight. That confidence shows up in the work. It shows up in the way the brand speaks, the way it designs, and the way it connects.
When a brand gets people right, the work finally feels like it belongs in the world instead of trying to force its way into it. It feels like something built from real understanding, and people respond to that because we all respond to that. We respond when someone sees us clearly.
And all of that starts in the same place. It starts by questioning the assumptions that look obvious. It starts with curiosity. It starts with a willingness to look a little deeper than the surface.
Which brings us to the final turn.
The takeaway
I started this whole thing by talking about living alone and how people assume that must mean I’m lonely. One detail, and the whole story gets written for you. It’s a strange feeling when you realize how fast people do that, and how wrong they can be. I’m not lonely. I never have been. My life just doesn’t match the script people think it should follow.
And that’s really the point. Most of us don’t match the scripts that get written about us. We live outside the lines more than we realize. Our choices come from odd corners of our lives, quiet moments, old instincts, and private preferences that no survey can capture. If you want to understand someone, you have to let go of the idea that the obvious answer is always the true one.
This is where brands get tripped up. They build on assumptions because assumptions feel efficient. But efficiency is not understanding. Efficiency skips the good part. Understanding takes curiosity. It takes a slower look. It takes a willingness to question the story that seems the most convenient.
When brands get people wrong, the work feels hollow. When brands get people right, everything opens up. The connection gets warmer, the message gets clearer, and the whole thing starts to feel honest. People respond to that because they’re not being talked at, they’re being seen.
At ThoughtLab, this is the part of the work we keep coming back to. Understanding people is not a box you check. It’s an ongoing practice. It’s the root of every strong brand and every piece of work that actually reaches someone. The more curious you are, the more human the work becomes. And the more human the work becomes, the more it stands out in a world that’s crowded with assumptions.
So if there’s one thing to take away, it’s this. Don’t rush to finish someone’s story for them. Not in life, not in branding, not anywhere. Slow down, look closer, and let people show you who they really are. Everything gets better from there.
