In my last post I wrote about a gap — the one between what your customers are actually communicating and what our best interpretation of their behavior and words suggests they mean. Today I want to share a couple analogies that together may explain the gap most precisely. I will also introduce a solution that can close that gap.

The Rosetta Stone

In 1799, a stone was discovered in Egypt bearing the same text in three languages — one of which scholars could already read. It became the key that unlocked ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics, a written language that had been silent for nearly 1,400 years. It’s called the Rosetta Stone.

There’s something about the Rosetta Stone that’s easy to overlook.

It didn’t reveal new information. It unlocked information that had been sitting there for centuries — in plain sight, in museums, carved into walls — completely mute. One artifact, and suddenly an entire civilization had a coherent, accessible voice. The world could finally decipher the meaning of what had always been there.

Before the Rosetta Stone, scholars didn’t throw up their hands. They interpreted the hieroglyphic symbols. They brought experience and instinct to bear and produced answers that were reasoned, confident, and probably somewhat right. But there’s something disquieting about a civilization’s meaning being filtered through the imagination of so many scholars — however brilliant. The inscriptions were saying something specific. The interpretation was saying something plausible. Plausible, but in the form of a constructed story never verified by the only true source — the people themselves who created it. And there was no way to know how plausible — no context, no key, no ground truth to measure against.

Art, in the Wild

Let’s consider something more contemporary, a more familiar, and more relevant version of this same problem. Think, for example, of “Every Breath You Take” by The Police.

Every breath you take
And every move you make
Every bond you break
Every step you take
I’ll be watching you . . .

. . . Oh, can’t you see
You belong to me?
How my poor heart aches
With every step you take? . . .

. . . Since you’ve gone, I’ve been lost without a trace
I dream at night, I can only see your face
I look around, but it’s you I can’t replace
I feel so cold, and I long for your embrace
I keep crying, baby, baby please

Many people have heard this song as a passionate love song. It feels true. It lands emotionally. But Sting has been unambiguous: he wrote it about obsession and control. A surveillance anthem, not a romantic one. One’s hearing of it as a passionate love anthem isn’t wrong — but it isn’t accurate to the person who lived it and wrote it. And that distinction matters enormously. If we were creating a message or a product for Sting on the heels of this song, a campaign about romantic love might miss entirely. A campaign about power and possession would land squarely.

This is what conventional market research does when it interprets observations, survey and interview responses, and even personal, natural conversations of the group being studied. It doesn’t leave you in the dark — it provides an interpretation. The problem is it’s an interpretation ultimately shaped by the mindframe and imagination capacity of those analyzing the data — their paradigm. This frame and capacity shapes the questions we ask, what we hear in the answers, and the meaning we finally assign. The customer’s experience and is filtered through someone else’s imagination the entire way through.

This is a recipe for quiet, persistent uncertainty.

The path to solving uncertainty

I’ve conducted every kind of human primary research on behalf of clients — surveys, focus groups, ethnographic interviews, discourse analysis. And these tools are valuable. I’ve seen them deliver real insight. But I’ve also seen what they can’t reach.

Behavior can be observed. Words can be collected. It all can be triangulated. But what people do and what people say are both like shadows on the wall. Neither gets you to the source as a context — to the meaning your customers are quietly making of their own lives, their own choices, their own relationship with your brand.

We naturally and reasonably confuse the shadow of a thing for the thing itself — until something gives us direct access to the source.

Enter the Guiding Narrative® method of gaining customer insight. Like the Rosetta Stone, it’s not another research tool to add to the pile. It’s the key that makes everything in the pile finally coherent — finally readable on its own terms. It recontextualizes your existing data, grounds your brand decisions in the lived experience of your customers and gives you something no survey or algorithm or AI can manufacture — a direct line to the story your customers are quietly telling themselves to make sense of their world. In other words, how they make meaning — of their lives, of your products, of your brand.

(The diagram below illustrates the cause and effect of adopting a traditional view of customer insight and one grounded in the Guiding Narrative® Method.)

This distinction is critical because real confidence comes from clarity. And clarity comes from the source. You need a key to process the world, and data, the way the source does.

In my next post, I’ll walk through the Guiding Narrative® Method. What happens when you have that key in your hands — and what changes, permanently, for the leaders and organizations that use it.

If this resonates, feel free to share it with someone who’s been living with that quiet uncertainty of the analyst’s interpretation, whether that analyst is you, an in-house research team, an outside vendor or specialist, or combination of all three.

And if you want to talk about what clarity could look like for your brand, reach out directly by email or feel free to find a time on my calendar for a brief Zoom meeting.

The Pain

If you’ve spent any time trying to understand your customers — really understand them — you know this feeling.

You have data. You have research. You have smart people interpreting all of it. And yet somewhere underneath the confidence of your decisions, there’s a quiet uncertainty. You know what your customers do. You’re not entirely certain what their behavior means, or what your brand means, particularly to them in the context of their lives.

So you do what any good leader does — you interpret, you trust your instincts, and you move forward. Because uncertainty is not a strategy.

I’ve watched this struggle up close for 25 years, working alongside organizations as a market researcher and consultant — across dozens of companies, including Fortune 100 corporations. The leaders I worked with were exceptional. Capable, thoughtful, genuinely committed to the people they served. And almost every one of them was navigating a gap they couldn’t quite name.

The Gap

The gap is between what their customers were actually communicating — in their behavior, in their choices, in the stories they were quietly telling themselves to make sense of their world — and what the available research tools were returning. The tools returned interpretations that were plausible. Reasoned. Even triangulated. But never verified for meaning by the only true source — the customers themselves.

That gap is where brand decisions go wrong. Quietly, expensively, and often invisibly.

This bothered me. Not as a methodological complaint, but as a human one. These leaders deserved better than their best guess. Their customers were saying something specific, nuanced and lived. The tools were returning something artificially constructed.

A Solution

I sought a different way to approach understanding customer behavior. A key that didn’t just add more data to the pile but made all the existing data finally coherent — finally readable on its own terms.

Drawing on years of applied ethnographic research — in academic settings and in the field — I built it. It’s called the Guiding Narrative^® Method. While readers of this Substack may be familiar with The Guiding Narrative^® as a human behavior framework, the application to marketing and brand building as a repeatable method is very specific.

In my next post, I’ll show you an analogy that best captures what the Guiding Narrative® Method does for marketing and brand building — and why the insight tools we’ve been relying on to date, however valuable, can only ever take us so far.

If this resonates, I’d love to hear what brand uncertainty looks like in your world. Feel free to reply or reach out directly.

Data + Framework

Data doesn’t drive decisions. Interpretation does.

There’s an old adage that you can’t judge a fish by how it climbs a tree.

Similarly, in organizations two leadership teams can look at the same customer KPI dashboard and reach opposite conclusions—not because the data is wrong, but because their lens, or framework for analysis, is different. “Evidence” for decision-making results only after you apply data to a framework for interpreting the data and that framework is built upon assumptions about what matters, what’s normal, and what’s motivating in the life of the person or group you’re focusing on.

Is getting more data, quicker, an advantage?

We’re entering an era where the risk of misinterpreting data can accelerate.

AI and algorithms will generate infinite “facts”, infinite correlations, and infinite “insights.” They create the impression that we can know more, faster—and that better decisions are simply a matter of more “objective” measurement. But more output doesn’t guarantee more understanding. It can produce false certainty at scale: more dashboards, more models, more confidence—built on the same unexamined assumptions.

When the framework used to interpret data about people is not accurately grounded in the reality of the group you’re studying, you can easily get expensive outcomes: misallocated spend, the wrong product bets, ineffective messaging, avoidable churn, and internal friction between teams who think they’re “following the data.”

Also, decisions that might be rewarded with sales conversions and transactions in the short run could quietly erode credibility, trust and loyalty in the long run.

That’s why human-centered, contextual research has become more valuable, not less as a first line strategy in today’s AI-charged environment. It clarifies the meaning behind the signals. It reveals what customers and employees inherently trust and value, and why —the things the data can’t explain on its own.

When the lens is wrong, the numbers get expensive

In consumer and CPG lore, for example, the most common (and costly) analytics failures weren’t due to bad data—they involved what was likely good data interpreted through the wrong framework.

The Gap (logo change).

In October 2010, Gap abruptly replaced its iconic blue-box logo with a new wordmark and small blue square. After immediate consumer backlash, Gap scrapped the new logo within days and reverted.

Framework lesson: brand assets are not decoration; they’re recognition and trust infrastructure.

Trust/fairness risk: Netflix (2011 price/structure change).

In 2011, Netflix separated DVD-by-mail and streaming into distinct plans and effectively raised the price for customers who wanted both. The company then reported a loss of 800,000 subscribers in the following quarter as backlash and trust damage hit.

Framework lesson: customers don’t just react to price—they react to broken expectations.

Pricing/perception risk: JCPenney (logic vs. the lived experience of “a deal”)

In 2012, JCPenney tried to eliminate constant promotions and coupons in favor of “everyday” pricing. The market signal was brutal: the company reported 18.9% comparable-store sales decline in the first quarter of that strategy.

Framework lesson: “value” is often a social/emotional construction, not a number.

Permission/creepiness risk: Target (propensity ≠ permission)

Target built predictive models to identify shoppers likely to be pregnant and mailed targeted offers to win their loyalty early. Public reporting described how this kind of targeting could cross the “creepy line,” triggering backlash and privacy concerns even when predictions were accurate.

Framework lesson: prediction isn’t the same as permission—meaning matters.

In the AI era, the competitive advantage shifts from more data to better interpretation discipline—grounding what the data means in how people actually interpret their lived experience and identity.

The Proper Data Interpretation Framework
is the Innate One

Using data to make decisions should focus on the framework first: the necessary lens for understanding customer and employee data is their own Guiding Narrative®. This personal, inner story determines how individuals and groups interpret value, risk, trust, and choice. We call it the only story that matters® because it’s the structure that reveals an individual’s or group’s internal understanding of what their behavior means, as opposed the meaning observers interpret using their own lens. It’s what customers and employees use to make meaning of the world so it’s ultimately the filter that determines and explains how they will behave, and why.

In other words, the framework you should use for making accurate meaning of data about a persona’s or segment’s behavior should be the same framework the persona or group uses to make meaning of their own lived experience.

If you want better forecasting, better ROI, and fewer unforced errors, don’t just measure more. Use the proper framework. Start with the innate narrative that inspires and gives meaning to the behaviors you’re focused on, then use the data to execute with confidence.

It’s a better way.

Is AI a threat to your humanity?

Understandably, may people who are not immersed in AI as the greatest advance in their lifetimes are stressing about AI.

It’ll take our jobs. Isolate us. Make us stupid. Fight our wars. Control us.

And true, we can all point to examples where this has already happened, to some people, on some level. And yes, some of it may be inevitable, at some level. We call that “change.”

Your Decision

But whether you’re using AI to make your business more efficient, or using it to make your personal life more efficient and expansive, or are subject to how others may be using it in business and personal realms, you’re largely in control of how it impacts your humanity.

How AI ultimately affects your own humanity begins with an inflection point in your own Guiding Narrative®. When you imagine how the world works, do you envision yourself more a recipient of culture, or a contributor? Do you feel more that you inherit society or create society? In other words, are you a passive floater, or active swimmer, in the wave that is taking us as humans wherever it is we’re headed?

A tool

AI is a technology, a tool. To the extent that it will change how we create and manage other technologies, it’s advance is a reflection of its utility in driving evolution, much like the printing press, the steam engine, the Internet, and Labubus. Ok, not Labubus.

The printing press spread ideas, the steam engine enabled industrial production and mobility, the Internet facilitated far flung connection and collaboration. AI enables efficiency, reflection, and fantasy alike.

To the extent that you value technology-aided efficiency, reflection, and fantasy over everyday human interaction in different aspects of your life, you’ll gladly use AI. Where you prefer homespun humanity over AI-assisted efficiency, reflection, and fantasy, disregard it.

Choose. And if you don’t like how you experience how others use AI because it diminishes the human interaction you might have with them or their businesses, choose someone else, a different experience. (I know, you can’t always choose whether a bot is deciding whether you get a job interview or insurance coverage for a medical procedure, and there’s that deep fake thing, but that’s “change.” Adapt, and when you can, choose.)

Claim your humanity

Believe it or not, not everyone spends a lot of time online. Many prefer the vibration of a spruce top acoustic guitar to the raging blare of a Marshall amplifier. Some even still hand write letters and lick an envelope. Luddites? Or people getting great satisfaction from their everyday sense of humanity. Living their lives.

The tagline for AI, like for many technologies, should be “just because you can, doesn’t mean you should.” AI is here to stay and likely the attention it’s getting will be eclipsed by something new in the next 5-10 years, or sooner (quantum computing?). Decide where it will reside in your lived experience.

The bottom line: take control of your own humanity. Be the human you want to be. If everyone does that, the line where AI ends and humanity begins will be clear, certainly to you, and through cultural signaling, even to the most ardent of AI champions and purveyors.

We tend to think reality is something “out there,” fixed and shared.

But imagine this:

Two people stand at the same intersection when the light turns red.

One sees order, safety, and cooperation.
The other sees control, restriction — a tiny reminder of all the rules pressing down on them.

Same light.
Same moment.
Two realities.

Which one is real?

This question matters more than ever — in business, in politics, in relationships.

Because we are not living in one world.

We are living in billions of private ones, stitched together through fragile, partial but often shared, understanding.

And that is both the problem and the opportunity we face as a society.

Imagination

Each of us walks around with an internal “decoder” — an imagination — that turns raw experience into meaning.

It doesn’t feel like imagination.
It feels like truth.

We take in information, filter it, assign meaning, and project that meaning outward as if it were objective.

We believe we “get” reality. But we mostly get ours. We believe we “get” others. But we mostly get what our imagination tells us about them.

It’s important to note that by “imagination,” here, we’re not talking about a common use of the word to mean creativity or out of the box thinking; we’re talking about imagination as the boundaries of what we can perceive and interpret, and the limits of our ability to assign meaning to what we observe in our environment or to concepts others explain to us.

Often we look to outside guides to help us with the meaning of things: scripture, science, statistics, our education, authorities, influencers. But the extent to which we internalize these sources is also a product of our imagination as we make room for them based on what our imagination allows and values.

What we’re really doing every day to make meaning is projecting our own imagination on the world and rejecting that which either conflicts with, or lives outside of, our imagination.

A quick story illustrates how this works. A friend of mine relates how she, a blonde, blue-eyed, white American female was traveling in China with her husband, a male American of Chinese descent who appears Chinese. She speaks fluent Mandarin and was conversing regularly with locals in Mandarin. Her husband does not speak Mandarin. On several occasions, despite that she was actively speaking Mandarin with them, and her husband was not conversing, the locals she was speaking with continually asked if he, referring to her husband, was her interpreter.

The imagination has contours and boundaries we are not conscious of. It interprets what our senses detect in a way that fits a story we tell ourselves about the world.

Empathy helps — but even empathy is still our imagination trying on someone else’s life like a coat that never fully fits; that is, we try to imagine how they see the world.

Once we grasp this phenomenon of projection and rejection that takes place as a result of our imagination’s activity and limits, we realize that communication, marketing, leadership, relationship building all hinge on how well we acknowledge and understand the operating system inside another person’s mind.

Why This Matters

Think about business:

We ask customers what they want.

They tell us what they think they want.

We study their behavior.

We infer what we think they want.

We take notes, collect “data,” make observations, and then build products or services. We craft a story in our own minds about what others tell us they believe and what they value, based on all these pieces of what seems like “objective” information.

Same in politics. Same in relationships. Same at work.

We focus on observed “data” when what really determines values and behavior is individual meaning making.

And meaning lives not in so many survey responses, or purchase decisions, or browsing patterns, but rather in our individual imaginations. When it comes to customers, employees, or others with whom we have relationships, bringing them value comes down to grasping the meaning created by their imagination.

Coca Cola’s misadventure with “New Coke” is an example of where the imagination of marketers, company executives, and/or market researchers projected that, based on data, taste preference was the key driver for soda purchase and, therefore, Coke would offer a sweeter tasting alternative to their venerable product. There was a significant, detrimental backlash from customers not only that the product was not desirable, but that it was patently undesirable in that it diluted the attractiveness of the Coke brand. What the decision makers got wrong was that the driver for the purchase of Coca Cola was tradition, stability, familiarity, and nostalgia — concepts in the customer’s imagination. Taste profile was interesting, but secondary.

In the company’s imagination, the marketplace valued newness, change, and keeping up with innovation from competitors. In the customer base imagination, value was something quite different, and the Coca Cola represented that to them. Ironically, prior Coca Cola advertising campaigns promoted the idea of being “the real thing,” and “I’d like to buy the world a Coke” — ideas that tie into familiarity and tradition.

The “data,” interpreted within the bounds of the company’s and the researcher’s imagination at the time, “concluded” that the taste profile would drive sales. But data doesn’t conclude anything; people, or even AI, draw inferences and create conclusions based on the limits of their imagination. In this case, the collective imagination of the decision makers (maybe someone at a lower pay grade had a more expansive imagination) eclipsed them from a view that would have resonated with their customer base.

At the end of the day, the reality of the customer and that of the company’s executives, differed.

The Breakthrough: Guiding Narrative®

Over the last two decades, the work conducted by The Good People Research Company has centered on a simple question:

Can we step into someone else’s imaginative world —not through empathy, but through reconstruction of the story their imagination tells them — and decipher reality as they do?

The answer is yes.

We call this inner story a Guiding Narrative® — the blueprint that tells each of us how to interpret experience, opportunity, threat, hope. The Guiding Narrative® is both the source of our values and an on-board survival manual, explaining to us how the world works and our role in the world.

We have found through ethnographic field research involving rapport building, open conversation, curiosity, active listening, observation, and reflection, we can allow that internal narrative to surface naturally. We can then validate it along with the person who lives it, and map their meaning system. We then segment the audience based on the dominant themes that characterize their Guiding Narratives® in relation to what our clients are trying to accomplish.

This validation process is amazing; it’s often the first time individuals and groups come to realize the particular Guiding Narrative® that drives much of their values and behavior.

When we do this, something remarkable happens:

People feel seen.
Our clients feel clarity.
And connection becomes possible — not as approximation, but as alignment of lived meaning.

This isn’t a set up for persuasion. It’s translation between worlds that illustrates a clear path for providing value and building lasting, mutually supportive, relationships.

The people relationship skill you can have

Imagine designing products, workplaces, cities, healthcare, and institutions . . .

Not based on assumptions about demographics, psychographics, or behavior, but based on how people actually make meaning.

Imagine leaders who don’t try to categorize people based on a convenient framework, but instead understand the narrative they live in and meet them inside it.

That’s not soft.

That is strategic.

It’s how trust is built.

And it is how community trust and validation scales — from individuals to organizations, to society.

Parting thoughts

The red light is not just a red light.
A brand is not just a brand.
A person is not just a person.
A preference is not just a preference.

Each one is an experience, lived through imagination. And it is imagination that makes something mean what it means.

We don’t share one reality.
We co-build one, constantly.
Beware that “facts” are notions we individually define and decide to agree or not agree on. (Often there’s good reason to agree.)

When we recognize that, we begin building connection and mutual respect.

Not by asking others to think like us — but by learning to see as they see.

That is how we build understanding.

That is how we learn how to create value for others and ourselves.

And that is how we build businesses, relationships, community and a future that works — not for one imagined world, but for all of them, individually and collectively.

Think of everything you accept and reject as reality in your life, and consider where that comes from. How do you make your inferences? Why don’t we all accept, project, and reject the same things?

We differ in the contours of our imagination and, in turn, in the Guiding Narrative® that defines our values and directs our behavior.

We live in a world produced and negotiated by Guiding Narratives®.

Postscript

The idea that our imagination is what we use to experience reality is not something I made up.

Philosophers, sociologists, anthropologists, psychologists, and all manner of thinkers over at least the past 2400 years have evolved the idea that our sense of reality is indeed a product of our imagination, or at least what our imagination allows us to believe.

For those interested in learning more, I’ve provided a lineage of how this idea has evolved over the past 2400 years, with links to works associated with respective thinkers.