There is an assumption buried inside a lot of marketing strategy:
The person with the problem is the customer.
Sometimes that is true.
But the more expensive, complicated or consequential the purchase becomes, the less reliable that assumption gets.
A person can desperately want your product and still have almost no authority to buy it.
And this is where marketing starts speaking to The Wrong Reader.
Slack gives us a useful real-world example.
Before Slack became part of Salesforce, the company described something interesting in its 2019 SEC filing.
Slack said that growth inside customers often happened as usage spread within and across teams. Its net dollar retention rate at the time was 143%, which Slack partly attributed to that expansion.
That is a beautiful product-growth story.
Someone starts using Slack.
Other people see the value.
Another team joins.
Usage spreads.
But now take exactly the same product into a large enterprise.
Slack's own filings describe its Enterprise Grid offering around a very different set of concerns: larger organisations required more administrative control, flexibility and security at scale. Slack also highlighted compliance capabilities, including support for HIPAA-regulated organisations.
Notice what happened.
The product is still Slack.
But the argument has changed.
The employee may be thinking:
This is much better than email.
The enterprise buyer may be thinking:
Can thousands of employees use this without creating a security and governance problem?
Same product.
Different reader.
Different definition of value.
That is The Wrong Reader.
This is not a new problem
Marketing researchers were studying this more than fifty years ago.
In 1972, Frederick Webster and Yoram Wind published A General Model for Understanding Organizational Buying Behavior in the Journal of Marketing.
Their model challenged the convenient idea that a company has one "buyer."
Instead, they described a buying centre containing different roles: users, influencers, buyers, deciders and gatekeepers.
That distinction becomes extremely important for marketing.
Because each role can be evaluating the same purchase against a different objective.
The user may care about speed.
IT may care about integration.
Finance may care about economics.
Procurement may care about commercial exposure.
Leadership may care about organisational risk.
None of them is necessarily wrong.
They are simply reading from different seats.
And modern buying has made this messier, not simpler
In 2025, Gartner reported that 74% of B2B buying teams showed unhealthy conflict during the decision process.
Gartner defined that conflict as situations where members had conflicting objectives, disagreed about the best course of action, or were overruled by external decision-makers.
That number matters.
Because it tells us that the challenge isn't merely reaching several people.
Those people may not even agree on what a good decision looks like.
Think of a family buying a house.
The child sees the swimming pool.
One parent sees the commute.
Another sees the mortgage.
The grandparent notices whether there is a lift.
The investor in the family starts calculating resale value.
They are standing inside the same house.
But psychologically, they are inspecting different properties.
B2B marketing has the same problem.
People read according to the job in front of them
Research on attention gives us another piece of the explanation.
Human attention is selective and can be shaped by current goals. Research on goal-directed reading, for example, has found that people allocate attention differently depending on the question they are trying to answer; question-relevant information receives different attention during reading.
That makes The Wrong Reader more than a persona problem.
It is an attention problem.
Imagine a cybersecurity homepage saying:
A security professional might immediately care.
Now imagine the CFO reading it.
Their brain may be searching for something else entirely:
What financial exposure does this reduce?
What happens if we do nothing?
What does this replace?
Why is this worth the budget?
The sentence did not become bad when the CFO arrived.
It simply stopped answering the question occupying the reader's mind.
This is where I think a lot of positioning diagnosis goes wrong
Marketers frequently ask:
Who is our ICP?
Useful question.
Then:
Who uses the product?
Also useful.
But neither necessarily tells you whose belief allows the transaction to happen.
The question I find more revealing is:
Who needs to believe what before the money can move?
Because if marketing speaks beautifully to the user but ignores everyone else, the user inherits another job.
They become your translator.
The marketing manager has to explain your agency to the founder.
The HR leader has to explain the software to finance.
The security head has to explain technical capability to the board.
Your champion walks into a meeting you will never attend and tries to reconstruct your argument in the language of another department.
That is a dangerous place to leave your positioning.
And it explains something founders often find confusing.
A demo can go brilliantly.
Users can love the product.
Engagement can be high.
The prospect can genuinely have the problem.
And the deal can still disappear.
Sometimes your message wasn't weak.
Sometimes it worked exactly as written.
It simply convinced The Wrong Reader.
And if you have the same problem, I can be your fractional CMO and guide your marketing.
Do comment and share if you learned something new.