IDEAS / POST
Mind The Gap
What You Think You’re Selling Isn’t What They Think They’re Buying
At Victoria Tech Week this fall, Dave Nicholls and I got on stage and unpacked a lifetime’s worth of experience on a subject near and dear to our brand-building hearts: the Translation Gap.
The Translation Gap is a well-known, and broad concept in business. We tightened it up within the context of marketing – defining it as the distance between what you think you’re selling and what your buyer thinks they’re buying.
What makes the Gap such an entertaining topic from an outsider’s perspective (and so infuriating if you’re experiencing it firsthand) is how ubiquitous it is. Dave and I haven’t met many companies – from massive multinationals to garage startups – that aren’t struggling with some form of the Gap.
For our talk, however, we picked the cherries – examples that were both entertaining and enlightening.
Your Buyer Changes As You Grow. Your Pitch Has To Change, Too
One of my clients makes software that monitors the oil inside electrical transformers. When that oil degrades, transformers explode. Spectacularly, and at a cost of millions.
The founder is a deeply technical guy. Which, for years, led to good business results. He was an engineer-scientist, selling to other engineer-scientists. Everybody spoke the same language, and had the same secret handshake.
Then the company grew, and the utilities consolidated. Suddenly, the engineers didn’t have a say in procurement – CFOs did.
And CFOs don’t talk, or think like engineers. The Gap happened.
Happily, the company overhauled its pitch, and GTM. It figured out how to translate engineer selling points into financial selling points. This was beautifully illustrated In a recent research project, where I interviewed more than 25 of their customers. One of those was an insurance person catering to utilities. His insight, in my humble opinion, was bold enough to build a CFO-centric pitch on: if you don’t use this monitoring, I won’t insure you.
That’s how you sell a CFO, and cross the Gap.
Nobody Can Say Yes?
E-Glass was a pandemic innovation, a piece of hardware that literally puts a teacher in the same picture as their board writing. Students on Zoom see the teacher’s face and writing. They see the teacher gesture at the important stuff. They’re literally drawn into the screen.
Teachers loved it. So did edtech procurement, apparently. The first order was 2,500 units from a California school board. Product / market fit? Check.
Then we tried to sell to more school boards, and walked into a ‘Mexican standoff’. If the term is unfamiliar, it’s a Western movie meme: three or four gunslingers point their shootin’ irons at each other. Nobody can fire without getting shot, so nobody moves.
Education, we discovered, works the same way. Teachers, principals, school boards, government and parents all hold a no vote. None of them holds a yes vote that overrides the others. And each ‘gunslinger’ has their own agenda:
- Teachers want to help kids.
- Principals want to keep their jobs and not rock the boat.
- School boards want to save money in a politically performative way.
- Government wants to be seen spending it.
- Parents want to know everyone above is doing their job in harmony.
In this case, the Translation Gap wasn’t even between E-Glass and the customers. It was between the customer stakeholders. No common goals, no common understanding. And my client in the middle.
Sales ground to a halt. The Gap never resolved itself. You know how the story ends.
Don’t Build a Supercar With Manual Gears For People Who Want An Automatic
Dave’s turn. For anyone outside the industry, BC liquor sales data has been a black box for 50 years. You know what you sold and nothing about anyone else. In places like Ontario, on the other hand, you can see what your competitor sold in the store across the street last week.
Dave found a company that had cracked open the BC data. He built beautiful charts that brand teams could drop straight into presentations, covering share, velocity, and even who was buying where and when. In demos people said, “I’ve never seen anything like this.”
Then they said, “I’ll get back to you.” They didn’t.
What they actually wanted to know was why their beer wasn’t selling in a particular store. They didn’t want a dashboard. They wanted the answer. These were teams who’d never used a data tool in their lives, because BC never had the data. The only time the product really worked was when Dave sat with a customer for fifteen minutes every two weeks and walked them through it. That’s a consulting practice, not a product, and it doesn’t scale.
Dave had designed a supercar with a stick shift for a market that only knew how to drive an automatic. He’d built the tool for himself, and that’s a market of one.
Find The Person, Get Inside Their Skin, And Add A Dash of Creativity
Now a happy story. I was on the agency team that won Bud Light in Canada. This is the story of a client who understood their customer better than anyone I’ve worked with before or since. And it’s a shining example of the good things that happen when you close the Translation Gap.
At our first meeting, the Bud Light clients didn’t hand us demographics charts. They brought a mood board filled with snapshots of everything their target drinker was, loved and did. They called him Bob. It might have been Joe. I honestly don’t remember, but he was an everyman, and he felt real.
They went on to describe him. In college, Bob wore a backwards ball cap, played football, dated the cheerleader and thought a great Friday night meant crushing beer cans against his forehead. Fifteen years later he’d married the cheerleader, bought a house with a white picket fence and had a kid. All his old buddies were living the same life down the block.
Bob couldn’t party like he used to. His waistline didn’t like it, his wife didn’t like it, and his kid wanted to play Saturday morning at 6am, hangover be damned. His weekends were chores, dull garden parties and Friday nights in. What he wanted was a little escape, a few hours of the old glory with his friends. Bud Light let him have two or three beers without getting drunk, getting fat or paying for it the next morning.
Compare that with the usual brief, “males 25–34, 1.5 children.” One is a person. The other is a spreadsheet.
The insight alone doesn’t win, though. The magic happens when you add a sprinkle of creativity and show what’s going on inside Bob’s head.
Our campaign? We created the Bud Light Institute, dedicated to helping guys like Bob escape the mundane. Some examples from our commercials:
- The Attic Launcher: Stuck cleaning out the attic? Load the junk into the launcher and fire it over the neighbourhood, then head to the cabin.
- The Viking Hotline: Can’t get out of a garden wedding? Call, and a crew of Vikings shows up to wreck it. “Honey, the wedding’s off. Damn Vikings.”
- The Figure Skating Channel: Want a night out with the guys? Bud Light has fake figure skating programming to keep your partner occupied.
The spots ran at the Super Bowl, won at Cannes and moved the sales line, which is no small thing in a category that big.
Would they fly today? Probably not, given the edgy humour. But the principle holds: a real person, a real pain point and a creative idea that brings it to life. Humour isn’t a brand position. It’s a technique that gets people to read the second line. It works in beer, it works in B2B, it works when your audience is human.
You Can’t Skip To Emotion In A Market That Doesn’t Know You
Speaking of emotion, back to Dave, with an example of a ‘feel’ campaign that got lost in Translation.
In a blind taste test, most mainstream beers taste the same. What differs is the emotion. Corona isn’t beer, it’s a vacation in a bottle, and it’s the top-selling import in North America.
Anheuser-Busch InBev, the biggest brewer in the world, wanted a piece of that. Their answer was Brahma, a top-selling beer in Brazil. Capoeira, flow and Brazilian energy – most of Canada’s leadership team at the time was Brazilian and had lived the brand all their lives. It couldn’t miss.
It missed. The launch went straight to emotion, without a grounding in “this is beer,” let alone “cold and refreshing.” It came in an unfamiliar clear bottle, with no test market. Canadians looked at it and, well, wondered what exactly they were looking at.
Dave’s fix was to get liquid to lips. He sampled everywhere, including dropping 13 pallets at one of Toronto’s biggest office towers and inviting everyone down for a free six-pack. It still didn’t save Brahma. But Dave took those lessons into the launch of Bud Light Lime, and that one was a massive success.
The lesson for founders: winning in your home market doesn’t cross the Translation Gap. Your brand may have grown from functional (“here’s what it does”) to emotional (“here’s how it makes you feel”). In a new market, where nobody knows you, you need to build the ‘why’ before building the vibe.
AI Will Tell You Your Baby Is Beautiful
An audience member asked about AI – it’s a fair worry. Generative AI is built to make you happy. It praises your prompts and agrees with your ideas. You can build a synthetic focus group of 100 people, which is a useful first step, but it’s a perceived reality, not reality. In simple human terms, AI can’t see your Translation Gap any better than you can.
Customer interview research is a solution. But ask a founder to do their own customer research, and it’s like asking them to solicit opinions on their baby at the playground. Everyone says it’s beautiful. Send someone neutral, and they’ll give you an honest assessment of the baby, warts, diaper rash and all.
The conclusion: closing the Translation Gap is possible with effective research. Not so much with sycophantic AI.
Founders Gotta Do The Work
Now for the counterpoint. Someone asked how a founder can do interview research if they can’t afford an interviewer?
Dave’s answer was blunt: you can, and must do it yourself. You don’t have to run 1,000 interviews. But if you haven’t talked to ten customers, you have nothing to judge anyone else’s findings against.
The trick is not leading the jury in your questioning.
And listening to what customers don’t say, because, as both Dave and I learned, people lie. Ask “Would you buy this beer?” and they’ll say yes. Follow them into the liquor store and see what they actually buy, and you may be in for a Translation Gap rude surprise.
Ask Before You Leap – And When In Doubt, Tweak
There were two big conclusions to our talk: dig into your interviews to sniff out authentic emotions and predispositions. And second, understand that even the best insights won’t necessarily create a viral campaign.
Marketing is art, not paint-by-numbers. Anyone who sells you a step-by-step formula is lying, because people are weird, and they keep finding new ways to be weird. You’ll get thrown curveballs. We all do. Don’t panic. Tweak and keep going.
Interested in closing the Translation Gap? My Confusion To Clarity DIY Diagnostic does the heavy lifting. Happy to provide details.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is the Translation Gap in marketing?
The Translation Gap is the distance between what a company thinks it’s selling and what its buyer thinks they’re buying. It often shows up when a technical founder describes features and capabilities while the buyer is weighing financial risk, political safety, or a specific problem they need solved. The product can be excellent and still stall, because the value is getting lost in translation.
What are some examples of the Translation Gap?
A transformer-monitoring company kept selling engineering benefits after CFOs took over procurement. An edtech hardware company found that teachers, principals, school boards, government and parents could each block a purchase, but no one could approve it alone. A BC liquor-data tool impressed people in demos, yet buyers wanted answers, not dashboards. A Brazilian beer launched in Canada on emotion before Canadians knew what it was. In each case, the seller’s story and the buyer’s reality didn’t match.
Why does a founder’s pitch stop working as the company grows?
The buyer changes. Early sales usually happen between peers. Engineers sell to engineers, and everyone speaks the same language. As the company scales or the market consolidates, decisions move to CFOs, procurement teams or committees with different priorities. The pitch has to be translated into their terms, such as cost, risk and return, or growth stalls.
Can AI help a company find its Translation Gap?
Only partly. Generative AI tends to agree with the person using it, so it rarely exposes blind spots. Synthetic focus groups can be a useful first step, but they reflect perceived reality, not actual buyer behaviour. Real customer interviews are still the most reliable way to see the gap.
Should founders interview their own customers?
Yes, at least ten, so they have a baseline for judging anyone else’s findings. The challenge is that customers tend to be polite to founders. Good interviews avoid leading questions, ask about past behaviour rather than future intentions, and pay attention to what people don’t say. A neutral interviewer, or a structured diagnostic, can surface more honest answers.