OVER TO YOU
Shape for Humans
Creating the resonance that turns attention into growth.
Resources to accompany chapter 7 of Make Marketing Matter: Change perceptions. Drive performance. Architect growth.
Chapter snapshot
Buyers today are making decisions in a world of constant noise, which makes every decision feel harder than ever but they still have to be made.
Shape for Humans is about building the trust that lets people act with confidence despite that uncertainty. Trust forms when audiences believe a business understands their reality, communicates with clarity, and behaves with credibility. It’s built through three things: knowing your audience at an individual, human level, speaking to them in a distinctly human voice, and genuinely listening to what comes back.
Why Shape for Humans matters
Shape for Humans is where the clarity built in Stand Out becomes something people actually feel, not just understand. A business can have a perfectly defined valuable uniqueness and still fail to connect if it doesn’t speak to real people in a way they trust.
This principle turns attention and difference into resonance, the thing that moves someone from noticing you to take action, and from acting once to advocating for you.
Definitions in this chapter
shape for humans principle.
The human-centred approach to building connections that people understand, resonate with, trust and act on with confidence.
Check In
Take a moment to reflect on how human your business feels to the people buying from it.
- Could you describe your most valuable customer as a real person - what they fear getting wrong, and what success means to them?
- Would your customers describe what you do the way your website does?
- How many times is a buyer asked to give something away before they can get what they need from you?
Take Action
Take one piece of current content - a webpage, an email or a proposal - and test it against the four rules of being simple to understand:
- Does it start with the audience, not you?
- Does it convey one underlying message?
- Does it handle complexity on their behalf?
- Does it ask for one clear action?
Then apply Klinkenborg's refinement test: remove words one by one and see whether the sentences still make sense. Every word is optional until it proves essential.
Bring it to the room
Human connection is delivered across the whole business, so map it together.
First, map where the business listens: customer feedback, reviews, sales conversations, service interactions and social channels. For each, ask the room: is the insight captured consistently, is it reaching the people who can act on it, and is it visibly influencing decisions?
Then map the buyer journey from first awareness to purchase. Mark every point where a buyer is asked to give something away or repeat themselves, and which team owns it. Agree one friction point each leader will remove.
Related reading
How Customers Think by Gerald Zaltman
Zaltman shows that decision-making has been wrongly framed as mainly rational, when in reality it's heavily shaped by emotional and unconscious processes. Even in B2B, buyers are influenced by feelings, identity, perceived risk and the desire for reassurance. It's the book to read if you want to understand why rational information alone rarely turns attention into action, and why emotional resonance matters so much to growth.
Harvard Business School Press, 2003.
The Transformation Economy, B. Joseph Pine II
Pine argues that customers are no longer satisfied with memorable experiences alone. They want to be changed by them, to grow and improve as a result, and they're willing to pay for it if it feels like time well invested. It's the book to read if you want to understand why connecting to what your audience wants for themselves, not just what they want from you, can secure competitive advantage and pricing power.
Harvard Business Review Press, 2026.
Make it Punchy, Emma Stratton
Written for B2B and tech marketers, this is a practical guide to turning complex offerings into messaging people actually understand and care about. Stratton makes the case for clarity over cleverness, showing how jargon and feature-led language push buyers away, and how to anchor messaging in the value customers get rather than what the product does. The idea I reference - imagining explaining what you do to friends at a BBQ - is just one of many exercises that make it easy to apply.
Page Two Books Inc, 2024.
Several Short Sentences About Writing, Verlyn Klinkenborg
This isn't a marketing book, but it's one of the most useful books on writing clearly you'll find. Klinkenborg challenges much of the writing advice we're taught, and shows that good writing is built one sentence at a time, each doing a clear job. Written in short, spare sentences itself, it teaches you to notice what you're actually saying, question every word and revise until what's left is precise. The advice I reference - "every word is optional until it proves essential" - captures its discipline perfectly.
Pantheon Books, 2012.
Back pocket arguments
- G2’s 2025 Buyer Behaviour Report™ lists review sites among the top three most trusted resources for purchase decisions, alongside GenAI and peers or colleagues. Read the research >
- A 2024 Forrester study as buyer confidence-building found that 83% of consumers are more likely to trust a business that publicly engages with dissatisfied customers. Read the research >
- McKinsey & Company research found that companies with the strongest creative capabilities consistently outperform peers on organic revenue growth, shareholder returns and enterprise value. Read the article >
- In 2025, HubSpot found that almost two thirds of consumers prioritise authenticity over polish in marketing content. Read the research >
- Salsify’s Consumer Research Report highlighted that over a third of buyers had purchased because of an influencer. Salsify also found 87% of shoppers were willing to pay more for a product they trust. Read the research >
- HubSpot’s 2026 State of Marketing Report found that while marketing teams have widely adopted AI, they identified human-centred capabilities – creative problem-solving and trust-building – as the skills required to drive results, with over two thirds of marketing leaders needing to create more human-centred content to cut through. Read the research >
Get the full picture
This page includes additional resources to support Chapter 7: Shape for Humans in the book Make Marketing Matter.
The chapter walks through defining an audience of one, building a distinctly human voice, and measuring the impact of human connection through the 3D Dashboard. Make Marketing Matter is a comprehensive guide for marketing leaders and boardroom colleagues who want to build a marketing ecosystem that shows impact, links to outcomes, and leads to recognisable revenue.
30
Definitions
Clear, precise language that gives you a shared vocabulary for your ecosystem approach.
40
Practical Exercises
Consistent, repeatable actions that bring the ecosystem approach to life.
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Make Marketing Matter: Change perceptions. Drive performance. Architect growth. is out on 20th October 2026.
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