Your Customers Aren’t Buying Function. They’re Buying A Feeling

Who is your customer, and does everyone in your business agree on that? 

That was the question at the centre of a recent All Together workshop with Richard Leader, a fractional CMO who’s spent 20 years running marketing functions across B2B and B2C businesses. The session was small and hands-on. Founders worked through their real ICPs and value propositions in the room, live. 

The Framework: SOPE 

Richard opened with a model he built out of necessity. As a fractional CMO parachuting into businesses for a few days a month, he needed a fast way to get up to speed. 

SOPE stands for: 

1. Strategy – who your customer is, your value, your brand, your competitors, your channels 
2. Organisation – the people and tools you have to deliver it 
3. Process – the rigour, KPIs and meetings that keep it on track 
4. Execution 

“Execution is easy,” Richard told the room. Get the first three right, and execution takes care of itself. Most of his advisory work happens in strategy, so that’s where the session stayed. 

Confident Isn’t the Same as Correct 

A poll at the start showed most attendees felt relatively sure of their ICP and value proposition. 

Richard’s first move was to complicate that. Confidence isn’t the same as correctness, and even a right answer can go stale. What was true about your customer six months ago might not be true now. 

Stop Aiming for Everyone 

The instinct for early-stage founders is to define their audience too broadly. Richard’s warning: that way lies overwhelm, and most founders don’t have the budget to chase a market that wide. 

Instead, he introduced Seth Godin’s idea of the minimum viable audience. Don’t ask who your customer is in five years. Ask who you need to reach in the next six to twelve months to hit your immediate goals. 

One founder, building a platform to help university students read faster, had already landed on Law and English students as a starting point. Richard pushed it further live in the session, narrowing not just by subject but by institution and behaviour, until “students who read a lot” became something much sharper. 

What Are They Actually Feeling? 

This was the thread that ran through everything. Richard kept pushing founders past the functional description of their customer and into how that customer feels. 

For the reading app founder, the emotional core wasn’t time saved. It was a sense of being overwhelmed and incapable. Richard was careful with the framing this suggested: “We don’t want to tell people they’re incapable, because they already feel that.” The reframe that emerged was about freedom, giving students back the headspace for a fuller university experience, not just better grades. 

Another founder, working with early-stage entrepreneurs on fundraising, described clients defined by overwhelm and fear of failure, often tangled up with identity. “If the business fails, then I am a failure.” Richard’s read: high achievers hate being bad at things, and that gap becomes real frustration, quietly carried. 

A bakery founder talked through standing out in a crowded, low-barrier market, not on product alone but on speed and reliability, deliberately pushing against industry norms like long lead times and inflated wedding cake pricing. 

A dessert brand founder spoke about nostalgia and connection as the emotional core of the offering. The brand had gone viral during lockdown, when people were craving exactly that kind of shared, familiar comfort. 

A Personal Example: Why Customers Actually Leave 

Richard shared a story from his time running retention marketing at a telecoms company once known for the UK’s worst customer service. 

Customers weren’t leaving because of operational failures. They were leaving because the thing that made them fall in love with the brand in the first place, in this case value, had slowly eroded over the life of their contract. 

The fix wasn’t a new feature. It was reminding customers, consistently, of the value they’d signed up for. 

“There’s not a great deal of difference between B2B and B2C marketing when it comes to this,” Richard noted. “You’re looking at the core fundamentals of how your product addresses a pain point.” 

Turning Emotion into a Value Proposition 

Richard ran through examples spanning purely functional to highly emotive. 

Asana sits on the functional end. Its own tagline sums up the pitch plainly: “work on big ideas, without the busywork.” 

Nike sits at the other extreme. Its product copy barely mentions the brand at all, leaning instead on lines like “harness your hops,” language built to sell a feeling rather than a spec sheet. 

Grammarly landed as the strong middle ground: functional, but with an emotional sting. Its positioning turns scattered thoughts into writing that’s “impossible to ignore.” 

Each founder left with their value proposition reworked around that emotional layer. The bakery founder tightened theirs around reliability and directness. The reading app founder reframed around freedom and possibility rather than just performance. The dessert brand founder landed on individual connection; a shared experience delivered in an individual portion. Different businesses, same shift: from what the product does to what it means. 

Five Things to Remember 

1. Don’t chase the widest possible audience. A minimum viable audience sized to your next 6 to 12 months beats a five-year vision you can’t afford to serve. 

2. Get specific about the feeling, not just the function. Understanding what your customer needs is the start. Understanding how they feel about it is where real positioning begins. 

3. Revisit your ICP even when you’re confident in it. Confidence set months ago isn’t the same as being right today. 

4. Look for the emotional truth in “boring” categories. Value, reliability and convenience can all carry real emotional weight once you know what they mean to your specific customer. 

5. Keep it short. As Richard put it, it’s far easier to write an essay than a single sharp sentence, but the sentence is what does the work. 

Richard Leader is a fractional CMO and marketing advisor to All Together members. To access workshops like this one, or to speak with Richard directly, visit alltogether.company/memberships.