This principle helps explain why people behave differently from what pure logic would predict.
More quotesMarketing has declared war on everyone except boring work.
We target consumers. Capture leads. Penetrate markets. Run war rooms. Deploy campaigns. Then we act surprised when the customer experience feels like being detained at customs.
Nobody needs a swear jar each time someone says “target”. Words are useful shorthand. But metaphors smuggle in instructions. A war room makes central command and frantic action feel sensible. “Overcoming objections” turns a buyer’s reasonable doubt into enemy resistance. “Capturing” an email address encourages the sort of form that demands a phone number, job title and inside-leg measurement before revealing a two-page PDF.
Try another picture and different behaviour becomes obvious. Hospitality asks whether the guest feels welcome. Navigation asks where they are trying to go and what blocks the route. Gardening asks what conditions help demand grow, which is less heroic than “launching an assault” but considerably closer to how markets behave.
The language inside a business is an X-ray of its assumptions. Are people captured, converted and retained, or invited, helped and worth serving again? Both sets can describe the same funnel. Only one reminds us that the other party can leave.
Competition is real. Winning matters. Yet customers remain civilians with wallets, limited patience and a splendid ability to ignore us. A sufficiently aggressive media budget will not turn them into enemy territory. Perhaps stop shelling them.