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A friend of mine runs a governance and business continuity firm in Geneva. We asked ChatGPT for the best agency in Geneva for that work, and he came up. Good. Then it added that he was expensive. There is no price anywhere on his website. ChatGPT made that part up. We added a few words about price to the site, and it stopped saying so.
Nobody misread him on purpose. The site left a gap, and something filled it.
I told that story to Loralyn Mears, Dr. LL to her listeners, on Small Business Stories. Her work is what she calls misinterpretation risk: the gap between what a business means to say and what people, and now AI systems, actually understand. Near the end she asked me whether marketing problems are promotion problems or interpretation problems. My answer was that how I hear you matters more than what you are saying.
Most of the conversation was about closing that gap from the customer’s side. Recognition first: an accountant for landscapers gets the landscaper’s call without a second thought. Then perception: say what you do so it is understood quickly, because people buy what they understand fastest, not what is cleverest. Then projection: walk the customer through the moments where they would otherwise stop, like the consultant who likes a new CRM and then remembers he has to move his old spreadsheet.
What we covered
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Why niching feels risky
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Recognition before persuasion
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The curse of proximity
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Clarity over cleverness
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When ChatGPT invents a price
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AI slop and your own voice
It is easier to spend more on ads than to step back and ask what keeps the customer up at night. A plumber in the States once advertised one thing: we come on time. Not that they were good plumbers. Everyone assumes that. They had worked out what the customer was really worried about, a day off wasted waiting. More promotion would not have found that. Understanding did.
