You can hear when a company misunderstands its customer
Weak customer knowledge shows up in vocabulary long before it shows up in strategy decks.
A company can have a detailed customer profile and still sound as if it has never spoken to a customer. I see this when the website uses the company’s internal categories instead of the words people use to describe their own problem. The copy may be polished, yet the reader has to translate every paragraph into something familiar.
The easiest example is service naming. A business might describe “integrated knowledge production solutions.” A customer may be trying to turn twenty interviews into a report by Friday. Those are connected ideas, but only one begins where the customer is standing. If you understand the person well, you know which language belongs on the first screen and which language can wait.
Demographics give only part of the customer picture. Age, location, job title, and industry can still be useful. I care more about the words people use when they are frustrated, uncertain, comparing options, or explaining the task to a colleague. Those sentences contain the real buying context. They tell you what feels urgent, what needs proof, and what the person is afraid of getting wrong.
This matters in AI products because teams often describe the model instead of the work. Most users care less about retrieval, orchestration, or a particular model family than they care about the result. They want the system to read their documents, keep citations attached to claims, and return something they can use. Technical detail belongs where it helps them evaluate that result.
I also distrust audience copy that tries to sound familiar through slang. Knowing a customer means understanding their level of knowledge and respecting their time. A lawyer and a product manager can both prefer simple English. Simple English can still respect the professional language each audience needs.
When we research customers, I want examples of actual questions, objections, emails, support messages, and sales calls. Then the writing becomes easier. We stop inventing a voice and start noticing one. The strongest copy often feels obvious after this work because it uses the words the customer already needed. That obviousness is earned.