Every business has information about itself that customers would find valuable but never actually get told, and every business has blind spots — things customers have figured out that the business itself hasn't fully recognized. Making that hidden and blind information visible is one of the more overlooked steps in building genuinely persuasive marketing content.
A Useful Model for Thinking About This Gap
A classic psychological model called the Johari Window, developed by researchers Joseph Luft and Harry Ingham to describe self-awareness in relationships, offers a genuinely useful lens for thinking about the information gap between a business and its customers. It divides what's known into four areas: what both sides already know, what neither side knows, what the business knows but hasn't shared, and what customers have figured out that the business hasn't recognized about itself.
Applying this thinking to your own marketing should involve:
- Identifying genuinely valuable information you know about your business but rarely communicate
- Actively seeking out what customers already believe or have figured out that you haven't acknowledged
- Recognizing that this information gap shrinks naturally as trust and familiarity build over time
- Treating early-stage content differently from content meant for customers who already know you well
A Simple Framework
- List information about your business, product, or process that customers would find genuinely useful but rarely hear about
- Actively gather customer feedback and reviews specifically looking for things they've noticed that you haven't
- Move the most valuable hidden information into your actual marketing content, where new visitors can see it
- Revisit this exercise periodically, since both what you know and what customers know keeps shifting
> Tip: Ask a handful of long-time customers directly what they wish they'd known about you before their first purchase, and separately, what surprised them the most after buying. Both answers usually reveal genuinely valuable content you're not currently including anywhere in your marketing.
Example
Before: A business with a genuinely rigorous quality control process that never gets mentioned anywhere in its marketing, leaving prospective customers to guess at quality based on price alone.
After: The same business featuring that process prominently once it recognized the information gap, giving hesitant prospects a concrete, differentiating reason to trust the purchase.
Common Mistakes
- Assuming customers already know things about your business that you've simply never actually communicated
- Never actively seeking feedback to uncover blind spots customers have noticed but you haven't
- Treating all visitors identically regardless of how much they already know about you
- Losing track of genuinely differentiating information because it feels too obvious internally to mention
A broader review of what your site actually communicates to a first-time visitor, compared to what a long-time customer already knows, is worth a deliberate pass. Reviewing that gap directly, page by page, is the most reliable way to catch it.
Some of your most persuasive content isn't something you need to invent — it's something you already know and simply haven't gotten around to telling anyone yet.