Where you are on the pyramid

Any market divides roughly into three tiers by what the buyer is optimizing: most on price, fewer on value, fewest on time. You will see that split quoted as sixty, thirty and ten, and no one has measured it, so the shape is what to keep. The instrument appears in Volume II as an operations question. Here it is a message question, and the failure mode is different.

Each tier is persuaded by a different thing. A price buyer wants to be sure they are not overpaying, so comparison and transparency work. A value buyer wants evidence of outcome, so specificity and proof work. A time buyer wants to stop thinking about it, so certainty and removal of steps work, and detailed comparison actively repels them.

The common failure is marketing at one tier and operating at another. The material promises the certainty a time buyer pays for; the delivery process is built for price and has no slack; the customer experiences the gap as a broken promise, and the reviews say so.

The other common failure is talking to all three at once. Material that lists your price advantage, your outcome evidence and your speed reads as unfocused to every tier, because each is being asked to sift.

Establish which tier you serve, get every function to answer separately, and then check the last ten pieces of material against the answer. The mismatch is usually visible within an hour.