When you’re inside a company, especially if you’re a founder, one of the hardest things to do is to clearly see your company and product from the outside-in – to see yourself as others see you.
And yet if you can do that, it becomes a superpower. You’ll have an advantage over competitors, better know what products to build, and understand how to influence your target customers so they see you as you want them to see you.
One way to think about this is perception vs. perspective. I recently ran across a TikTok video with an ex-CIA agent explaining the concept and how it helps with spycraft. As he noted, perception is your interpretation of the world. Most of us rely only on our perception – after all, it’s what’s inside each of our brains, and it’s hard to escape our own brains.
Yet, as the spy guy says, there’s no real advantage over others if you rely on your perception of things – because that’s what everyone else does, too. And it’s a disconnect from the reality that others experience.
Radical Empathy
Perspective, however, is the act of observing the world from outside yourself. Another way to put it, which I’ve heard a few times in the tech ecosystem, is to have radical empathy. It’s a way to get out of your head and put yourself in the place of your target customers – to consider what they’re worried about, what makes them happy, what motivates them, what they really need.
If you can do that, you can escape your perception that, for instance, your product is an amazing breakthrough that everyone should immediately rush to buy – and replace it with a perspective on how others see your product. This leads to insights about, say, why your product isn’t selling like crazy. If you can see that, you have an opportunity to change others’ perceptions with highly effective messaging, or come to a realization that you need to tweak the product to truly meet the needs of your target market.
Is Perception Reality?
Now, you might sometimes hear people say that perception IS reality. In a way, that’s true, because each person’s perception is in fact their particular reality. As a Psychology Today article notes, perception “occurs entirely in the mind in which mental gymnastics can turn any belief into reality.”
But YOUR perception is only YOUR reality. It’s not the reality of target customers. The challenge then is to get outside of yourself and understand the reality of others.
Perception is essentially imaginary. It’s a belief. It’s not actually real. Which means that it can be altered because it’s only neurons firing, not actual, physical, unalterable reality.
If you understand someone else’s perception of your business, you stand a chance of countering inaccurate perceptions or building on perceptions that are favorable. That’s the role of great, perspective-driven messaging, whether it’s through thought-leadership content, advertising, sales decks, pitch decks or talking points.
Strategic Category Design: Gaining Clarity Through Perspective
In our work with companies, we’ve come to realize that perception vs. perspective is one of the most valuable aspects of strategic category design. The discipline of category design is centered on an outside-in approach to creating a new market category. The tools of category design are aimed at understanding the reality of target customers, empathizing with them, and getting deep into what they need and why they need it.
It also helps explain why we – outsiders – bring value to the category design process. We’re not steeped in the company’s perception of the world. We see it from the outside-in.
That allows us to break the spell of perception in a leadership team. Instead of discussing the amazing product they’ve built, what we first want to know is: what’s the shift in context around the people you’re targeting, what’s now missing for them amid the current context, and what innovation would make their lives better?
Once a company gets its arms around that kind of thinking, it can break through and clearly see a new product category that needs to exist but doesn’t yet.
We’ve run into many companies that have worked on category design themselves with an internal team. Some are able to do it. After all, the book Play Bigger lays out a playbook for running a category design project.
But most find it challenging. We’ve had a few client companies that have tried internal category design, found it frustrating, and then worked with us to get to a successful outcome.
The reason that happens is rooted in perception vs. perspective. Without an outside guide, perception is hard to escape. (BTW, that’s why psychologists exist!) With the right nudges from someone who isn’t steeped in the company’s perception of reality, a leadership team can get out of its own brains and see the market with crystal clarity – a superpower that pays enormous dividends.
Need help getting perspective? Book an office hours session with us.