Segments tell you 'who',Thick Customer Profiles tell you when, how and why
Personas and segments tell you who your customers are. Thick Customer Profiles (TCPs) describe what motivates and influences them, when and how they decide. Your teams plan for specific situations and needs, not populations.
Built on a 13-layer framework anchored in published research on practices, jobs-to-be-done and switching forces.
0
personal data points
required to build a profile
5–7
actionable situations
per profile, each evidence-tagged
Example
WHAT YOUR CURRENT CRM SAYS
- Role
- Interventional cardiologist, tertiary hospital
- Segment
- High-volume prescriber, DACH
- Channel
- Email, congress, rep visit
Accurate — and true of several hundred other cardiologists.
Decides in the two minutes between a PCI and the next case, standing, at a shared workstation. Anything needing a new login does not happen.
Now you know why the portal failed and the one-page summary worked.
The common CRM describes a role / population in a common / generalized setting. It's a channel targeting mechanism.
Two problems every commercial leader is carrying right now.
This approach is not a philosophy, it's a solution 10 years of customer work in the making.
You cannot scale empathy with thin data
AI made personalisation cheap to produce and no more relevant. Models can only recombine what they are given, and what most teams give them is segments, personas and CRM fields — descriptions of who someone is, not the situation they are deciding in. Thick profiles give the machine the missing input: need, behaviour, means and the moment. Same tooling, radically better output.
- Personalisation without situation is volume, not relevance
- Thick profiles are the input layer AI is missing
- Empathy becomes a repeatable asset, not a workshop
Sales and marketing are working harder for less
More content, more channels, more touches — and declining return on each of them. The cause is not creative quality, it is coverage: teams plan bursts at a population instead of showing up in the finite set of moments where the decision is actually made. Naming those situations shrinks the work and raises the hit rate, because relevance stops being a variant test.
- Fewer, better-aimed assets instead of more of everything
- Coverage of decisive moments becomes the metric
- A plan you can staff, budget and defend
The framework
Thirteen layers of meaning. One thick perspective.
Thick Customer Profiles borrow from thick description in anthropology — a way of capturing not just what people do, but the context, meaning, and forces that shape it. The framework turns that academic lens into thirteen layers, each one evidence-tagged and each one pointing to the situations that matter.
What you have
CRM record
- Role
- Interventional cardiologist, tertiary hospital
- Segment
- High-volume prescriber, DACH
- Channel
- Email, congress, rep visit
- Message
- Efficacy data, guideline alignment
Accurate, and true of several hundred other cardiologists. It cannot tell you when to engage, or what would make engaging worth his time.
Stop marketing to customers.
Start marketing to situations.
'Customers' are statistical averages. Situations are decisions happening right now, with investment, needs and urgency. You cannot influence an average, but you can position yourself inside a moment where someone is taking action.
Situations means competitive advantage. Making sales and marketing simpler to plan, easier to defend, and harder to copy.
Empathy is not feelings. It is understanding decisions.
Empathy is the capacity to understand the decisions people make in the situations they are in, and what influences them. Sentiment scores and journey emotions are not a productive data point. Need, behaviour and means are.
What people want to pay for are progress and outcomes
Needs are bigger than products, and they are resolvable in many ways. Once you plan for the outcome someone is paying to achieve, you stop guessing.
You can't build for averages, you can build for behavior and motivation
Demographics average away the only thing that predicts behaviour: the situation someone is in. Morning or evening, routine or atypical, business trip or family trip etc. . It's the same person but with entirely different needs, means and priorities.
Not a report. A short list of moments you can build for.
Every situation names the trigger, the institutional pressure behind it and the human force inside it. Then drafts the experiences that fit. Creating a shared understanding and alignment across stakeholders.
Hover to compare. Strong-fit situations are lifted — they match both an institutional pressure and a behaviour of this customer.
Where the thick layer sits in what you already run.
Nothing is ripped out. The thin data stays where it is — the thick layer is added between your data and your planning, and it is what turns records into situations.
Skinny ideal customer profiles
Role, industry, geography.
Customer / lead data
API, CRM or third-party database.
Thick firmographics behavior
What a company is doing and saying right now.
Thick firmographics structure
What the company is as an organization.
Thick customer profiles
What the people in the role need, feel, and are forced by.
Brand Corpus
What your own company, brand and offer can bring to the situation.
Key situations
Pinpoints where customers have relevant need and are motivated to act.
B2B SaaS
The business case is built alone, in a spreadsheet, before any committee sees it.
E.g. renewal review, budget season, a new VP taking over the function.
Banking
Liquidity is raised informally by the CFO, long before the formal credit review.
E.g. covenant pressure, a delayed receivable, an acquisition in progress.
Content
Key experience and messaging.
Channels & orchestration
Chosen for the situation and motivation.
Analysis & learning
What works, what does not, what changes next.
01 + 04 = what you already run. 02 + 03 = the thick layer we add.
Invite-only for now. Ask for a seat.
We are opening this to a small group of teams first. If you would like to see how thick customer profiles work for your segment, send a note and let's start a conversation.