The Missing Link in Our Commercial Strategies

Why It’s Time to Stop Designing for a Customer That’s Never Existed

“There is in the operation of a restaurant no sensible distinction to be made between the value created by the man who cooks the food and the value created by the man who sweeps the floor. Both are factors contributing to the attainment of the end aimed at: the satisfaction of the consumers.”

— Ludwig von Mises

When Edward O. Wilson was seven years old, he was fishing off a dock in Paradise Beach, Florida, when a pinfish shot from the water and drove one of its spines straight into his eye.

He didn’t cry. He didn’t scream. He kept fishing.

Weeks later, the eye turned smoky blue. Doctors removed the lens in what he would later describe as a “terrifying nineteenth-century ordeal.” From that point on, he saw the world differently.

Nearsighted in one eye and half-blind in the other, he began to notice the smallest things: the shimmer of citronella ants in a stump, the curl of a snake in the marsh, the way life organized itself into patterns.

He would go on to name hundreds of ant species, win two Pulitzers, and redefine our understanding of sociobiology.

In 1994, Wilson and his colleague, Bert Hölldobler, published "Journey to the Ants," a book that explored the fascinating, cooperative world of ant societies. It was part science, part memoir—an ode to the joy of observing life at ground level.

And tucked near the beginning, almost as an afterthought, is a line that would later become famous:

“It would appear that socialism really works under some circumstances. Karl Marx just had the wrong species.”

That sentence is the jumping-off point for this article, because in our quest to design better organizations, better systems, and better messages, we keep making the same mistake Marx did:

We’re building for the wrong species.

And sometimes, we build for a species that has never existed at all.

At the turn of the 20th century, the scientific community in Europe was buzzing with fossil fever. France had found Cro-Magnon Man. Germany had Neanderthals. The Dutch unearthed Java Man in the steamy jungles of Indonesia.

These weren’t just bones. They were national trophies, proof that your country had a place in the great story of human origins.

Britain, however, had nothing. No ancient skull. No missing link. No seat at the supposed evolutionary table.

That changed in 1912, when a respected amateur archaeologist named Charles Dawson announced a remarkable find. According to Dawson, he’d been walking near Piltdown Common in Sussex when he came upon a curious piece of flint, supposedly uncovered by local ditch diggers. He asked them if they’d seen any bones. They said no.

“Well,” Dawson replied, “let me know if you do.”

Soon enough, they did.

Over the following months, Dawson returned to the site with an uncanny string of discoveries: a fragment of a cranium. Then a jawbone. Then a fossilized elephant tooth, for good measure. It was an anthropological jackpot.

The Natural History Museum accepted the remains without much skepticism. The fossil was named Piltdown Man.

It was, in hindsight, an absurd fake.

The skull came from a medieval human. The jawbone was from an orangutan. The teeth had been filed down. The whole thing had been dunked in a chemical bath to give it a weathered look. It was a composite creature that had never walked the Earth.

But none of that mattered. Because Piltdown looked right.

To the English scientists of the day, it confirmed two things they wanted to believe: First, that England was the true cradle of civilization. And second, that human evolution had begun with the intellect, characterized by a large brain.

One anthropologist, beaming with pride, declared, “It bucks me up to think that England is coming up trumps.”

A literal monument was erected near the site:

“Here,” the inscription read, “Mr. Charles Dawson, F.S.A., found the fossil skull of Piltdown.”

It took forty years for scientists to admit the obvious and finally debunk the discovery.

So why did it take so long?

Because Piltdown wasn’t just a forgery. It was a fable. A story we wanted to be true. A way to make sense of ambiguity. It turned uncertainty into order. It turned hope into heritage. It soothed the chaos of competing narratives with a clean, satisfying conclusion.

That’s why it lasted.

And while we may scoff at the scientists who were fooled, we’re not so different.

• We still fall for models that make us feel certain.

• We still put our faith in simplified visions of reality—especially when they’re convenient.

• We still reach for the cleanest explanation, even when it’s not the truest one.

Piltdown was a myth, but it isn’t the last one we’ve built.

If Piltdown Man was a forged ancestor, built to satisfy national pride, then the modern business world has its own version:

A forged customer, built to satisfy managerial certainty.

This customer is the model consumer of modern economic theory: calm, calculating, and coldly consistent.

They are perfectly rational, what economists call homo economicus, and what Richard Thaler once described as the “Spock model of humanity.”

This person has no emotion, no bias, no blind spots. They weigh every option with surgical precision, have perfect information at all times, and place unshakable trust in every system they encounter.

• They are not influenced by brand, peer pressure, status, or story.

• They do not respond to tone, timing, or texture.

• They are a-social and a-sensory—unmoved by relationships, immune to narrative, and uninterested in anything that cannot be mathematically quantified.

They are pure logic, pure data, and pure myth.

And yet, much of our industry still builds its go-to-market strategy on this illusion—pricing models, marketing plans, and sales playbooks designed for a customer who only exists on paper.

This customer, as tidy as they are fictional, makes life easier for the people building business models.

• They don’t object.

• They don’t hesitate.

• They don’t shop emotionally or get distracted by reputation or rumors.

• They simply show up, read the facts, and make the most rational decision available.

Which is why we like them.

They give us clean spreadsheets. Predictable conversion funnels. Forecasts that behave. There’s no need to wrestle with psychology, identity, or uncertainty—just chart the demand curve, set the incentives, and let the model run.

“I can know everything I need to know about my customers through a spreadsheet.”

That’s a real quote. Shouted by an executive in the industry.

But this model isn’t just inaccurate. It’s dangerous.

Because once you start building for a fictional customer, you stop seeing the real one.

You stop noticing how decisions actually get made. You miss the social cues. The emotional shortcuts. The stories customers tell themselves about what they’re buying—and who they’ll become if they buy it.

You forget that real people don’t navigate life with calculators in their pockets. They operate on gut, context, and cues. They care what others think. They care about how something makes them feel. They care about what a decision says about them.

And the moment you start designing as if they don’t, your strategy stops being strategic. It becomes theoretical.

Optimized, yes—but only for a species that does not exist.

We did the same thing with Piltdown Man. Faced with ambiguity, we reached for a fiction that made us feel more certain. A skull that confirmed what we already wanted to believe.

And today, in business, we have our own fossil on display. Homo economicus. Rational, reliable, and conveniently obedient.

We run our models through him. We build our markets around him. And just like Piltdown, he’s never actually walked the earth.