Marketing isn’t logic, it’s emotion with evidence.
I’ve said some version of this for many years now, and I still think it’s the most unrealized and underappreciated truth in product marketing. We spend enormous energy on the evidence part. The data sheets, the battlecards, the ROI calculators, the analyst quotes. All useful. All necessary. All important. And almost entirely insufficient on their own.
Because buyers don’t make decisions when they have enough information. They make decisions when they feel something. The information is what they use to justify that feeling.
PMM teams tend to only build a content plan. The good ones build a plan that includes emotion. There’s a difference, and it shows up in whether buyers remember you six weeks after the demo.
The Mission, That We Have Chosen To Accept
Here’s how I frame PMM’s actual job: We create emotions that trigger actions.
Not “generate leads.” Not “support Sales.” Not “produce assets.” Not “launch products”. Those are actions and outputs. The real job is to create specific emotional states in specific people at specific moments in the buying journey. Everything else … the decks, the one-pagers, the launch campaigns, the battlecards … are in service of that.
When a PMM team has a great product and is working well, you can feel it. Buyers show up to conversations already curious. Sales reps walk into deals with conviction behind them, not just talking points. Prospects reference your customers unprompted. The messaging doesn’t just land, it moves people.
When a PMM team is only working on outputs, you feel that too. Lots of assets. Thin engagement. Sales using their own slides anyway.
The difference, almost always, is whether the team has thought deliberately about the emotional journey they’re trying to create, or just the content calendar. Note: it’s also highly dependent on the business support the team has, where PMM sites in the org chart, and the level of empowerment provided.
The Five Emotions To Invoke
Here’s the playbook I’ve built over many years. It’s changed, it’s adjusted, but it remains the mainstay of my approach to product marketing. Five emotions, mapped to the buyer’s journey, each one the responsibility of a specific PMM motion.
Curiosity: “I want to know more.“
This is the hardest one to create and the most underinvested in. Curiosity happens before the buying cycle. It’s the moment a practitioner reads something you published and thinks “hm, I hadn’t thought about it that way.” It’s the conference talk that sends someone back to their desk with a new question. It’s the community post that gets forwarded internally.
The PMM motion responsible for Curiosity is evangelism and/or technical marketing. Not demand gen. Not product messaging. The content that creates curiosity isn’t positioning, it’s perspective. It’s a point of view or interesting take on a topic that earns attention before anyone’s looking for a solution.
This is easy to skip, because it’s hard to measure and slow to compound. That’s exactly why the ones who do it build durable market position.
Conviction: “I believe this is real.“
This is where most PMM teams spend their time, and rightly so. Conviction is what turns interest into belief. It lives in the messaging … crisp, defensible, grounded in product truth, built for the conversations that actually happen in deals rather than the ones you wish were had.
Bad messaging creates skepticism. Good messaging creates conviction. The difference is usually whether it’s built from what the product actually does and what customers actually care about, or from what someone thinks sounds good in a slide.
Conviction is hard earned by core PMM’s. You can’t borrow it from a competitor’s positioning or manufacture it with superlatives. It comes from knowing your product and your buyer well enough to make a specific, honest claim that resonates because it solves a problem.
Confidence: “I’ve seen it work.“
Conviction gets a buyer to believe in the concept. Confidence gets them to believe in you specifically. And the only thing that creates confidence is proof. Seeing is believing as the saying goes.
Named customers. Specific outcomes. Peer voices that sound like the buyer, not like marketing copy. The moment a skeptical prospect says “oh, they work with [company I respect]” … that’s the confidence motion working.
This is customer advocacy’s job. And it’s chronically underbuilt in most PMM teams, because it requires ongoing relationship work with customers that doesn’t feel like “marketing.” It is. It’s some of the highest-leverage marketing you can do. A live customer reference in a competitive deal is worth a hundred battlecard bullet points.
Commitment: “I’m ready to act.“
Commitment is when the emotional journey converts to commercial motion. The buyer is curious, convinced, and confident. Now they need to be able to act, which means the field needs the right narrative, the right sales plays, the right packaging and ICP clarity to close the loop.
This is scale and GTM work. It’s often where the emotion breaks down, not because the feeling isn’t there, but because the commercial motion isn’t set up to capture it. A buyer who’s ready to act but can’t get a clear answer on packaging, or gets a different story from three different reps, loses momentum fast.
Commitment is the emotion closest to revenue. It’s also the one most dependent on the four that came before it.
Anticipation: “They know what I’m thinking before I do.“
This one’s different. Anticipation isn’t something the buyer feels, it’s something PMM creates internally. It’s the intelligence motion, the competitive signals, the analyst relationships, the win/loss insight that keeps every other team calibrated to where the market is heading, not where it’s been.
When the anticipation motion works, your messaging evolves before your buyers notice it needs to. Your competitive response lands before the rep has to scramble. Your roadmap conversations happen with context the product team didn’t know they needed.
When it doesn’t work, you’re always catching up. Reactive to competitors, surprised by objections, optimizing messaging for last year’s buyer.
Where Teams Get Stuck
If you’re a PMM today, be honest with yourself. You’ve probably spent more time and energy on Conviction (messaging) than everything else combined. If you’re more balanced, good for you!
Curiosity gets cut because it’s slow. The content that creates curiosity, genuine thought leadership, practitioner-level perspective, the kind of thing that earns you a reputation before someone’s looking for a solution, takes time to build and time to establish credibility, and is nearly impossible to attribute to pipeline. So it gets deprioritised for things that show up in dashboards.
Confidence gets under-resourced because customer advocacy is relationship work, and relationship work doesn’t fit neatly into a quarterly sprint. The case study library ends up three years old and the reference program is held together with a spreadsheet and good intentions.
Commitment gets blurry because the handoff between PMM and Sales is unclear. Who owns the play? Who updates the narrative when something’s not landing? The emotion was there, but the commercial motion wasn’t built to receive it.
Anticipation is the rarest of all. Most companies don’t have a systematic intelligence function. They have one person who occasionally reads competitor websites and a Slack channel where people post things they noticed.
The companies that build all five are the ones that create durable market position, not just good quarters.
The Robots Are Unemotional
AI can simulate every one of these emotions in content. It can write copy that sounds curious and confident. It can draft a case study in the right format and a battlecard with the right structure. It can produce the shape of an emotion playbook faster than any team could do it manually.
But the emotional truth underneath each layer has to be real.
Curiosity that’s manufactured from generic thought leadership doesn’t make anyone think differently. Conviction built on messaging that doesn’t reflect the actual product erodes the moment a buyer talks to a rep. Confidence borrowed from a customer story that isn’t specific collapses in a reference call. Commitment built on a sales play that doesn’t match how buyers actually decide loses deals it should win.
AI executing on a hollow brief produces hollow emotion. The model can’t feel whether the insight is genuine, and it can’t tell you whether the customer story lands. It can’t sense whether the conviction is earned or performed.
That’s still human work. It’s the 20% that the Humans + AI model I keep coming back to reserves for the people who actually understand the market, the customer, and the product truth. That would the PMM in case it escaped notice :)
Use AI to execute the playbook faster. Don’t use it to skip the thinking that makes the playbook worth executing.
Build the Emotion Plan First
Before the content calendar. Before the launch brief. Before the enablement deck.
Answer these five questions:
- What does our buyer need to feel curious about?
- What would make them believe us?
- What proof would give them genuine confidence?
- What does the field need to convert that confidence into commitment?
- What signals would tell us all of this is shifting before we notice it in the numbers?
That’s the emotion plan. The content plan follows from it.
The companies that win in competitive markets aren’t just better at execution. They’re better at knowing which emotion they’re trying to create, why it matters at that moment, and what’s actually required to produce it.
Build the playbook that invokes emotion, not just execution.
Adam