New Book Names 'Organisational Gravity,' the Hidden Force That Pulls Companies Away From Their Own Customers
The Buyer in the Loop
The Buyer in the Loop
Dr Matt Wilkinson
The Buyer in the Loop by Matt Wilkinson argues that most commercial teams lose the customer not in the research, but in the approval process that follows it
LONDON, UNITED KINGDOM, June 29, 2026 /EINPresswire.com/ -- A new book available for pre-order this week names a problem that most commercial teams experience but have never had language for: the steady drift of a company's messaging away from its own customers, even as those teams believe they are being customer-centric.
In The Buyer in the Loop, author Matt Wilkinson calls the force behind that drift organisational gravity, the structural pull that moves every commercial message away from the buyer's reality and toward internal consensus. It operates, he argues, on the strongest teams as much as the weakest, and it acts at every stage of the approval process, one reasonable edit at a time, until the message that reaches the market sounds as though it was written for a different reader entirely.
The book's central argument is that this is not a research problem or a talent problem, but a structural one. Companies invest heavily in understanding their buyers, then have no mechanism to keep that understanding present once the research phase ends. Dr Wilkinson's proposed countermeasure is the grounded synthetic customer: an AI representation of a buyer, built from a company's own interviews, sales calls, and other primary evidence, that remains available to challenge messaging at every stage of the commercial process. The word grounded carries the weight. A model built from a company's own buyer evidence produces language no competitor can reproduce, where a generic AI persona produces only the category average.
Dr Wilkinson is careful to set out where the approach breaks. The book's governing principle, "synthetic for directional, human for decisional," draws a firm line between the work these models can support and the decisions that still require real people, and a full chapter is devoted to the failure modes that teams must design around.
The book carries a foreword by marketing strategist and author Mark Schaefer, who writes that Dr Wilkinson "names something that most commercial teams experience but have never had precise language for." It also carries endorsements from Ann Handley, Joe Pulizzi, and Joeri Billast.
"Most organisations research the buyer well, then watch them vanish between brief and market. I call that pull organisational gravity. The fix is structural: keep what customers tell you alive," said Dr Wilkinson, Founder and CEO of Strivenn. "A grounded synthetic customer does exactly that. It is built from your own buyers, so it answers in their language, not the category average."
Dr Wilkinson is Founder and CEO of Strivenn and writes for Forbes as The AI Marketing Scientist. In 2026 he was named to Marketing Week's CX50 for the life sciences sector. He holds a PhD in Chemistry from the University of Bristol, an MBA and a Visiting Fellowship from Cranfield School of Management, and a BSI practitioner credential in AI Management Systems to the ISO/IEC 42001:2023 standard.
The Buyer in the Loop is available for pre-order now ahead of its launch on 22 July 2026, at a reduced introductory price for the pre-order period. It will be published in digital and paperback editions. Full details and pre-order links are at strivenn.com/the-buyer-in-the-loop.
For review copies, interviews, or further information, contact:
Dr Matt Wilkinson
Strivenn
+ +44 7861 714033
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