Customer Deep-Dive — the buyer, in their own words

Every weak headline, dead ad, and ignored email traces back to the same root: writing about the customer instead of from them. This skill mines real customer material into the assets copy actually runs on — a verbatim language bank, pains ranked by what they cost, and the objections that live behind the polite ones. One pass, written straight into the brief.

Inputs

• Raw customer material — call notes, reviews (yours and competitors'), support tickets, community threads, win/loss notes — pasted or pointed to: $ARGUMENTS
• From marketing-brief.md if present: the ICP and any existing customer section to sharpen rather than restart.

Do this

Inside Claude Code, steps 2–6 map to the customer-research agents by name — voc-miner, avatar-builder, pain-mapper, desire-mapper, objection-collector — and can run as delegated passes. Inline, work through them in order.

1. Audit the raw material first. If there is little or none, do not invent a customer — name the fastest real sources (your reviews, competitor reviews, the communities where buyers complain) and build a provisional version clearly marked as such.
2. Mine the language. Harvest verbatim phrases into a language bank grouped by pain, desire, and objection. Verbatim means verbatim — keep the typos, the profanity, the odd metaphors. That texture is what makes copy land.
3. Build the avatar. Day in the life, pressures from above and below, watering holes, buying triggers, dream outcome — assembled from the evidence, in their words, one avatar per run.
4. Rank the pains. Score each on intensity, frequency, and willingness to pay to remove it. Attach the cost of leaving each one unsolved — that cost is a future headline.
5. Map the desires. What "solved" looks like in their words, the status and identity payoff behind it, and the before/after gap copy will have to bridge.
6. Sort the objections. Stated versus real ("too expensive" usually means "I don't believe it will work for me"). For each real objection, name what has to be true in the buyer's head and the proof that installs it.
7. Write the results into The customer section of marketing-brief.md — ICP notes, avatar, top 5 pains, desired outcomes, objections, language bank — marking every element that came from inference rather than evidence.

Output

The customer dossier, written into marketing-brief.md under The customer. Close with the three weakest spots in the evidence and the single fastest source that would strengthen them — usually five customer calls or one competitor-review sweep.

Rules

• An invented quote is a landmine. Copy built on fabricated customer language fails silently and expensively — mark every inference as inference.
• Distinguish what buyers say from what you conclude. Both are useful; confusing them is how personas become fiction.
• One avatar per run. A blended avatar describes nobody and writes copy for nobody.
• Weight fresh material higher. A three-year-old review describes a market that may no longer exist — date the bank.
• Competitor reviews are fair game. Buyers describing a rival's failures are describing your opening, in their own words.
• The language bank is the crown jewel. When in doubt, spend the extra time there — everything downstream draws on it.