By Ryan Richardson · Published 8 October 2026
Crossing the five stages of buyer awareness (unaware, problem aware, solution aware, product aware, ready now) against the four or five distinct buyer types in the market produces a grid, usually twenty to twenty-five cells. Most businesses fill three of them from instinct and never look at the rest.
Two of the buyer types in the grid received no advertisement, no page copy, and no first line written for them at all, for months. Nobody had made a decision to exclude them. Nobody had looked at the grid as a whole to notice they were missing.
A grid built once at the start of a campaign tends to get used for the first few cells that come naturally and then forgotten, rather than checked as a complete coverage tool. The gap isn't a strategic decision to skip a segment. It's a blind spot that nobody built a habit of re-checking.
The matrix now gets checked whenever creative is planned, not built once and filed away. Every cell actually advertised to gets ticked, dated. The blank cells left over become the creative brief whenever there's no clear next angle to write.
Build the five-by-four (or five-by-five) grid, if you haven't already, and tick every cell you've genuinely advertised to in the last few months, with a date. Any blank cell is either a deliberate decision you can name, or it's this failure, quietly repeating. Don't try to fill every cell for completeness either; that produces a pile of mediocre angles. Use the blanks to find the one or two sharp gaps worth writing to, not to cover all of them at once.
| Claim | Value | Source |
|---|---|---|
| Number of distinct buyer types typically in the grid | four or five | THE BOOK FULL.md Piece 2, line 474 |
| Number of awareness stages crossed against buyer type | five | THE BOOK FULL.md Piece 2, lines 474 and 476 |
| Number of buyer types left unaddressed in this specific failure | two | Measured in Real Money, Field Manual |