Marketers Are From Mars Consumers Are From New Jersey

Understanding the Marketers Are From Mars Consumers Are From New Jersey Framework

Kevin Kennedy put this together years ago, and it still shows up when campaigns completely miss their audience. The basic idea is simple enough: marketers tend to overthink things while consumers just want something that works. That gap is where most budgets go to die. Marketers operate from what Kennedy calls "Mars" — that means they obsess over strategy, positioning, tone of voice, brand guidelines, and a dozen other things that sound important in a boardroom. Consumers are the New Jersey side. They're practical. They've got zero patience for fluff. They want to know what the product does, whether it fits their budget, and if other people they trust say it's worth it. Then they move on. I spent about three years working on healthcare SaaS products, and this framework kept saving my ass. We'd spend weeks crafting the perfect landing page with segmented messaging, A/B tested headlines, and carefully chosen CTA placements. The bounce rate was brutal. Turns out our target buyers — practice managers — just wanted to know three things: does it integrate with our existing EHR system, what's the monthly cost per seat, and can I get a demo next week? Not in that order. They clicked through the whole page and still messaged us asking those questions directly.

The fix was painfully simple. I restructured the page so those three questions appeared above the fold, in plain language, with actual answers. Not marketing-speak answers. Real ones. Conversion rate jumped roughly 40% in the first month. No new traffic. No new ad spend. Just removing the Mars stuff and speaking New Jersey. There's a deeper layer people miss though. It's not just about simplifying your copy. The framework also applies to how you structure your customer journey. Marketers love to create elaborate nurture sequences, lead scoring models, and multi-touch attribution. Most small to mid-market B2B companies don't need that machinery. Their buyers are in New Jersey — they'll buy when they're ready, and they'll tell you exactly what they need to make that decision. Force them through a complex funnel and they just disappear. I saw this play out with a client who was doing email drip campaigns for a project management tool aimed at construction firms. Their automated sequence had seven emails over fourteen days, each with a different value proposition angle. Open rates tanked at email three. The construction project managers weren't reading through seven emails. They wanted to see a pricing page and a video walkthrough. We cut the sequence to two emails — one introduction, one case study with pricing baked in. Response rate went from about 3% to 22%. The leads that came through were also way higher quality because they'd already filtered themselves by engaging with pricing info.

Here's the part most people skip when they read about this framework. It's not a license to write bad copy or ignore strategy entirely. You still need to understand your audience, your positioning, and your market. What you're doing differently is recognizing that the Mars mindset — the overthinking, the over-engineering, the obsession with perfect messaging — is usually solving problems your customers don't actually have. They have real problems. Your job is to solve those directly, not to impress other marketers. One edge case that trips people up is when you're selling into enterprises. Enterprise buyers are a different animal. They've got procurement, security reviews, compliance checks, stakeholder alignment. They're not purely New Jersey in that scenario. They're more like New Jersey with a very long checklist. The framework still applies — they still want practical answers — but you can't compress the journey as aggressively. I learned that the hard way trying to apply a startup-style frictionless funnel to a mid-market manufacturing company with a five-person procurement team. We lost three deals in a row because we asked for the commitment too early, before they'd completed their internal review process. The workaround was building in proper milestones — a discovery call, a technical validation step, a pilot program — that respected their actual buying cycle without adding unnecessary Mars noise at each stage. The biggest mistake I see is applying this framework at the brand level instead of the conversion level. It's not that brand strategy doesn't matter. It's that brand messaging and purchase-triggering messaging are two different conversations. You can have a Mars-level brand position internally while keeping every customer-facing touchpoint firmly in New Jersey territory. Apple does this reasonably well, honestly. Their branding is philosophical and aspirational, but their product pages are extremely practical.

Another counterintuitive thing: this framework works best when you know your buyer better than they know themselves, not worse. The whole point of spending time on Mars — doing the research, the segmentation, the competitive analysis — is so you can then throw all of that away when you actually write the message. Your New Jersey copy should feel effortless and obvious to the buyer. That effortlessness only comes after genuine Mars-level work. The trap is getting stuck on Mars and never coming back down to write the actual email or landing page. If you want to actually use this, start by mapping out every piece of content or copy you currently have and rating it against a simple question: would a busy person who just wants the answer find this useful or annoying? If it's annoying, cut it or rewrite it. Don't feel bad about it. The framework isn't about being clever. It's about being clear enough that someone who is tired and distracted at 2 PM on a Tuesday can understand what you're offering in three seconds and decide whether to keep reading. There's a free PDF walkthrough of this framework on Kennedy's site if you want the full diagram and original examples. The core idea doesn't need a download, but the worksheets help if you're trying to audit existing marketing materials systematically. I found it useful for a campaign audit last year where we had about forty pieces of content across seven landing pages, and being able to tag each one as Mars or New Jersey quickly showed us where the problems were concentrated.