In the first essay of this series I told a simple story: factories exist because humans desire things. People want red leather shoes, so somewhere a factory hums through the night making them. Every word of that is true. But it is not the whole story.
The whole story explains where marketing and sales actually come from, why listening is the beating heart of both, and why the AI-does-everything future has a human-shaped hole in its supply side that no machine can fill. It is the part of the desire argument I have been saving, because it is the part I have staked my career on. So let me tell it properly.
Go back to the shoe factory. At any given moment, the market for red leather shoes is two groups of people. The first group is buying them today. Their orders are on the books, and the factory can see them. The second group can be far larger, and the factory cannot see them at all: the people who would love those shoes but have not decided yet. Some have never heard of them. Some have a vague pull they have not acted on. Some would fall for them in the shop window and swear it was love at first sight.
Call that a latent tangible want: a want for that particular thing which has not formed or become active yet. From the outside it looks like indifference. Every market is an iceberg. Orders above the waterline. Latent wants below.
Be precise about what is latent here. It is the want for something tangible. Somebody below your waterline may already have an emotional want your product could answer. Somebody else may not. The only thing everybody below the line has in common is that the tangible want for your particular solution has not formed. And that want, awake or asleep, is the thing that gets a product bought.
Now ask the question every founder eventually asks in the dark: where do customers actually come from? They come from below the waterline. Almost nobody wakes up asking for your product by name. Something, or someone, moves them from would-want to want. And the profession that does the moving has a name. Two names, actually. Marketing and sales.
This is the job description almost everyone gets wrong, including many who hold the job. Marketing and sales are not the noise-making departments. They are the professions that find latent tangible wants and help wake them.
So how do you wake a want? Watch it happen in ordinary life.
Think of the last time you tried a restaurant because a friend said you would love it. One sentence, and you went. Now count the restaurant advertisements you scrolled past that same week without a flicker. Why does the friend’s sentence outperform a thousand adverts? Not charisma. Not repetition. The friend has spent years listening to you. They know your taste, your history, where you are in your life this exact month. Their sentence lands because it resonates, and it resonates because it was built from everything they have heard. Influence is not a trick. It is the natural authority of someone who has listened.
That is the entire engine of growth. You can only influence what you resonate with. You can only resonate with what you understand. And you can only understand a person by listening to them.
Which is why growth leaders listen: understanding does two jobs at once. It tells you what to build, because it shows you what people actually want. And it earns you the grounds to influence, because it shows you where people actually are. Sometimes the buyer walks in knowing exactly what they want, and your job is simply to serve it.
More often they are standing somewhere else entirely, and because you understand where, you can walk over to that spot and show them the path from there to what you have. Done without listening, that is pressure, and buyers smell it. Done after listening, it can be service, but only when the tangible solution genuinely delivers what the person wants emotionally. Use the understanding to make a false solution feel right, and that is manipulation.
Now for the sharpest objection in the series. What if an AI is listening to you all the time? Not the way your best friend listens to you. In more of a “surveillance” kind of way: watching every search you make, picking up every conversation near a phone microphone, tracking your purchases. That kind of surveillance. Surely its recommendation would be powerful beyond anything a friend could manage. Why do even need human listeners then?
For some purchases, that may actually work. It will spot the tyres wearing thin, the toner running low, the pattern in your Tuesdays, and it will suggest the obvious next thing with perfect timing. That is similar to the fridge reordering the milk you already decided you like. A want already formed and already settled, carried out by a machine.
As much as this is convenient to a buyer, it does not relieve the supplier from the need to continue to employ human listening. A competitor that understands what that same buyer wants emotionally can make a different solution feel like the more resonant tangible want and displace the incumbent. Machine reordering is easily intercepted. All someone needs to do is to resonate with the human buyer more and the machine setting will be adjusted.
Look closely at the full chain behind a tangible want. The thing a person asks for is rarely the whole of it. A feeling comes first. What the person wants emotionally follows from the feeling. And the product is the thing that solves the emotional want. I want a feeling of safety and reassurance. A Volvo may give me that.
Let’s unpack this. The mother who chooses a Volvo is not expressing a preference for Swedish engineering. Underneath sits fear that her family may be harmed, a fear she may never have fully named. What she wants emotionally is reassurance and protection. What she can actually buy is a safe car.
A young professional chooses the same Volvo, for the same safety score and the cheaper insurance premium that comes with it. His emotional root is the fear of going broke on a new car. What he wants emotionally is financial security and the relief of predictability. Same tangible want. Different emotional roots and emotional wants. The difference decides what each of them needs to hear.
And people often cannot tell you any of this. A person can act on a tangible want without knowing why the thing appealed at that moment. This is one way impulse buying can happen: the thing appeals, the hand reaches, and what the person wanted emotionally never gets named. Which is precisely why understanding the emotional want takes work.
Which describes what the waking of a want actually requires. It is emotional work.
It starts with true listening, which is listening with feeling. The mother may never have said the fear out loud, even to herself. A well-asked question from someone who is listening intently will cause the underlying emotion to show itself.
Then comes understanding. What she says is not merely information. She is handing over something tender, and what she needs back is not a spec sheet. She needs to see that it landed. And when it lands, something useful happens: the feeling stops being an odd thing she is carrying alone. It becomes a normal thing for a parent to carry. People are grateful for that, and gratitude opens doors that a business case never will.
Then comes resonance, which is what happens when the thing you put in front of her is genuinely in harmony with what she wants emotionally. The salesman who is himself a parent, who says “I drive my own children in this one,” is not performing a technique. He is showing her that what he feels and what she is experiencing are the same thing.
And then she chooses. Herself. That is the requirement of legitimate influence: she changes her own mind, because what you offered makes sense in the light of what she actually wants. It rests on one condition. The car must in fact make her family safer. Where the thing does not factually deliver what the person wants emotionally, this stops being marketing and becomes manipulation.
Machines will imitate all of this, and the imitations will get impressive. They will not become the real thing, for the reason this series established at the start: nothing is at stake for a machine. It cannot fear the phone call, so it cannot share the fear, so its comfort is a recording of comfort.
And humans are exquisitely tuned to the difference. We have been reading the gap between performed feeling and real feeling since before we could speak. It is why we discount the salesman who fakes it. An AI that hears everything still feels nothing. Total surveillance not listening. Listening, the kind that wakes wants and closes deals, is hearing with feeling in it. Your friend does it without trying. The machine will spend the rest of history trying.
I started thinking about all of this because of the claims that humans will have little use in an AI world: mere consumers in a production economy that serves us everything, a world where, Elon Musk suggests, money itself may no longer be needed.
You already know my first answer: we are a restless bunch. When the current hunger is satisfied, a new hunger arises, and none of us can single-handedly build everything we want. So trade between humans stays inevitable, at any level of abundance. That is the macro view, and I stand by this.
The supply side remains human for an equally important reason.
Humans do not only desire to have. We desire to serve. Both come installed. Watch any child: they want to cook the meal for you, build the contraption, carry the bag, fix the thing, and then stand there glowing, waiting for you to see it. Nobody teaches them that. It never leaves us either. Look at the richest people alive: not one of them needs to work another day to eat, and they work like their lives depend on it, chasing problems to solve and things to make easier.
That is not hunger for food. It is the hunger to matter, to be of use, to serve. So even in the abundant future, humans will keep walking onto the supply side, not because they must, but because they want to. Somebody out there longs to build what comes next, the way somebody today longs to bake bread or design shoes. The doomsday picture of humanity lying back while machines do everything misreads us entirely: we will not stop wanting to have, and we will not stop wanting to serve.
Now the full picture assembles. Commerce is two wantings finding each other: one person’s desire to have, and another person’s desire to serve. Listening is the bridge between them. That is what marketing and sales actually are. Not the shouting professions. The listening professions.
True listening helps a business understand what a person or market wants emotionally.
The emotional root that drives the emotional want often shows up alongside to strengthen the understanding of the emotional want, but sometimes it doesn’t. Whether the root is visible or not, the business can create or position a tangible want that genuinely answers the emotional want.
Sometimes the tangible want is already spoken. Sometimes it is still latent. Understanding tells the builder what to make and the marketer or seller what to say.
When the offer factually answers the emotional want, it resonates and is seen as value.
Income comes from value. Value comes from understanding. Understanding comes from listening.
Here is some homework. Write this about your own product: “The people who would want this but have not formed the want for it yet are currently ___.” Where are they stuck? What are they using instead? What do they believe about their situation? This week, find three people who fit the would-want description and listen to where they are. No pitch. Just listen.
Make it rAIn, KG