Inside-Outside Marketing

Toyota has a practice called the five whys.

When something goes wrong on the factory floor, they don’t fix it and move on. They ask why it happened. Then they ask why that happened. Then why that happened. Five levels deep. Until they reach the root.

A machine stopped working. Why? The fuse blew. Why? The bearing wasn’t lubricated. Why? The pump wasn’t circulating enough oil. Why? The pump intake was clogged with metal shavings. Why? There was no filter on the intake.

The surface problem was a blown fuse. The root problem was a missing filter.

If you fix the fuse, the problem comes back in a week. If you add the filter, it never happens again.

Toyota built the most reliable cars in the world using this one principle: never fix the surface. Find the root.

Most businesses do the opposite.

The outside-in trap

When something isn’t working, the first instinct is to look outward.

Sales are flat. What are competitors doing? What’s trending? What hooks are working for other brands? What new format should we try? What agency should we hire? What tool should we buy?

The entire response is oriented outward. Look at what’s happening outside the business. Find something that appears to be working for someone else. Bring it in. Apply it. Hope it fixes the problem.

Sometimes it does. Temporarily. A new creative format gets a bump for two weeks. A new agency brings better ROI for a quarter. A new channel shows early promise before the same problems resurface.

And then you’re back to looking outward again. New trend. New reference. New hook. New campaign.

This is fixing fuses.

You’re solving the surface problem. The ads aren’t performing. The landing page isn’t converting. The emails aren’t opening. Those are real symptoms. But they’re not the disease.

The disease is almost always the same thing, and it’s almost always inside the business, not outside it.

Run the five whys on your marketing

Sales are down this month. Why?

Conversion rate dropped. Why?

Landing page isn’t performing. Why?

The messaging doesn’t resonate. Why?

We’re saying the same thing we’ve always said. Why?

Because we don’t actually know what our customers care about right now. We’re repeating what worked last year and hoping it still works this year.

The surface problem is a landing page. The root problem is a disconnect between your message and why people actually buy.

You can redesign that landing page ten times. If the message doesn’t match what your customer actually cares about today, it won’t matter.

And no amount of looking outward will solve it. Because the answer isn’t out there. It’s in here. Inside your business. Inside your customer data, your reviews, your support tickets, your purchase behavior, your ad results. The signal you need is already there. You’re just not looking at it.

Inside-out

There are two ways to build a marketing strategy.

Outside-in starts with the market. What’s happening externally? What do competitors look like? What formats are trending? What’s the algorithm rewarding? You take those external inputs and build your strategy around them. You’re letting the outside define the inside.

Inside-out starts with the customer. What did they say in their review? What search term brought them to your site? What did they email your support team about? What time of day did they buy, and why? You take those internal inputs and use them to go find more people like them. You’re letting the inside inform the outside.

The difference sounds subtle. It isn’t.

Outside-in converges. Every brand in your category is looking at the same trending hooks, the same swipe files, the same competitor creative. They’re all building from the same external inputs. The result is a sea of sameness. Same UGC format. Same problem-solution structure. Same hooks. The only lever left is spend. If your ad sounds like everyone else’s ad, the winner is whoever has the bigger budget (or who has the better unit economics to spend more)

Inside-out diverges. Nobody else has your customer data. Nobody else has your reviews. Nobody else knows what your buyer said on a support call last Tuesday. When you build from internal insight, your marketing becomes specific in a way that can’t be copied. Not because the format is unique. Because the message is.

What this looks like

We worked with a brand that sold a children’s oral care product. For three and a half years, they marketed one angle: clean ingredients. Natural. Fluoride-free. It made sense, because that's why the founder created the product in the first place

That’s outside-in. Start with what the category says matters, and build your messaging around it.

When we went inside, when we actually read the reviews, studied the purchase data, analyzed the customer behavior, we found something different. Their best customers weren’t buying because of ingredients. They were buying because bedtime was a war. Brushing teeth was a nightly fight. These parents didn’t care about fluoride. They cared about making 7:30pm less miserable.

That insight was sitting inside the business the entire time. Three and a half years of reviews. Nobody read between the lines.

The first ads built from that inside-out insight hit top 3, 7, and 9 in the entire ad account within the first week.

Three and a half years of looking outward. One week of looking inward to find something better.

Another brand was convinced their product was seasonal. Strong Q4, dead Q1. Every year, same story. When we looked inside their data, we found a completely different customer buying for a completely different reason at a different time of year. The off-season wasn’t real. It was a symptom of talking to the wrong person. They’d been marketing to the customer they assumed they had, not the customer they actually had.

The outside-in view said: it’s a seasonal product, plan accordingly. The inside-out view said: you have a year-round customer you’ve never spoken to.

The root is always the same

I’ve been doing this work across dozens of brands now, and the root problem is almost always the same.

You’ve lost touch with why people buy from you. Or the reason has shifted and you haven’t shifted with it. Or there are new reasons you haven’t discovered yet because you’ve been too busy looking outward to look inward.

New creative won’t fix it. New agency won’t fix it. New channel won’t fix it. Those are fuses. The root is the filter: do you actually understand, right now, today, why your customer buys?

Because it changes. Every season there’s a new reason. Every month there’s a shift in how people think about your product. Every day there’s a customer discovering your product for a reason you haven’t identified yet. The brand that understood their customer last quarter can lose that understanding this quarter if they stop asking.

Inside-out isn’t a one-time exercise. It’s a practice. Toyota doesn’t run the five whys once and call it done. They run it every time something goes wrong. Because the root cause changes. New problems appear, and the system evolves. Your market evolves the same way. The brands I’ve seen win are the ones who keep going back inside.

The real competitive advantage

Your competitors can study your ads. They can copy your hooks. They can replicate your format, your landing page, your offers. Anything you put out externally is visible and copyable.

They cannot copy what’s inside your business.

They don’t have your reviews (well they technically do, but they won’t do anything with them). They don’t have your support tickets. They don’t know what your buyer whispered in a DM last week. They don’t know which angle is quietly converting at 3x your average, or why.

Inside-out marketing creates an asymmetry that can’t be competed away. The deeper you go into your own customer data, the more differentiated your marketing becomes. Because you’re being specific. And specificity built from proprietary insight is the one thing that scales, compounds, and can’t be replicated by anyone who doesn’t have access to the same source material.

Outside-in brands end up saying the same things. Inside-out brands become impossible to copy.

Where to start

If you want to shift from outside-in to inside-out, the starting point is embarrassingly simple.

Read your reviews. All of them. Not to see if people like your product. To understand why they bought, what they were feeling before they bought, and what language they use to describe it.

Listen to your support calls for insight. What are people asking about? What are they confused by? What do they wish the product did that it doesn’t?

Study your ad data for patterns. Which audiences are converting that you didn’t expect? Which angles are working that you didn’t predict? What is the data telling you that your assumptions aren’t?

Then take what you find and build from it. Write the ad that speaks to the real reason someone buys, not the reason you assumed. Build the landing page around the language your customer actually uses, not the language your marketing team came up with. Create content for the people who are already inside your world, and share it outside.

Quick Links:

1. We built a free tool that runs this analysis on your brand. Drop your website URL and get a gap report showing what your customers actually say vs. what your brand says.
2. We run 12 weeks of structured experiments to find your next winning audience and angle, validate it with real ad spend, and help apply those insights across your entire business. See what that looks like for your brand