Giving Customers a Seat at the Table (and the Marketing Rule of 7)
What keeps your customer in the room?
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY:Customer research pays off when real customer needs stay present in every decision your company makes. Once you know who your customers are, your next job is earning their trust, and that starts with frequency. The Marketing Rule of 7 holds that people need about seven touchpoints with a brand before they buy, a pattern rooted in availability bias, our tendency to pick whatever comes to mind most easily. The exact number varies, but the principle holds: create enough meaningful touchpoints to stay familiar, and back that visibility with credibility so familiarity turns into trust.Who speaks for the customer when they aren’t in the room, and how do you earn their trust? Your customer is making decisions in rooms you’ll never see. Whether you come to mind there depends on how well you know them and how often you’ve shown up in ways that matter.
Giving Customers a Seat at the Table
When you define your customer segments around needs instead of relying on internal opinions, your marketing campaigns, product development, and even company culture begin to align with the jobs your customers are hiring you to solve. That alignment gives focus, helps you avoid distractions, and directs your energy toward the opportunities that truly matter.
One company I worked for created a consistent reminder of this principle. Translucent chairs were placed around the office in conference rooms, each clearly labeled with the word customer. These chairs were meant to symbolize that the customer always deserved a seat at the table. These chairs were physically placed at the meeting table, reminding us to pause and ask whether a decision made sense for the people we served. It was a simple, theatrical gesture that kept the customer present in every conversation and helped us make better choices.
That is ultimately the role of customer strategy and customer research. Just as those chairs gave the customer a physical presence in the room, research gives your customers a voice in the way you lead, build, and grow. Personas help you see them clearly, and research tools help you hear them accurately. Together, they ensure that your company is guided not by assumptions but by real human needs. When you commit to that mindset, you are not just collecting data. You are building a culture that keeps the customer at the center of everything you do, which, ultimately, will keep them interested in everything you do.
The Marketing Rule of 7
Okay, so now that you understand who your customers are and what their core needs are, how do you build trust with them?
For one thing, start with frequency. There is an age-old principle called the Marketing Rule of 7, which states that, on average, it will take someone seven touchpoints with your brand before they purchase your product or service. This concept has been around since the 1930s, when movie studios first coined the approach after they realized they needed to expose spectators to advertising materials an average of seven times before they committed to a trip to the movie theater.
The Marketing Rule of 7 is really a simple wrapper on a deeper psychological principle known as the availability bias. Availability bias is “the human tendency to rely on information that comes readily to mind when evaluating situations or making decisions.” In marketing, this means that people are most likely to choose what is most familiar or most cognitively available. If a customer has seven or more meaningful interactions with your brand and only three with a competitor, the scale tips in your favor.
Research supports this dynamic. In the tech industry, for example, a report by Statista found that 63% of consumers are more willing to buy from familiar brands, underscoring how critical brand awareness is in competitive markets. Familiarity may not guarantee purchase, but it significantly increases the odds that you will even be considered.
Of course, the Marketing Rule of 7 is not a magic number. The actual number of interactions will vary by industry, product complexity, and purchase size. Modern studies have even shown that it’s not seven interactions that customers need, but seven hours of engaging with your content before they are ready to purchase.
The number alone is less important than creating multiple and meaningful touchpoints. A customer might scroll past a dozen ads without noticing, but one useful piece of content, a trusted recommendation, or a memorable experience can do more to shape perception than all those other fleeting encounters combined. In the Consideration stage, your task is to stay present in ways that add value so your brand is top of mind when the decision moment arrives.
So quality comes first, but quantity matters too. You need to create opportunities for brand impressions, the moments when a shopper sees or interacts with your company. This can mean amplifying organic reach by posting consistently across platforms, investing in paid advertising to reach targeted audiences, repurposing content into different formats, and using remarketing to stay visible to people who have already shown interest. Even small tactical moves, such as boosting high-performing posts, testing new ad formats, or partnering with influencers, can increase your impressions and keep your brand present often enough for those meaningful touchpoints to take hold.
This brings us to a natural question: Is any publicity good publicity? The answer is both yes and no. Visibility matters, but visibility without trust can backfire. A study by Edelman revealed that 81% of consumers need to trust the brand to buy from it, emphasizing that awareness without credibility is not enough.
When customers are weighing options, it is your responsibility and opportunity to build that trust. If they have not chosen you yet, they may simply not have gotten to know you well enough, experienced you in the right contexts, or seen evidence that you can deliver on your promises. That is the continued work of marketing in the Consideration stage: to turn repeated exposure into meaningful familiarity, then familiarity into trust.
Wrapping It All Up
Building trust centers around one important habit: keeping the customer in view. Inside the company, that can be as simple as an empty chair at the meeting table. Outside, it means showing up often enough that your company is the familiar name when your customer is ready to make a purchasing decision.
Think about how many times a new customer runs into your brand before they buy. Is it anywhere close to seven, and does each one give them a reason to trust you more?
Interested in more?
This article’s content was adapted from the book Keeping People Interested: How Leaders Use Marketing to Capture and Sustain Attention, available as a paperback, ebook, and audiobook today.
