The Assumption Trap
What you “already know” can hurt you.
The most dangerous words in a marketing meeting are not "let's spend more" or "let's pivot." They are: "We already know that."
Success breeds certainty, certainty breeds assumption, and assumption quietly erodes the curiosity that drives growth. This erosion happens so gradually that most organizations don't notice it until the symptoms become impossible to ignore. The campaigns still run. The metrics still get reported. The team still stays busy. But somewhere along the way, the story stopped moving the market, and nobody can pinpoint exactly when it happened.
Most financial brands do not lose relevance because their competitors out-innovate them. They lose because what once worked becomes what always works in their minds. The playbooks get laminated, treated as sacred texts rather than working documents. The data gets interpreted through yesterday's lens, filtered through assumptions that nobody thinks to question because questioning them would require admitting that the ground has shifted beneath your feet.
The result is subtle stagnation dressed up as stability. You can feel busy and productive while slowly drifting away from the market you're supposed to serve. You can hit your quarterly numbers while missing the fundamental changes that will make those numbers irrelevant in three years. This is the assumption trap, and it catches smart, experienced teams precisely because they have earned the right to trust their instincts. The problem is that instincts formed in one market environment can become liabilities when that environment changes.
I saw this play out vividly at a recent strategy session with a progressive community bank. The CMO said something that stopped me cold: "We realized we have an aging customer base, not an aging market." This distinction sounds simple, but it represented a fundamental reframe of everything they thought they knew about their business.
For years, this bank had built their strategy around the belief that their small towns were shrinking and aging. The demographic data seemed to support this narrative, or at least it did when viewed through a particular lens. Their marketing reflected this assumption, targeting the customers they already had rather than the customers they could have. Their product development prioritized the needs of longtime account holders rather than anticipating what newcomers might want. Their branch strategy assumed that foot traffic would continue declining because that's what the trend lines suggested.
When we actually looked at the data with fresh eyes, we found a different story entirely. The towns weren't shrinking; they were growing. The demographics weren't aging; they were getting younger and more diverse. The problem wasn't the market. The problem was that the bank's customer base had calcified while the community around them transformed. They had been marketing to who they knew rather than who had moved in. Their customers were aging, but their market was full of young families, remote workers who'd relocated during the pandemic, and small business owners who'd never considered a community bank because no community bank had ever spoken to them.
Their marketing had been shaped by a perfectly logical, perfectly wrong assumption. And because the assumption felt true, because it matched what they saw when they looked at their existing customers, nobody had thought to verify it against what was actually happening in the broader community. This is how assumption traps work. They feel like wisdom because they're built on real experience. But experience with yesterday's market can blind you to today's reality.
When we looked deeper, we found a dozen more examples of assumptions operating as invisible constraints. They had chosen certain distribution channels because those channels had worked fifteen years ago, not because they still made sense. Their messaging was calibrated to a mindset that their target customers had moved past. Their creative decisions were made to comfort internal stakeholders rather than capture external attention. They were running a 2010 playbook in a 2025 market and wondering why the results felt flat.
Once those assumptions surfaced, everything changed. The team shifted from defending the old narrative to testing a new one. The reframe wasn't radical in execution. It was grounded in fresh data and internal honesty. But acknowledging what they no longer knew opened up possibilities that had been invisible when certainty ruled. They updated their visual identity to speak to a younger audience. They shifted their audience mix to reflect who actually lived in their footprint. They rewrote their messaging to address the concerns of first-time homebuyers and young entrepreneurs rather than assuming their only opportunity was to retain retirees.
Sometimes the biggest act of brand courage is admitting what you no longer know. It feels risky because expertise is supposed to provide certainty, and certainty is supposed to provide confidence, and confidence is supposed to drive results. But false certainty is worse than honest uncertainty. When you assume you understand your market, you stop looking at your market. When you stop looking, you stop learning. When you stop learning, you start drifting. And by the time you realize you've drifted, the effort required to course-correct has multiplied dramatically.
I want to offer you a practical tool for surfacing your own assumptions before they become traps. I call it an Assumption Audit, and it works best when you run it with your leadership or marketing team in a dedicated session rather than trying to squeeze it into a crowded agenda.
Start by listing every belief you hold about your audience, your brand, and your market. Don't filter for importance; just get them all on paper or on a whiteboard. You're looking for the things you treat as facts rather than hypotheses. Statements like "our customers are primarily over 55" or "people in our market prefer in-person service" or "price is the main decision driver for our segment." These beliefs shape every decision you make, so you need to see them clearly before you can evaluate them honestly.
Next to each belief, add one of three labels. The first label is "proven recently," which means you have data supporting this belief from the last twelve months. Not data from five years ago that you assume still applies, but current evidence that this is actually true in today's market. The second label is "assumed true," which means you think it's right but you have no current proof. This is the dangerous category, the beliefs that feel so obvious that nobody has bothered to verify them. The third label is "inherited truth," which means you say it because it has always been said. These are the beliefs that predate the current team, the things everyone "knows" without anyone remembering where the knowledge came from.
Once you've labeled everything, focus your next quarter's learning budget on converting assumed and inherited truths into proven ones. This might mean commissioning fresh research, running small experiments, or simply asking your frontline team what they're actually hearing from customers. The goal isn't to find fault or to blame anyone for holding incorrect beliefs. The goal is to replace comfort with clarity, to build strategy on evidence rather than echo.
Your biggest competitor isn't another fintech or bank. It's the belief that you already understand your market. That belief feels like an asset because it provides confidence and direction. But when it's wrong, when the market has shifted while your assumptions stayed fixed, it becomes the heaviest anchor you're dragging. Curiosity is uncomfortable because it requires admitting uncertainty, but brands that get curious again get interesting again. They start seeing opportunities that certainty made invisible. They start speaking to audiences that assumptions had written off. They start building strategies that match reality rather than memory.
If your team's strategy feels familiar in all the wrong ways, if you're executing the same playbook with diminishing returns and can't figure out why, it might be time for an Assumption Audit. The truths you inherit are not always the truths you should keep. The market you remember is not always the market you serve. And the customers you know are not always the customers you could have.
I'm happy to share the framework we use with our clients if you want to run this exercise with your team. Just let me know.
Allison