The best marketing advice I’ve ever received came from my rabbi, a real person, and Mr. and Mrs. Katz, his imaginary friends.
“Whenever I sit down to write a sermon, I picture a couple who have been attending services together for years,” Rabbi Weiss told me over coffee a while ago, introducing the Katzes.
“One night, Mr. Katz feels sick, so Mrs. Katz goes by herself. When he gets home, Mr. Katz asks what the sermon was about. If I’ve done my job right, Mrs. Katz doesn’t just summarize it. She shares what she learned and what it meant to her.”
It was a light bulb moment for me—or, perhaps, a “Let there be light” moment.
Thinking Past the Pulpit
What Rabbi Weiss is doing is brilliant. He’s shifting his perspective from the bimah, where he stands, to the sanctuary floor, where Mrs. Katz sits. It helps him focus not just on the words, but on how they’ll land.
The result is a sermon that invites listeners to internalize the message, reflect on it, and express it in their own way.
A Marketing Mitzvah
So what does this mean for marketing? After all, we’re working with the 5 Ps, not the Ten Commandments.
Audiences are abstractions—data, variables, assumptions. Even personas, with all their names and traits, are just better-defined abstractions. Marketing to them often feels like performing on stage: We know the audience is there, in the dark, and we can even get a sense of how they’re reacting, but it’s hard to truly connect.
When we picture an individual like Mrs. Katz, we know not just what to say, but how it could resonate. We stop treating our messages like lines of code, designed to generate a flawless response, and instead encourage people to draw their own meaning.
Putting ourselves in someone else’s shoes helps us create messages people don’t just understand, but internalize. Picturing a faceless audience—or a conceptual persona—often leads to messaging that says, This is important. But when we picture an individual, our goal shifts. We want them to say, Here’s why I think it’s important.
Rabbi Weiss’s approach doesn’t replace what we’re already doing. Instead, it elevates our efforts by making the message sharper, warmer, more human—and ultimately, more impactful.
Practicing What I Preach
I’ve written this blog post for my fellow marketers, but I have been thinking about an individual all along: Rabbi Weiss’s.
What will he take from this? How will he describe this post to others? What will he tell me the next time we have coffee? I don’t know for sure, but I do know what I’ve written here is stronger because I had an individual in mind.
Amen.
