Confidence Economics wasn't where the work started. It emerged over years of listening to customers, changing the questions, and eventually treating what customers said not simply as content—but as evidence.
There was no Missing Middle. No Behavior → Evidence → Meaning. No State or Standing. No X and Y. No Enterprise Intelligence.
I was trying to understand something much more practical:
Why did some customers value their salesperson's help so much?
I had spent years inside and around automotive retail, including four years directing store marketing for Lithia Motors. By then I had already recorded dozens of customers and salespeople at Lithia, and I would interview hundreds more customers in the years that followed.
I thought I was learning how dealerships could market themselves better.
I didn't yet understand that the customers were showing me something much more important.
In my first LinkedIn article in May 2015, I wrote about something I had repeatedly observed while interviewing customers:
“The epiphany came when I realized salespeople have the most influence over the purchase because they provide the most help.”
What surprised me wasn't simply that customers appreciated good salespeople. It was how much they appreciated them—and how little the salespeople themselves sometimes understood the value of the Help they had provided.
I had watched salespeople tear up when they saw what their customers said about them.
One experience particularly stayed with me. A dealership had scheduled ten customers for interviews. All ten belonged to the same older salesperson. The other salespeople weren't confident their customers would participate. He was. He offered to get me ten more.
I asked why he was so sure they would do it. His answer was essentially: I call them and ask them to do me a favor.
At the time, I saw a terrific salesperson and powerful testimonial content.
What I had also witnessed—without yet having language for it—was reciprocity.
Something had survived the transaction.
The early work was still marketing work.
I believed customer videos could help shoppers trust salespeople before visiting the store. I wrote about “happy customers,” persuasion, testimonials, Know-Like-Trust and other ideas I would not use to explain Confidence Economics today.
But underneath that marketing language, another question kept appearing.
“What they really need is the help of someone they can trust.”
I was beginning to see that the dealership's problem wasn't simply getting information in front of shoppers.
The shopper could have enormous amounts of information and still face a problem information alone couldn't solve:
Can I safely accept your Help?
I didn't yet know that would eventually become Y.
Then price started bothering me.
Dealers heard shoppers ask about price constantly, so it was natural to conclude that price was what mattered most. But the customer interviews suggested something else.
“Most ‘price shoppers’ are asking about price because they don't know how to ask for what they really want.”
“What they really want to know is ‘who can help me?’”
That explanation was incomplete. Confidence Economics would eventually become much more disciplined about not deciding for the shopper what her words “really mean.”
But the underlying observation mattered:
The customer's stated question might not be all she is trying to determine.
The same article contained another observation that stayed with me. When a commissioned salesperson approaches us, many of us instinctively say:
“I'm just looking.”
At the time I described it this way: “It's what you say to someone you're not sure you want accept help from.”
That was getting closer.
The visible behavior wasn't merely an obstacle for the salesperson to overcome. It might be evidence of something the shopper was trying to determine about the person offering Help.
Years later, that distinction would matter enormously.
By 2017, the center of gravity was shifting again.
I was still creating customer content. But I was increasingly interested in what customers themselves could tell us about their decisions.
I began calling the things customers said significantly affected their purchase their “Why-Buys.”
Dealerships advertise Why-Buys. Customers know the Why-Boughts.
A dealership can tell a shopper why she should buy from it. But after the Decision, the customer can tell us what actually mattered to her.
The terminology didn't survive. The principle did:
The experience belongs to the customer.
The dealership knows what it intended to do. The salesperson knows what he intended to communicate. The process tells management what was supposed to happen.
But the customer has the authority to tell us what she experienced and what it meant to her.
That was an important turn.
The interviews had begun as content. Increasingly, I was treating what customers said as evidence.
The more I listened, the harder it became to ignore something else.
Customers weren't entering these purchases as neutral information processors. They were worried.
In a June 2017 article I wrote that shoppers were looking for more than information. They were looking for enough “reasonable hope” to move forward.
Again, that wasn't yet Confidence Economics.
The question was becoming less:
How do we persuade a shopper?
and more:
What has to happen before this person can feel confident enough to decide?
That is a very different question.
As automotive retail accelerated toward digital retailing, automation and reduced human contact, I found myself pushing in the opposite direction.
Not against technology.
Against the assumption that technology had eliminated the human problem.
“People need the education and validation of trusted experts to make confident decisions.”
That sentence was much closer to where the work would eventually land.
A high-consideration purchase creates a paradox. The shopper needs expertise precisely because she doesn't know everything she needs to know. But accepting expertise creates vulnerability.
The person who can help her may also have interests of his own.
How does expertise become safe enough to use?
I still didn't have the mechanism. But by then, I knew that was the problem I was circling.
For years I had interviewed customers because their stories could help influence the next shopper.
Eventually I realized I had been overlooking the more important audience:
the enterprise itself.
Instead of asking, How can this customer's story help us sell to another customer?, the more consequential question became:
What can this customer teach us about what actually happened?
That changed everything.
The interview stopped being merely marketing content. It became Customer Evidence.
And once customer interviews were systematically analyzed across customers, something became visible that no individual anecdote could establish by itself: patterns.
Customers with different backgrounds. Different budgets. Different vehicles. Different dealerships. Different salespeople who had never met one another.
Yet their accounts repeatedly described recognizable human problems—and recognizable kinds of Evidence that changed what happened next.
The framework did not come first.
The customer evidence did.
Eventually I stopped trying to explain the phenomenon from memory, intuition or sales folklore.
We systematically analyzed the customer interviews.
The research focused on people who had gone beyond completing a transaction. They had maintained Relationships, returned, serviced, referred others and, in many cases, purchased again—the kinds of people dealerships commonly call Customers For Life.
That distinction mattered.
We already knew what Customers For Life did. We knew why they were economically valuable.
The unanswered question was:
How had wary shoppers become Customers For Life?
So we went back to those with the authority to explain their experience: the customers themselves.
The analysis eventually encompassed 107 customers, 2,645 customer quotations and eight dealerships.
And what emerged was considerably different from the language I had used in those early articles.
Customers arrived Guarded, carrying Negative Expectations. They evaluated what happened. Behavior could become Evidence. The customer determined what that Evidence meant. Her State could change. The salesperson's Standing could change. An expected Adversary could become an Ally.
Expertise that initially might have been risky to accept could become usable Help—without the customer surrendering authorship of her Decision.
A transaction could become a Relationship she chose to continue.
And that Relationship could continue creating value in both directions.
Someone she could return to—whose expertise and Help she had already learned she could use.
Service, repeat purchases, referrals and advocacy—and access to someone who knew what had happened in the Missing Middle.
That became Confidence Economics™.
Looking back across those old articles, I can see ideas I would express differently today.
I wrote about persuasion. Today I would emphasize agency.
I wrote about earning trust. Today I would ask what Evidence the shopper encountered and what that Evidence meant to her.
I sometimes assumed I knew what was underneath a customer's words. Today Confidence Economics insists on a harder discipline:
Meaning Belongs to the Customer.
I wrote about using customer stories to influence future shoppers. Today I see another source of value in them:
Customer Evidence can teach the enterprise.
That evolution matters.
Confidence Economics wasn't created by finding new terminology for things I had already decided were true. Quite the opposite.
The customers kept correcting and deepening the question.
For years, the enterprise benefited economically when a salesperson created a durable customer Relationship.
The customer benefited too. She now had someone she could return to for expertise and Help—an Ally whose Standing didn't disappear simply because the transaction ended.
And the Relationship created continuing economic opportunity for the enterprise.
But the knowledge explaining how that Relationship formed remained with the customer.
The CRM recorded the activity.
The DMS recorded the transaction.
Accounting recorded the revenue.
The customer carried the explanation.
None of those management systems recorded what happened to the human being in between.
That is the Missing Middle.
And it revealed a second source of enterprise value.
The Relationship can create continuing economic opportunity. When those opportunities become actual economic events—service, repeat purchases, referrals and other business—they can produce Durable Revenue.
But when the enterprise goes back and asks the customer what happened, the Relationship can also create continuing learning opportunity.
That intelligence can improve the enterprise's capacity to recognize what may be happening and respond more productively in future encounters.
Across: People • Processes • Systems • AI
The interviews began as content.
Then the content became evidence.
Eventually, the evidence revealed a human mechanism.
And now that evidence can become Enterprise Intelligence.
That observation was there in 2015. It took years of listening to understand why it mattered.
And perhaps the most important lesson from that journey is the same one Confidence Economics asks an enterprise to practice now:
Don't begin by assuming you know what happened to the customer.
Ask her.
Confidence Economics wasn't where the work started.
It was where the evidence eventually led.