This morning I reread an e-mail I had sent three weeks ago to a school headteacher in Dorohoi.
It was a Tuesday, I think, or perhaps a Wednesday — I can't be certain any more; days blur into one another during periods when I work a great deal and sleep badly. I was sitting at my desk with a coffee beside the keyboard, Gri (the cat) was asleep in a ball on the chair in the corner, and outside it was raining with that fine, insistent October drizzle — the sort of rain that doesn't bother you, but won't let you forget it's there either.
The e-mail was good. It genuinely was good. I had written it with care, revised it twice, added a reference to a specific school project I had found on the council's website, framed the proposal clearly, and placed the call to action exactly where it ought to be. Every rule observed. Everything I knew to work, applied correctly.
I received no reply.
And that morning, rather than moving on as I usually do — because you normally do move on, because if you don't you seize up and stop doing anything — I paused and asked myself a question that, I realised on the spot, I had never truly asked myself before.
Not "Why" didn't he reply.
But "What did I actually know" about him when I wrote it, and "What is the context" — the local market — in which it was received?
The answer came quickly, and it was uncomfortable in that particular way uncomfortable answers have of being clear and final, with no room for negotiation: I knew almost nothing. I knew his title — headteacher. I knew the institution — a school in a town in the north of Moldavia that I had never visited. I knew the school had run a European project two years earlier, from the public information I had found online. I didn't know whether the man read his e-mails himself or had someone filter them for him. I didn't know whether the local authority had blocked or released budgets that quarter. I didn't know whether he was weary of suppliers writing to him, whether he had just had an inspection, whether he was on sick leave, whether his secretary deleted e-mails from unknown suppliers before they ever reached him.
I knew nothing that actually mattered.
I knew what I needed to know in order to write the e-mail. Not what he needed in order to read it.
I had written to an imaginary headteacher. Not to him.
This mistake has a name, and it took me years to articulate it clearly: I ignored the real client's profile and the stage of market maturity in which my message was operating. Written down like this, it sounds technical — it sounds like a digital marketing article headline, like something you'd read on a specialist blog and nod along to before scrolling past. But it isn't technical. It is something older and more personal than any technique.
It is blindness.
A blindness I cultivated systematically, year after year, every e-mail sent adding a thin layer over the reality that I didn't know who I was speaking to.
My father didn't have this problem. Not because he was better at marketing or more intelligent — my father didn't know what marketing was, and if you'd explained it to him he would probably have looked at you with that mixture of curiosity and scepticism he wore whenever you explained something that struck him as needlessly complicated for something that could be sorted out simply. No, my father didn't have this problem because his tools obliged him to calibrate.
He turned up in person.
When my father wanted to work with someone — to repair something, to buy a part, to negotiate a service — he went to that person. He went to his workshop, his shop, his yard if need be. And within thirty seconds, perhaps less, he knew who he was dealing with. He could see what the space looked like — tidy or chaotic, well-kept or neglected. He saw the clothes, the handshake, whether the man looked you in the eye or avoided your gaze. He could smell, quite literally, the air in the workshop — fresh oil or old oil, worked iron or rusted iron. He calibrated instantly and spoke the language of the man in front of him, not the language he might have preferred.
If the man before him was an old mechanic from a village who had never owned a computer, my father spoke as an old mechanic from a village. If the man was a young fellow who had just opened a garage and wanted to appear modern, my father adapted there too, in his own way, with rather more difficulty but with the same intention.
Nobody had taught him this. It was instinct built from years of going to people, from years of being in the physical presence of those he worked with.
I have lost the tool. An e-mail gives you no information about the real person at the other end. It gives you an address and a job title. And from those, for years on end, I constructed whole human beings — with assumptions, with projections, with levels of digital literacy that I possessed, not them.
My father's mistake was that sometimes he turned up unprepared, without having checked beforehand whether the journey was worth making. My mistake is that I don't turn up at all. And I don't even feel the absence of turning up, or I feel it rarely — only on mornings like this one, when I reread an e-mail nobody replied to and wonder where the silence comes from.
There is a reality of the Romanian market that I have known in theory for years and refused to accept in practice, because accepting it in practice would have meant doing things differently, writing differently, thinking differently about the people I was writing to — and that would have required an additional effort for which I always found excuses.
The reality is this: across broad segments of the Romanian market — small entrepreneurs in secondary towns, directors of public institutions with limited budgets and considerable pressures, mayors of communes administering a few thousand inhabitants who have neither the time nor the cognitive infrastructure to process sophisticated proposals — a firm, direct e-mail that carries an air of authority, that makes demands without over-explaining, that promises without demonstrating, performs better than my carefully argued message.
Not because these people prefer superficiality. Not because they are less intelligent or less valuable as interlocutors. But because they process messages through a different filter from the one I was assuming. Psychologists call this the peripheral route to persuasion — when you lack the cognitive tools or the experience required to evaluate a complex argument, the brain looks for something else: tone, structure, familiarity, the perceived certainty of the sender. A person who writes with firmness and clarity, without too many nuances, activates the perception of authority. A person who builds arguments with academic references and social proof activates, in a digitally inexperienced recipient, cognitive fatigue.
An aggressive, firm e-mail that promises without demonstrating can generate short-term conversions. That is the market reality, and there is no point in ignoring it, however uncomfortable it may be.
I knew this. I had read about it. I understood the mechanism.
And I still ignored the real client's profile when I wrote. I still built e-mails for an imaginary market — digitally mature, capable of evaluating complex arguments, willing to read a case study before making a decision. A market that does exist in Romania, but not in the segments that many of my e-mails were actually reaching.
And I — I who knew all this, who had read Cialdini and understood ELM and written articles about the psychology of persuasion — I was sending e-mails that assumed the recipient would evaluate genuine competence, not the outward signals of competence.
I was constructing the most solid arguments possible for someone who was not equipped to evaluate them. And I was puzzled that he didn't reply.
My son is thirteen, and over the past few months he has become more absent — not absent in the sense of being away; he's there, I see him at the table, I hear him in the hallway — but absent in the sense that he is harder to reach, that there is a distance which wasn't there a year ago and is now, and I don't know exactly when it appeared.
In the evenings he sits with his phone and I sit with my laptop and we are in the same room and we are not in the same place.
I sometimes think about what he sees when he watches me work. He sees the screen open in the morning and the screen open in the evening. He sees me sending messages to people he has never met, from towns he has never visited, about projects of which he knows almost nothing concrete. He sees that my work is invisible in the sense that it produces nothing tangible to show — no object, no structure, nothing with weight and form.
His grandfather, my father, produced things with weight and form. He repaired engines. When he finished, the car either ran or it didn't. It was simple. It was immediately verifiable.
What am I transmitting to my son through the way I work? That the world is a screen and that people are e-mail addresses. That you don't need to know who you're speaking to — a correct address and a job title is sufficient. That you can build working relationships with people you have never met and will never meet.
And the mistake I have been making — ignoring who those people truly are, what stage of digital life they are at, what language they process, not I — that mistake he will not see as a mistake. He will inherit the model. He too will send e-mails to imaginary people, in imaginary markets. Not because he won't be intelligent. But because he won't know there is an alternative.
My father turned up. I no longer turn up. My son will not know that turning up was ever an option.
I want to be precise about what I am acknowledging, because precision matters here.
I am not acknowledging that the carefully argued e-mail is wrong in itself. I am not acknowledging that the Romanian market is inferior or incapable. I am not acknowledging that I ought to send aggressive, substanceless e-mails in place of reasoned ones.
I am acknowledging that I ignored the client's profile. That I did not ask myself, before writing, who the real person was and what world he lived in. That I assumed, automatically and unreflectively, that the market I was operating in was digitally mature and capable of evaluating the complex arguments I was constructing. That this assumption was wrong for a significant portion of the segments I was targeting.
I am acknowledging that I knew in theory how the psychology of authority works in markets with low digital literacy — that a firm, direct tone can generate conversions where a sophisticated argument generates silence — and that I refused to incorporate this knowledge into my practice, probably because doing so would have meant accepting that some of my potential clients were not equipped to appreciate me at the value I placed on myself.
That is pride. Not the noisy, declarative pride that is easy to recognise. The quiet pride of someone who believes he knows better than his market.
The aggressive e-mail works in the short term. It brings real conversions, real clients, real money. In the segments I am describing — small SMEs, public institutions, entrepreneurs in secondary towns — a supplier who sounds firm and asks directly will often prevail over one who builds elaborate arguments the recipient cannot process.
But a client won through a tone of authority without substance quickly becomes dissatisfied when the deliverables fail to support the promise. And in the small, vertical Romanian market — where everyone knows everyone, where a school headteacher in one county knows what happened to a headteacher in the neighbouring county who worked with Supplier X — reputation travels quickly and in directions you cannot control.
This tension — the short-term efficacy of performed authority versus the long-term erosion of genuine credibility — is the central tension in any communication decision in these markets. There is no simple resolution. There are choices, with their respective consequences.
For years I chose a third path that was not really a choice at all: ignoring the tension entirely, building messages for an imaginary market, and then wondering why they didn't work.
I don't know whether the school headteacher in Dorohoi will ever receive an e-mail from me that truly reaches him rather than a projection of him. Perhaps he will. Perhaps next time I will spend ten minutes understanding who the real person is, what stage of digitisation he is at, what language he processes, what frightens him and what might actually persuade him.
Or perhaps I will open my laptop tomorrow morning, drink my coffee with Gri on the chair in the corner, and write once more to the imaginary headteacher, because it is easier and more comfortable and because seeing the real person requires an effort that is not always there to be summoned.
That is the truth, without ornament.
The mistake I have described here is not something I resolved by writing about it. It is something I have seen. And seeing is the first step — the only step I can confirm I have taken.
The rest remains to be demonstrated.
My son is asleep now. It's past midnight. The screen is the only thing lit in the room.
Tomorrow I'll ask him how school was and I'll try to listen — truly listen — to what he says, rather than waiting for him to finish so I can say what I have to say. I'll try to be present to the real person in front of me, not to the imaginary son I construct from my assumptions about who he is and where he stands.
That is easier to write than to do.
But if I have learnt anything from everything I have described this evening, it is that the distance between knowing and doing is exactly the place where all mistakes are born.
— Petru
10 Questions and Answers on the Tensions and Value of this Article
The article acknowledges a professional mistake but addresses it through a personal and familial lens. Isn't that a departure from the subject?
A: No — that is precisely the intention. The professional mistake described does not exist in a vacuum. It exists in the life of a person who inherited a way of building relationships from his father, who is passing that on to a son, and who realises that the transmission has broken down somewhere along the way. Treating it in a strictly professional manner — with lists of errors and solutions — would be a different article, on a different site. Here the marketing subject is the pretext for a deeper question: how do you truly know who you are speaking to, and what happens when you don't?
Doesn't the claim that aggressive e-mails work in the short term on the Romanian market risk justifying mediocre communication practices?
A: The risk exists and is explicitly acknowledged in the article. The distinction between describing a mechanism and recommending it is essential. The article describes the market reality honestly — including the fact that performed authority generates real conversions — precisely because ignoring that reality is part of the mistake being described. You cannot correct a blindness by remaining blind to what exists. The implicit recommendation is not to imitate the aggressive e-mail, but to understand why it works in certain segments and calibrate accordingly, with genuine substance behind it.
What does "stage of market maturity" actually mean, and how do you assess it in practice before writing an e-mail?
A: The digital maturity of a segment describes the capacity of its recipients to evaluate complex arguments, compare offers, and actively use digital tools in the decision-making process. In practice, you gauge it through a handful of signals: the type of institution or company, the size of the locality, the history of collaboration with digital suppliers, and the language used in publicly available documents. A school headteacher in a small town with an institutional website unchanged since 2015 operates in a very different segment from a marketing manager at a regional retailer active across all platforms. The years you spend with your eyes open in your market build an instinct that partially replaces formal research.
The article also presents the author's father as an implicit model of good practice. But wasn't the father's model limited to small markets and face-to-face relationships? Isn't the nostalgia for him somewhat romanticised?
A: Yes, it is probably partially romanticised — and the article makes no claim that the father's model was superior in absolute terms. It claims that his tools — physical presence, instinctive calibration — obliged him to do something that e-mail does not: to see the real person. What has been lost is not the tool but the compulsion to calibrate. E-mail allows you to send without calibrating. Sometimes that is an efficiency advantage. At other times it is a shortcut to the mistake described in the article.
Is the mistake described specific to the author, or is it systemic — do all those who work with heterogeneous digital markets make it?
A: It is systemic. The curse of knowledge — the term used in cognitive psychology for the inability to imagine the perspective of someone who does not know what you know — affects anyone who has developed expertise in a field. The more you know about digital marketing, SEO, and online consumer behaviour, the harder it is to write for someone who knows none of it. The mistake is more common among professionals precisely because their experience creates the blindness rather than preventing it.
What should a reader who recognises themselves in the mistake described actually change?
A: One single thing, applied before any important message: ten minutes of genuine research about the person at the other end — not their title and institution, but their level of familiarity with your field, the language they use in publicly available communications, and the type of decision you are asking them to make and whether they are ready for it. It need not be exhaustive research. It needs to be sufficient to replace the imaginary person with a handful of real data points about the actual individual.
The article has a narrative structure that is more literary than it is marketing-oriented. Does that work on a site that also addresses a professional audience?
A: It works precisely because it doesn't resemble a marketing article. The reader of a text like this is not in rapid-scan mode looking for useful information — they are in reading mode, in recognition mode, in internal-dialogue mode. And the mistake described — ignoring the real person in favour of the imaginary one — is easier to recognise and harder to deny when it is presented through lived experience than when it is presented as a list of best practices. The form is part of the argument.
The tension between the short-term efficacy of performed authority and the long-term erosion of credibility — does it have a practical resolution, or does it remain an open tension?
A: It remains an open tension in the article, deliberately so, because a formulated resolution would be false. There are choices with different consequences, not solutions. If the sole aim is short-term conversion and you have no intention of building a lasting relationship with that segment, performed authority works and is a legitimate choice. If the aim is a long-term relationship in a small market where reputation circulates quickly, the cost of that performed authority is paid later. What makes the difference is clarity about what your real objective is — not a universal formula.
Why does the author's son appear in the article? What connection does he have with the professional subject?
A: The connection is direct: the mistake described — not seeing the real person, operating with projections rather than reality — is not only a professional mistake. It is a way of being in relation to the world. The son is there because you inherit the model, just as the author inherited his father's. And because asking yourself what you are passing on is the only form of responsibility that goes beyond correcting a single error.
The article ends without a resolution. Isn't that a failure to serve the reader?
A: It depends on what you mean by usefulness. If usefulness is a list of steps to follow, the article does not offer that and makes no attempt to. If usefulness is recognising a pattern in your own practice and naming it clearly — without self-censorship and without moralising — then the article does precisely that. The open ending is not narrative laziness. It is honesty about the fact that seeing a mistake does not automatically mean you have corrected it. The distance between knowing and doing is real and deserves to be acknowledged as such, not concealed beneath a reassuring conclusion.
Online Bibliography
Psychology of Persuasion and the ELM Model
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Psihoteca.ro — Psihologia vânzării: rută centrală vs. periferică (Petty & Cacioppo, 1986) https://psihoteca.ro/psihologia-vanzarii/
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Robert B. Cialdini — Psihologia manipulării (Romanian edition, principles of authority and reciprocity) https://www.ideeaeuropeana.ro/carti/psihologie-psihanaliza/psihologia-manipularii/
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LinkedIn / Angela Calina — 6 principii psihologice cu impact în vânzări (authority, social proof) https://ro.linkedin.com/pulse/6-principii-psihologice-cu-impact-%C3%AEn-v%C3%A2nz%C4%83ri-angela-calina
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psihologiavanzarii.ro — Applied Academic Resource (curse of knowledge, calibration) http://psihologiavanzarii.ro/
Consumer Behaviour and Digital Maturity in Romania
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Eurostat — E-commerce statistics for individuals (comparative EU data, digital engagement rates) https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php/E-commerce_statistics_for_individuals
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The Big Pixel — Comportamentul consumatorului în era digitală: statistici și insights https://thebigpixel.ro/comportamentului-consumatorului-in-era-digitala-statistici-si-insights/
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DigiER / Erasmus — Romanian customer behaviour (Eurostat comparative data) https://digier.erasmus.site/courses/good-practices-examples-for-implementation-to-digital-crash-course/lessons/chapter-6-shopping-behaviour-and-social-shopping-2/
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Amfiteatru Economic (academic PDF) — Consumer rights protection in the era of technological change https://www.amfiteatrueconomic.ro/temp/Articol_1289.pdf
The SME Market and Romanian Entrepreneurship
- Financial Intelligence — Sondaj IMM România 2025: percepția antreprenorilor față de mediul de afaceri https://financialintelligence.ro/jianu-imm-romania-8-din-10-antreprenori-sustin-ca-partidele-politice-nu-au-programe-si-platforme-de-sustinere-a-mediului-de-afaceri/
Own Editorial References
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petrucojocaru.ro — Firmele de la coada clasamentului — ținta ideală pentru creștere https://petrucojocaru.ro/studii-de-caz/firmele-de-la-coada-clasamentului.html
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absolutweb.ro — De ce funcționează emailul „agresiv" pe piața românească: psihologia autorității în medii cu educație digitală scăzută https://absolutweb.ro
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petrucojocaru.ro — Păcatul 1: Mândria și Ignoranța — din seria 7 păcate ale mesajelor https://petrucojocaru.ro/greseli/7-pacate-ale-mesajelor.html