---
id: "action-tailor-marketing-literacy"
type: "action-item"
source_timestamps: ["§ Tailor Your Marketing to Your Audience's Literacy Level"]
tags: ["marketing-strategy", "messaging"]
related: ["concept-ai-magic-effect", "concept-ai-demystification", "framework-literacy-tailored-ai-strategy"]
action: "Segment audiences by AI literacy; highlight performance for experts, and preserve the 'magic' for average consumers."
outcome: "Optimized marketing messaging that resonates with the specific psychological drivers of the target segment."
speakers: ["Chiara Longoni", "Gil Appel", "Stephanie M. Tully"]
sources: ["adoption"]
sourceVaultSlug: "hbr-seg-adoption"
originDay: 9
articleStem: "hbr-edu-39-understanding-ai-not-embrace"
sourceUrl: "https://hbr.org/2025/07/why-understanding-ai-doesnt-necessarily-lead-people-to-embrace-it"
sourceTitle: "Why Understanding AI Doesn’t Necessarily Lead People to Embrace It"
---
# Tailor Marketing to Literacy Levels

**Action:** Segment audiences by AI literacy; highlight performance for experts, and preserve the 'magic' for average consumers.

**Detail:** Use surveys or behavioral proxies to segment audiences by AI literacy. For **high-literacy** users (e.g., software engineers using [[entity-github-copilot-d9]], [[entity-cursor-d9]], [[entity-google-vertex-ai]]), market the tool's **capability, performance, and ethicality**. For **low-literacy** users, lean into the 'wow' factor and avoid detailed technical explanations that trigger [[concept-ai-demystification]] and destroy the [[concept-ai-magic-effect]]. This is Steps 1 and 3 of the [[framework-literacy-tailored-ai-strategy]].

**Outcome:** Optimized marketing messaging that resonates with the specific psychological drivers of the target segment.

> **Enrichment tension:** AI-ethics critics argue that deliberately withholding technical explanation to *preserve* awe risks manipulative design — so pair this with [[action-transparent-tradeoffs]], especially in sensitive domains (see [[claim-magic-marketing-backfire]]).