I had absolutely no idea what I was doing when I became a mom.

I’m an only child. I didn’t grow up around little kids. I didn’t have younger cousins I practiced on or siblings I watched my parents navigate. When my son was born, I was starting from zero. Every trick, every framework, every “here’s how you actually get a child to cooperate” insight had to be figured out in real time. Usually at 7am. Usually under pressure.

Now I have a seven-year-old and a three-year-old. And somewhere between the toddler negotiations and the bedtime standoffs, I started noticing something I couldn’t unsee.

My kids behave exactly like customers.

Not as an insult to either party. But genuinely, structurally, the same dynamics that make parenting hard are the same dynamics that make marketing hard. A distracted audience with zero default interest in what you’re offering, a short window to earn their attention, and a very low tolerance for anything that feels like it’s wasting their time.

I think about this constantly. And it’s actually shaped the way we run strategy sessions at GreaterThan. When we’re auditing a brand’s marketing or building out a new system, we run everything through what I’ve started calling the toddler test. Not because customers are irrational. But because the test is honest in a way that most marketing reviews aren’t.

Here’s how it works.

1. Can you get their attention in five seconds?

The move that works at home is not “hey” or the full name said three times. It’s a crouch, eye contact, and a “psst. Come here. I need to tell you something important.”

That’s a hook. That’s what stops whatever they were doing and creates the expectation that something worth hearing is coming.

I learned this the hard way with my son, who is spectacularly good at tuning out anything that doesn’t immediately feel relevant to him. You have to earn the interruption before you ask for the attention.

Your headline, your subject line, your above-the-fold copy — that’s the crouch. That’s the “psst.” If it describes your product instead of speaking directly to what your audience is already thinking about, you haven’t earned the interruption. They’re gone before you’ve said anything.

When we run a messaging audit, this is the first place we look. Can a total stranger read the first line and immediately think “this is for me”? If the answer is no, nothing else matters yet.

2. Can you reframe the whole thing around what they actually care about?

This is the one that shifted how I parent and how I think about positioning.

I do not tell my daughter to eat broccoli because it’s healthy. She does not care. I tell her it’s what superheroes eat before a mission. Same broccoli. Completely different motivation. She asks for seconds.

The product didn’t change. The frame did.

Most brands lead with what their product is or does. The features. The methodology. The process. And their customers hear none of it because that’s not the question those customers are walking around with.

The question a marketing leader is walking around with is “how do I stop looking like a task manager in front of my leadership team.” The question a founder is walking around with is “why does my competitor with a worse product look more polished than us.” That’s the mission briefing. That’s what you lead with.

In our sessions, we spend a disproportionate amount of time here. What is the customer actually trying to feel or avoid? What does success look like to them in words they’d use themselves? Then we work backwards: how does this product or service get them there? That becomes the foundation for every piece of messaging we build.

3. Is it simple enough to act on without losing the plot?

Even when my kids are fully on board, fully motivated, they will still lose the plot if the path has too many steps. Too many turns. Too many decisions before the finish line.

Your funnel works exactly the same way.

I’ve watched brands generate real, qualified interest and then lose people to friction they never accounted for. Too many CTAs on one page. A form with twelve fields. A pricing page that raises more questions than it answers. Each addition made sense to the team that built it. Collectively, they create hesitation. And hesitation at the top of the funnel almost always becomes inaction.

When we audit a conversion flow, we ask one question at every step: what’s the minimum someone needs to do to get to the next thing? The goal isn’t to oversimplify. The goal is to remove everything that is making someone pause when they were already leaning toward yes. One clear path forward. No analysis paralysis. No “I’ll come back to this later.”

“Later” is where leads go to die.

4. Does it stay consistent long enough to actually build trust?

Here’s the parenting one that took me the longest to figure out.

Consistency isn’t just about repetition. It’s about predictability. When my kids know what to expect, the resistance drops. When the rules change day to day, when the tone shifts, when what was true yesterday isn’t true today, trust erodes and everything gets harder.

Your customers are doing the same calibration every time they encounter your brand. They’re asking, often without realizing it, whether the version of you they see today matches the one they saw last week. Whether your website sounds like your ads. Whether your social content sounds like your sales conversations. Whether the thing you promised in the email is the thing they found when they clicked.

Most brands fail this test not because they’re inconsistent on purpose, but because no one ever engineered the system to be consistent. Different vendors built different channels. No shared messaging framework. No common creative standard. The pieces each look fine in isolation and read as completely different brands side by side.

This is the work that compounds. When every touchpoint reinforces the same story, the same promise, the same voice, you’re not just marketing. You’re building trust at scale. And trust, once built, is the thing that makes every other part of the funnel easier.

The pull back

I didn’t expect parenting to sharpen how I think about this work. But having to learn it all from scratch, with no built-in frame of reference, meant I had to actually understand why things worked. Not just follow a playbook.

And the honest truth is that the things that work on a stubborn seven-year-old and a very opinionated three-year-old are the same things that work on B2B buyers and DTC customers. Earn the attention. Lead with what they actually want. Make it easy to act. Show up the same way every time.

If your marketing can pass that test, you’re building something that compounds. If it can’t, that’s exactly what we look at in a strategy audit.

Comment AUDIT below, or book a free session at greaterthan.ai and let’s run your marketing through the test together.