Reaching a Perception: From Perceptual Cohort to Reachable Audience

The correspondence principle of brand management prescribes acting on the highest-payoff dimension and cohort, but presumes a perceptual cohort is reachable without showing how. A cohort defined by perceptual proximity has no native media address, unlike the channels, cookies, and lookalike segments of conventional activation. This applied companion closes that gap. It demonstrates that being actionable decomposes into three measurable bridges, unified by a measurement-to-activation handoff contract: the instrument supplies the target and the cost of reaching it; the manager runs the campaign. The first bridge emits a signal strong on the dimension a cohort is sensitive to and lets self-selection route it, requiring no address. Formalized on a degraded broadcast channel, the self-selection sharpness equals the same off-axis variance the parent paper counts as a perception-metamerism loss: the targeting bug becomes a self-selection filter. The second traces atoms back to the surfaces where each perception was found. The third maps the cohort to addressable proxies and makes measurable the garbling loss of doing so. A calibrated simulation and two case studies show the contract selecting bridges by distinctiveness. Because the address-free bridge is where post-cookie activation is already moving, the reach answer is a structural tailwind, not a patch. Includes zharnikov-2026av-reaching-a-perception.yaml (Paper Spec v0.1.0) – a machine-readable specification of the paper's claims, assumptions, and dependencies. See https://github.com/spectralbranding/paper-spec for the standard. This PDF is generated programmatically from that machine-first source under a research-as-repository model.