Marketing, It’s About People…

Marketing. It can feel a very rational, data-driven activity. We target consumers, we promote, and we convert, all the time using data to optimize what we do.

But consumers are not just pieces of data, defined by what they buy. They’re people, and people are a complex mix of beliefs, goals, and routines.

Our success depends on understanding and motivating them.

Marketing is at heart a people business.

Think about it:

People buy products for themselves, not for us.

People buy products because they have a goal to achieve. It might be rational, to have clean teeth or clean clothes. It might be emotional, to feel good or excited. Or it might be social, to say something about themselves or the tribe they belong to. But it certainly isn’t to achieve our sales target.

Our brand is what people say it is, not what we say

Our marketing may signal what we want the brand to be. But people’s shared experience of the brand is what ends up defining it.

And since brands are hardly the most important things in people’s live, people rely on these shared experiences to make quick intuitive purchase decisions, rather than our marketing.

People trust people, not our marketing

Throughout my career, people have always trusted individuals more than they trust institutions. But thanks to our connected world, this has been put on steroids. People now have the ability to influence many more people than we can through our marketing. The term Influencer first appeared in the Miriam-Webster dictionary in 2019 for a reason.

So what are we marketers to do?

Seek to understand people, not consumers

Don’t just focus on what people do, find out why they do what they do. For example, in the early days of the Organic Produce market, we all assumed its consumers cared about the environment. But then we noticed there was a disproportionate number of young mothers among them, so we set out to understand why. We discovered a very different motivation: they wanted to give their baby the purest food they could, because that’s what a good mother should do. Subsequently, Organic baby food was launched, and soon became a significant part of the baby food market.

But it’s not enough to focus on the individual in isolation. We also need to understand the culture that shapes the individual’s behaviors. As Dr Marcus Collins points out in his excellent book For The Culture, people continually ask themselves a simple question: do people like me do something like this?

Create brands that matter to people

Despite what we like to think, people hardly ever think about brands. They’ve just got too much else going on. A brand needs to matter to earn a place in their busy lives, by creating value for them and earning their trust.

To create value, a brand needs to help people achieve a goal or goals that they have, easier, cheaper, or better than alternatives. Tide for example immediately comes to mind if your goal is to wash clothes, it’s easy to find and use. Seventh Generation also washes clothes, but fulfills a goal of caring about the environment.

But beyond this, a brand also needs to earn trust. Not simply that it can be depended on do the job it promises. But also, that it treats people as more than just data, and has their back. Rare Beauty, for example, doesn’t just sell beauty products. It sets out to encourage self-acceptance and confidence among young people, and demonstrates it with its actions.

Trust people to market for you

When people hear about the brand from people they trust, they’re far likelier to adopt it than from any communication directly from the brand. Lean into your best customers, and they will connect others for you.

This may feel at odds with Byron Sharp’s pronouncements to attract light users. But let’s return to Rare Beauty. It’s been built by creating a community, including through its signature online and in-person meet-ups, dubbed Rare Chats. Yeti, Gymshark, and Poppi are similar examples.

But it’s not just for start-ups and niche brands. Take McDonald’s. After years spent trying to persuade people that it wasn’t as unhealthy as they believed, it finally turned its attention to the regular customers it already had. What followed was a series of marketing moves, most notably its Famous Orders campaign, that tapped into what they really loved about McDonalds. These customers felt recognized, that McDonalds really got them, and were inspired to spread the word on behalf of the brand.

The underlying point here for marketers? We need to create a personal and business culture that’s not just curious about data, but also cares about people. Then, we have a better chance to understand and motivate them.