Want to Be a Better Marketer in 2020? Step Away From the Screen

How well do you know your customers?

I don’t mean their demographics or even psychographics. No. I mean really know them? Their goals for 2020, their routines, their favourite type of coffee… the things that keep them up at night?

If you’d asked me the same question a few years ago, my answer, as a Marketing Director, would be similar to yours, I’m sure:

“I mean… I have a wealth of data?”

But when I started my own marketing consultancy business in 2019, I started noticing a pattern. Each one of my clients had the exact same problem: sustainable, affordable growth.

They had performance marketing teams and enviable databases. Well-oiled campaigns and dashboards for days. Their sales funnels were flawless, and their aptitude for data was admirable. The one thing they were missing and hiring me to find? Context. Real-world, real impact context.

This is a story about context, and how can we, as marketers, can be more successful in 2020 by finding it.

What does it mean to be customer-centric, really? In 2020, it means getting to know your customers *offline* as intimately as you would your best friend. It means obsessively understanding their needs — and tracking their needs as they change. It’s about taking your data and contextualising it.If the 2010s were about personalised data, the 2020s are going to be about better understanding the people behind the data.

Hands up if you can name 5–10 businesses you have an actual emotional connection with?

No. Me neither.

Every business knows they need to be customer-centric. Most businesses know they need to connect with their customers to stay relevant. Very few have figured out how.

Why? Because our fixation with numbers and personalisation has taken us even further from the people we’re selling to.

But as performance marketing costs start to rise, the greatest investment a business can make for the long-term is an offline one.

If you’re having trouble growing your audience, step away from the screen. If you’re not getting the conversions you expect, step away from the screen. If you’re wondering how to really grow your business, step away from the screen.The answers you’re seeking exist where your audience really exist. It’s a process Christian Madsbjerg calls Sensemaking, based on his work at some of the world’s largest companies, including Ford, Adidas and Chanel. Here’s how you can start:

1. Imagine you’re working for a chocolate brand. Your starting point is to understand your customer’s everyday relationship with chocolate. What does chocolate mean to the British? How are they treating it, talking about it, paying for it, giving it to each other? How and when do they eat it? Why do they eat it? This is the immersion process. This is where the beauty begins.

2. It’s then that you should email, call, listen to and observe as many customers as you can. Some can be existing customers that you contact directly, but others should be people in the wild. It’s amazing what you can learn if you ask the right questions. When you hear things for the third time around, you know you’re onto something.

3. Once you’ve immersed me in fact-finding for a week or so, leave your notes, photographs and data behind and take a break.

4. Within that break, enter the real world thinking like your customer. Commute like them. Consume content like them. Enter the supermarket like them. With their fears, their goals, their dreams. It’s there, and only there, that you can start communicating. Not to them, but from them. From their standpoint.

Again: Don’t communicate *to* your customers, communicate *from* them.

“Don’t think, but look.” — Ludwig WittgensteinIn my own personal marketing practice, my greatest inspiration comes from unexpected places. I read an article about Lorde who, while recording her 2017 album, Melodrama, would listen to her demos on the subway. Why? Because she wanted to hear how her album sounded out of the studio and in the real world, in the context of her listeners.

As marketers, we need to get out of the studio.

This way of thinking isn’t new. In fact, this thinking — this ‘Sensemaking’— is so beautifully illustrated in many of the people we uphold as masters.

Think of renowned investor George Soros, who built his wealth by knowing his enemy’s world. If you’re empathically engaged in understanding your enemy’s perspective — you, like Soros, can take advantage of them with great market calls.

Think of Henry Ford who famously ignored his investors’ advice to build a luxury car and, instead, focused on the rising leisure culture. As a committed populist, Ford was determined to make a car that would open up mobility for all, because he’d observed that in a new, emerging America, moving up and out would be a fundamental part of life — and his car would be instrumental in this.

The more you, as a marketer, have empathically engaged with your customers, the more you to have to draw from in moments of pattern recognition. It’s an entirely personal practice.

The more you dig into the context surrounding your data, the more you can crack the mysteries at the heart of your marketing.

In 2020, dig deeper. I guarantee that many of the answers you need to grow your business are hiding where your audience are. In real life. Away from the screen.