Customer Obsessed or People Focused?

In her MFA EX 2023 session, Gemma Hunter, General Manager of Marketing at Myer, revealed why she believes data-led human insight is key to effective marketing – and why media agencies are the lock pickers.

Here are three key takeaways:

Focus on people, not customers

What you see in a client’s brief is just a target market on paper. It’s not people. To understand people, you need to really get under the hood.

When you start asking questions about your target market – how it’s behaving and thinking, what it’s doing – your audience changes and gets smaller.

Understand how our brains work

Our brains operate with two systems – fast and slow.

The fast system is where we make 90 percent of our decisions. These decisions are automatic and pass through the emotional centre of our brain – for example, we reach for the same bread we always buy in the supermarket.

The slow system, where we make 10 percent of our decisions, needs input from things like data, inspiration and recommendations.

So, given customers use fast thinking for 90 percent of the decisions they make in a day, and these decisions are based on the brain’s emotional centre, by creating more feeling we can drive better business results for our clients.

Not all channels are created equal

Make sure you’re sending the right message in the right channel for the right people. During a recent campaign targeting 45+ women, a colleague asked Hunter why they were spending so much on Facebook when this audience doesn’t use socials. But the data spoke for itself – the average age of a person on Facebook today is 45 years old.

So, make sure you’re serving what your audience is interested in, on the channels they’re interested in, and in a way that appeals to them.

For more learnings, watch the video of Gemma Hunter’s MFA EX session here.