One of the greatest gifts marketing can give a business is making it relevant. Relevant to the people it wants to reach, to the problems it solves and relevant in a world where attention is scarce and trust is hard to win. And yet, for a discipline that exists to understand people better than anyone else, we have a consistent habit of getting it a little wrong.
We make assumptions on behalf of the customer. We speak about them as if they are a data point on a spreadsheet, not human beings like you, reading this, and me, writing it for you. We talk more than we listen. We forget that we aren’t the customer.
These are not occasional slip-ups. They have become norms in many marketing departments.
Understanding We Are Not the Customer
Most of us have experienced it at some point: a CEO who tries to influence strategy because their son or daughter has been using a social media app that the marketing team now needs to be on, or shares notes on creative direction that’s been chosen based on personal taste. Generally in marketing, we all have our own biases – whether in our language, the channels we favor, or the creative we instinctively reach for. As guardians of the brand, our choices matter. But we have to look beyond ourselves and become genuinely fascinated by the people we are trying to reach. Their habits, choices and their needs. The values they want to see reflected back at them as they decide where to spend their money.
This matters more now than it ever has. People increasingly look to brands that align with their values, in fact 70% of people say they tend to buy brands that reflect their personal values. But it’s not just having an empathetic brand connection that sways a customer – it’s also making the decision-making process easier, not harder with simplified, clearer messages. And with the volume of data available to marketers today, there is little excuse not to know your audience deeply.
Listening vs. Broadcasting
And yet something has shifted in how we talk about them. Marketing is fundamentally about people, but the language of marketing departments has become increasingly metric-driven. We normalize acronyms in our documents and our conversations. We take shortcuts via assumptions. Curiosity about people’s behavior and context, which should be as routine as any weekly report, often doesn’t get as much airtime as a data dashboard. What surprises me most is how little time we actually spend on understanding audiences when a marketing plan gets developed relative to how much time we spend building tactics to reach them. We broadcast far more than we listen.
I understand why. I have been in the work, under pressure, with deadlines and targets. But I have also seen, leading marketing in various technology businesses where genuine audience research was treated as foundational, what happens when you build from real understanding. Campaigns connect rather than just communicate and they get remembered. They generate ROI because they are rooted in something true.
Curiosity As a Strategy
But to get there we need to shift our attention back to audience-first thinking.
Understanding the audience needs to carry the same weight at the beginning of the process as measurement does at the end. That means starting with insight that genuinely shapes strategy, not insight that gets considered after the brief is already written. It means choosing metrics that reflect real engagement and human resonance, not just vanity metrics that signal volume. And it means bringing human-centered language back into the room, not as a nice-to-have, but as a practical reminder of why we are there in the first place.
When we stay curious about people, and when we are honest about the gap between ourselves and the audiences we serve, we become better at delivering creatively inspired work that is truly relevant to audiences and going back to what marketing is supposed to be doing – understanding people.
