As marketers we like to believe we are consumer centric in everything we do, but the reality is that we often get lost in processes, tools, and procedures that are more internally focused on who we are as an organization, what we are doing, and what we want to do rather than externally focused on who are consumer really is – what the consumer is doing, and what they want.  In short, we often get so busy managing our brands and our business that we lose sight of why we are doing it in the first place.

And then, even if we are in fact focusing on the consumer, it is often only within the confines of how and when they buy and use our product.  Targeting your consumers based on category consumption is limiting for two important reasons:

1. Lacking the breadth and scope of how they live their lives, you lack the understanding of the larger role of the emotional benefits of your brand and will become overly focused on the functional benefits.
2. Category definition are in themselves limiting. Many major product breakthroughs occur because the company thought outside the self-limiting box of typical users and usage occasions.

Look at what Jeep Cherokee did to Minivan when it created the new ‘SUV’ category or Red Bull did to the soft drink companies in creating the category of ‘energy drinks’. The later example is especially interesting because literally hundreds of me-too products tried to replicate Red Bull’s global success with a focus on their own self-limiting perceptions about newly defined energy drinks category.  It took ten years until 5-Hour Energy came along, and broke all those category limitations with completely new packaging, usage occasions and most of all, millions of new consumers!  The Coca-Cola Company fell into the same self-limiting trap two times in a row and wonders to this day why their brand burn never really took off.  Their frustrated bottlers didn’t do much better when they went outside the parent company to distribute Monster globally which is just a larger sized Red Bull with creepy graphics.

People are Human Beings Too

So maybe it’s time to step back and think about how we structure and build our marketing plans so that they become more human centric from start to finish.  We still utilize the big three of marketing planning – targeting, brand strategy and communications, but we must build our processes for all three based on a much stronger understanding of who our consumers really are – living, breathing human beings with full and complicated lives.

Unless we start with a comprehensive understanding of who our consumers are and how they live their lives, it will be very difficult, if not impossible, to meaningfully connect to those consumers with your brand on both a functional and emotional level.  Connecting to them on purely a functional level is easy, but building a much more powerful and lasting emotional connection requires that you get to know who they are in a broader context relative to how they live their lives, and deeper relative to what they really care about.  And when it comes time to seek these consumers with effective brand communications, unless you have this broader and deeper understanding of who they are, you are going to find yourself interrupting what they are doing at that moment of contact rather than  a more engaging approach of determining the right time and place when they are open to your brand and product category so that you can create positive purchase intent.

How Well Do You Really Know Your Consumer?

Naturally, if you going to practice human centric marketing, you need to start getting a deeper and broader understanding about who they really are as people, not just how the buy and use your category.

Start With Consumer Targeting

There are many types of segmentation methodologies available.  Most are limiting either in helping you understand how you can position your brand within their lives so that you can add value, or lacks the necessary information to reach them with the appropriate medium and deliver a meaningful message.  Look at your segmentation, or any segmentation model you may be considering, and ask yourself if it can truly deliver all the information you need to do your marketing job in the 21^st century.  An effective segmentation will offer the following useful information to build an effective brand and communication strategy.

You may recognize this as a mood board.  It is.  What makes it an especially effective mood board is that it asks the pertinent questions you need to know to understand your consumer from a broader lifestyle context as well as illustrating what they really care about within the scope of their full lives, as well as within your specific category.  People buy brands because they are aligned with their self-image in some way.  Their lifestyle reflects what they do so that you can determine if, when, and where your brand has a role.  It will also later help you better determine their mind set as they move through their world so that you can more effectively and efficiently reach them through various mediums when they are the most receptive to engage in the message about your brand – and then buy it!

Shared Beliefs

Social media and the internet didn’t invent consumer values and attitudes, but the advent of such interactive media has made what your brand and company stand for much more impactful – for better or worse. Highly impactful brands such as Apple and Nike go far beyond features and benefits to drive more motivating value for their consumers.  They are built on pillars of shared beliefs (achieving my personal best for Nike and individuality for Apple).  Unless you understand the values and attitudes of your consumers you cannot possibly compete on the basis of shared beliefs and you have consequently significantly limited the future impact of your brand.

Clustering consumption patterns across a broader range of product categories and brands will illuminate your potential consumer’s self-image, lifestyle as well as their values and attitudes (beliefs).  If your segmentation doesn’t offer insights into those holistic areas (who they are as human beings), you can potentially back into it based on a research and analysis of consumption across a definitive range of product categories.  By definitive, I mean looking at product categories that help define who people are and the values they hold dear.  For example the choice of an automobile, clothing brand, beverage, toothpaste, and even hair care product consumption speaks volume about who the consumer is both in terms of lifestyle, self-image and values and attitudes.  Brands are in essence identifying badges that reflect who we are.  The problem is that most marketers only look at their own category consumption to determine consumer needs and thereby lack a more comprehensive and revealing understanding of their consumer as a human being.  Marketers who use only category based consumption as a segmentation driver are often surprised when a product comes out of nowhere to make their brand yesterday’s news. And it invariably will happen to you sooner or later.  Utilizing a human centric marketing approach allows you to make the lack of consumer relevance your competitor’s problem.

From Research to Presearch

The biggest advantage about knowing your consumer more holistically as human beings is that you can get into their skin and start to predict how they will act under various circumstances.  Wayne Gretzky was once asked by a journalist why he is considered to be the greatest hockey player of all time.  Gretzky replied that; “When other players get on the ice, they go to where the puck is.  I go to where the puck is going to be.” You know your wife/husband, your children, your close friends, and other people who are important in your life so well that you have the ability to anticipate what they will do in different situations or circumstances.  It may not be possible to know your consumers as well as you know your own family, but you can certainly get much closer than you probably are today.  Also, a broader understanding of their lifestyles and deeper understanding of their need states allows you to understand the tension points in their lives.  Knowing those crucial tension points allows you the opportunity to position your brand to release some of that tension and satisfy lifestyle needs both on a functional as well as an emotional level.

A Consumer Centric Brand Architecture

While most brand architecture models utilize consumer insights and use phrases like ‘reason to believe’ that make it appear that they are human centric, the unfortunate reality is that most are brand centric – internally focused on what the brand does, rather than what the brand does for human being.

Even if the brand architecture model you are currently using does attempt to look at the brand and its benefits from a consumer’s perspective, it seldom aligns the architecture according to the motivations of the consumer as holistic human beings.

The main advantage of a Motivational Hierarchy model is that it aligns the functional and emotional benefits of the brand based on how motivating those benefits are in driving actual purchase behavior and brand preference.  You will also notice that in the Motivational Hierarchy model the brand benefits are further aligned into three brand distinct corridors or pillars that link core attributes of the brand within that pillar as they increases in motivational power for the consumer.  It’s not just what you put in each pillar, but importantly how the benefit pillars link these attributes and benefits as they extend from Cost of Entry to Differentiation, and finally culminating into a single brand experience that combines all three pillars – the Crucial Emotional Experience.

Begin building each brand pillar in your Motivational Hierarchy with the Cost of Entry benefit that relates to a specific need of your targeted consumer like socializing or good with food for example, that are important for most beverages.  Now look at your tension point for your consumer that specifically relates to how and why that need is particularly important to a targeted human centric consumer segment.  That tension point will propel your brand differentiation benefit about socializing to something more powerful and unique and yet connected to the basic need.  Your point of differentiation for each brand pillar should help to release that tension within the consumer – that’s how you create brand preference.  Coordinating those inter-related brand pillars with their need states and tension points into a Crucial Experience with consumers is what your creative team wants above all else in your creative brief because they know not only what to communicate, but why it is important to the target their communications must engage.

Delivering the Right Message at the Right Time and Place

Most brand communications you see are based on an old school interruption model.  The primary objective of this outdated model was to locate the greatest number of consumers at a particular time and place and then interrupt whatever they are doing with your brand message.  You don’t like it when it happens to you, so why do so many of us do it with our own brand communications?  Consumers don’t hate advertising – they just hate being interrupted with an irrelevant message.  Offer them information that is relevant to their needs and deliver that message when they are in a state of mind that is open to the information you can provide and they will welcome your brand communications with open arms.

The first step is to use the broader lifestyle and values and attitudes knowledge you have about your consumer to map how they move in their daily lives, how they act within the selling environment to identify potential touch points to create purchase intent and drive actual purchase behavior.  You can also identify relevant and meaningful touch points you have after the purchase to build brand advocacy.  Good marketers are not just satisfied with a repeat purchase, but aim to convert existing consumers into brand ambassadors who help sell other consumers because they love the brand experience you provide.

The challenge you face moving from interruption based communications to engagement based communications is understanding the relevant and appropriate role your brand can play within the consumer’s lives.  By understanding the consumer and how they are involved in a particular activity, you gain the ability to craft your brand message to be a welcome addition to that activity.  Most activities and times of the day simply will not fit your brand no matter what you do creatively – like trying to sell beer in a commercial during the morning news.  And even when you do nail down those few occasions in their daily lives that the message could be welcomed, it doesn’t mean they are anxiously waiting for it.  They almost never are.  But identifying the appropriate times when their minds and their attitudes could be open to your product category are the specific touch points where you direct your creative team to engage.  For example, young adults tend to practice what we call ‘homing from work’ using the internet and social media on their work computers Thursday and Friday afternoon for 15-30 minutes to determine plans for those nights and the approaching weekend when they are most likely to go out.  Good time to reach them with a beer commercial if you can help them accomplish that objective and fit in with a relevant message to their mind set at that particular time.

Another example is that parents of young children tend to be in a reflective move in the hour or two after they put their children to bed and consequently could be more open to messages about their future plans such as insurance needs, or in the case of a furniture brand, how to re-decorate or re-model some part of their home.  You get the idea.  The creative team still needs to craft a message so that the consumer will let you into their activity, but now you can provide the creative people working on your brand not only with deeper insights about your consumer target’s potential relationship with your brand, but the precise times of day and what your target is doing, thinking and feeling in that moment.  There is a lot of engagement potential in that knowledge.

Marketing that Drives Exponential Results

Spread a human centric logic across your entire business system.  None of the marketing models illustrated here are incredibly complex.  In fact, they are relatively simple and most of all, they’re logical once you start to look at the consumer holistically as you tend to do with all the other people that are important in your life.  You have actually been doing human centric marketing with your parents starting when you were about four years old and now your kids are doing it with you.  All of your employees have that same capability that you can unleash to drive consumer value.  Empower your organization into a commitment that everything you say and do with your brand – from product development to sales and everything in between – should be based on creating, delivering and communicating consumer value based on shared understanding of who your consumer is as a human being.

The logic of planning and executing your go-to-market strategy with the holistic understanding of your consumer as the guiding principle is like a compass that will always direct you to a better place – a more powerful and sustained connection with your brand.  Not only will your marketing be more effective when you imbed this human centric logic in everything you do, you will also discover that you can do it much more efficiently. As David Packard, the co-founder of Hewlett Packard famously said; “Marketing is too important to be left just to the marketing department”.   A dedicated human centric approach practiced by as many people as possible across your business system is not only good marketing, it is also good business.