You Are Not The Customer

The marketer's fallacy, Cheetos does it again, and customer acquisition panel

Author

Pedro Porto Alegre
April 17, 2024

Welcome to Marketing Chronicles. A newsletter where marketers come for expert industry commentary at the intersection of strategy and creativity — every Wednesday sent before daybreak. If you like what you see, join us for free.

In this edition:

Column: You Are Not The Customer

Any marketer’s dream is to work on a brand which they’re themselves consumers of.

It’s like the first time you get into a car and sit on the driver’s seat. You can actually directly influence where this thing is going.

As marketers we grow up watching ads, we go to business school and study the biggest and most exciting brands, and we typically start our careers working on smaller and less influential brands.

Any marketer’s dream is to work on a brand which they’re themselves consumers of.

But there comes a time when we might get entrusted with the reins to an iconic brand — Ruffles, Pepsi, Nike, the NBA, McDonald’s, etc. Oh the amazing things we will get to do on a daily basis!

Planning the brand’s future innovations, working with creative agencies on uncovering new insights to serve as the platform of a new big equity campaign, activating your brand with your most loyal customers, and partnering with other amazing brands whom share a similar customer base with your brand.

This is the dream!

While there is a possibility that you will be in such a position one day, this entire premise is flawed to begin with.

Let me explain.

Marketers Are Weird Creatures

If you’re a marketer you’ll know this — we’re not like everybody else in the business world.

Companies will often look at the marketing department as the extroverted, fun, culturally attuned, party people. In the end of the day, part of our jobs is to drive excitement around the company’s brands.

Part of a marketer’s job is to drive excitement around the company’s brands.

So, we live and breathe brands — we pay attention to the ads on TV, don’t skip them on YouTube, try new brands, follow their social handles, read books about them, watch Super Bowl just for the commercials, turn off ad blockers, pay attention to every billboard on our way to work, and so on.

To us, this is normal life.

But think about this from a different angle.

How many consumers actually, even remotely, think like that about brands?

Short answer: close to zero.

We Are Not The Customer

This simple yet ground shaking realization is the starting point for any successful marketing career.

The moment you get a job at a company as a marketer and you sign your name on that contract, you’re officially crossing a threshold.

You've left the world of the consumer and will never be able to see your product the same way again.

That is a cardinal rule of marketing — once you become part of an organization, you see the world completely differently than your customers.

As Mark Ritson puts it "You cannot see the label from inside of the bottle".

This metaphorical “hole” we create in the hearts of marketers will eventually get filled with research about their customers, but at the start it’s a slap on the face that says: you know nothing about who buys your brand. Accept that.

This humbling experience is often labelled as market orientation (or outside of academic circles, consumer centricity/customer obsession).

It’s a mentality that lays the foundation for all the amazing work you’ll get to do as a marketer. It makes you question your gut reactions to things and instead think like a marketer: you validate assumptions and uncover insights through proper research.

Consumer Centricity

When I was a PepsiCo (an organization that is extremely customer centric and is acutely aware of this marketer fallacy), we used to have 1-on-1 interviews with random consumers across Canada where we’d chat with a stranger for an hour and ask questions about our category.

It was such an enlightening exercise because we’d quickly realize that 1) most consumers don’t think of your brand as competing with other similar brands (they see them as alternatives/options, not competitors); 2) they typically have no idea that several of the brands they consume are actually owned by the same company; and 3) they buy your brand maybe 1-2 times per year.

Let’s unpack some of that:

  1. The way consumers buy products isn’t as rational as we might think. For example, when they’re thirsty they don’t think “Oh, which water brand should I buy?”. Instead they think “Should I get a Coke or a Gatorade?”. Completely different categories that overlap customers in a similar, though smaller way as Pepsi and Coke share consumers;

  2. When a shopper goes to the chip aisle at a grocery store, they don’t see 40 linear feet of Frito-Lay products and that one innovation that a marketer worked so hard to commercialize sitting right there, at eye level. No, instead they see a bunch of products they rarely consider, ignore the majority of it, and then go straight to what they usually buy: Doritos.

  3. Finally, the distribution of buying frequency is heavily skewed. While certain categories might see on average consumers buy their product 3 times per year, in fact what’s happening is that the majority of the category only buys your product once a year, and a few heavy buyers purchase it 10 times per year. As Professor Byron Sharp uncovered years ago, the Pareto Law of marketing is more like 60/20 — slightly more than half a brand’s sales come from the top 20% of its customers.

And when we layer the fact that the average person sees hundreds of ads per day, 99.9% of which goes completely unnoticed (because imagine if we paid attention to all of it, we’d spend over 3 hours a way actively consuming ads), then we quickly realize that we live in our own bubbles.

Instead, people’s attention is selective. Most of our daily lives are on auto-drive — we brush our teeth without really thinking about it, we make our coffee by muscle memory, we even drive for extended periods of time and realize we forgot we were driving all along.

Our monkey brains cannot handle too much information otherwise it exhausts its resources and shuts down. Which is why our unconsciousness does most of the work for us.

Market Orientation

In other words, most people don’t give a shit about your brand.

As marketers we’re fighting for 3-6 seconds of someone’s attention 1-2 times per week. And rarely do we accomplish that.

But we shouldn’t feel discouraged by it.

This is a gift. One that keeps reminding us that we aren’t doing heart surgery for a living.

Instead we’re trying to be remembered so that when people are looking to buy within our category our brand is the one that comes to mind.

But if we rely on our own marketer’s instincts to direct our work, we’ll miss the mark 100% of the time.

Consumers don’t think like us.

So, next time you hear your marketing team using their own experiences as a proxy for how their consumers would behave... stop them right there.

We are NOT the customer.

📢 Community Shout Out

Interested in more marketing and advertising content or have unanswered questions? All you have to do is the following:

  • Share this week’s newsletter on LinkedIn.

  • Write something nice about it and add a question.

  • Tag me on LinkedIn so I can see it.

I’ll answer it in the post comments and pick someone to give a shout out in my next column!

Inspiration: Cheetos “Other Hand” Campaign

The best insights come from simple, often unnoticed, moments in our daily lives.

When brands find a fit between those moments and their distinctive assets… you have a winner.

Cheetos absolutely nailed this one ✋.

Upcoming: Unlocking the Future of Customer Acquisition

  • May 16 @ 4:30 pm - 7:00 pm MDT

  • Earl Grey Golf Club - 6540 20 St SW, Calgary, AB T3E 5L2 Canada

  • REGISTER HERE

In an era where the landscape of customer acquisition is ever changing, staying ahead of the curve is not just beneficial; it’s essential for any marketer looking to make a significant impact. This exclusive Panel & Power Hour session brings together a trio of local marketers (including yours truly), each with a distinct set of experiences and insights into the dynamics of customer acquisition in today’s marketing world.

What You Will Learn:

  • Emerging Trends: Uncover the latest trends in customer acquisition, from technological advancements to shifts in consumer behaviour.

  • Strategic Insights: Gain valuable insights into developing and implementing strategies that resonate with today’s consumers.

  • Real-World Applications: Learn from the firsthand experiences of the panelists, who have successfully navigated the challenges of marketing in various industries.

  • Interactive Q&A: Engage with our experts in a dynamic Q&A session, where you can seek advice, clarification, and deeper understanding of the discussed topics.

Whether you want to refine your strategy, explore new avenues for growth, or simply stay informed on the latest customer acquisition trends, we designed this Panel & Power Hour for you.

REGISTER HERE.

  • May 16 @ 4:30 pm - 7:00 pm MDT

  • Earl Grey Golf Club - 6540 20 St SW, Calgary, AB T3E 5L2 Canada

Founded in 2001, The Calgary Marketing Association (CMA) is a nonprofit industry association that supports Calgary’s thriving marketing community. They bridge the awareness gap between agencies and large corporations—providing industry professionals with access to exclusive events, mentorship opportunities, shared tools, and networks. From showcasing emerging best practices to creating a community that fosters collaborative knowledge exchange, the CMA offers a variety of resources that can raise the bar for Calgary’s marketing industry.

More of PPA:

PPA 

Pedro Porto Alegre is a seasoned marketing professional with in-depth experience building brand and communications strategies for top-tier B2C and B2B organizations across Canada. His repertoire extends from crafting and executing integrated multi-media brand marketing campaigns to the commercialization of performance-driven innovations for multimillion-dollar and nascent brands alike.