Human-Centred Marketing with Richard Hewitt

Through the Line with Andy Bargery

One of the primary tasks of a marketer is to understand people and to put them at the centre of your thinking. More often than not, that's your customers or prospective customers. What do they genuinely care about? What makes them choose Coca-cola over Pepsi cola, or why do they shop at Waitrose and not Tesco? The problem is only some marketers do this; instead, we often have a more inward-looking orientation. We put the brand at the centre of our universe when that's rarely the case with our customers. As Mark Ritson might say, people don't give a shit about our brands. Human-centred marketing is different. It's our approach to understanding the human condition and connecting people to our brands through an iterative process of empathising, defining, ideating, prototyping and testing. At least, that's Richard Hewitt's approach, founded on anthropology and the research discipline of ethnography. In a world where marketers rely heavily on realms of data to make decisions, wouldn't it be nice actually to study human behaviour in person for a change?