Do you know what beauty looks like?
Building on the example above, one skill set that will become increasingly vital to success is the ability to understand and anticipate consumer tastes and preferences.
As markets become increasingly saturated and consumers are bombarded with an endless array of choices, marketers who can tap the pulse of their target audience and deliver content, products and experiences that resonate will have a significant advantage.
However, it is equally important to recognize when an attempt to connect with an audience fails or, worse, offends. Take, for example, the infamous Pepsi ad featuring Kendall Jenner. In the ad, Jenner joins a protest and offers a can of Pepsi to a police officer, seemingly resolving the tension. The announcement was quickly met with backlash, with critics accusing Pepsi of trivializing the Black Lives Matter movement and using social justice as a superficial marketing ploy.
This is a great example of a disconnect between a brand’s intended message and the actual tastes and sensibilities of its audience. In attempting to capitalize on a cultural moment and appeal to a young, socially conscious demographic, Pepsi instead came across as tone-deaf and opportunistic. It’s a warning to us marketers: Understanding your audience isn’t just about knowing what they like, but also being attuned to what they’ll find insensitive, offensive, or just plain tasteless.
As a marketing leader, I often encounter this message/flavor mismatch in the content directed at me. Many of these ads seem condescending, incapable of truly understanding the complex pressures and challenges I face in my role. Instead of providing meaningful, tailored solutions, they often address complex issues in a superficial and generic way.
This disconnect goes beyond a simple inability to resonate with me: it often actively diminishes my perception of the brand. When I encounter content that makes me think “they just don’t get it,” it undermines the very purpose of the marketing effort. Instead of building a connection or establishing credibility, it creates a cognitive barrier between me and the brand, making me less likely to interact with them in the future.
Looking to the future, the marketer’s role may also shift from managing people to managing machines. With the advent of artificial intelligence and automation, algorithms and software will handle many of the repetitive tasks of marketing, such as data analysis, transactional copy creation, etc.
However, this does not diminish the importance of human judgment and discernment. In fact, it amplifies it! As a marketer, your role will be to manage the results of these machines to ensure they align with the voice, values of your brand and tastes of your target audience. To do this effectively, you will need to have a keen sense of what is truly beautiful.
This means constantly comparing your work to the best in your industry, staying in tune with your audience’s changing tastes and trends, and having a clear vision of what excellence and resonance will look like for your particular brand and market. It’s no longer enough to simply push out volumes of content or ads and hope for the best. Marketers will need to be curators and arbiters of taste, with the ability to separate the signal from the noise.