Who is your ideal customer? And how does your brand serve them?

Yes, I know you have KPIs to hit this quarter. Leads. Sales. A specific revenue target. And so it can be easy to quickly drill down to targets.

But all marketing beings by asking… who is the ideal customer? And how does our brand serve them?

So I loved a lesson I recently read in a podcast guest application – ‘Take the time to understand your target audience deeply and your value proposition.’

To hear the story behind that lesson, along with many more lesson-filled stories from throughout her career, I sat down with Kristen Stevens, Senior Marketing Manager for the US, at the Marine Stewardship Council. (https://www.msc.org/)

The Marine Stewardship Council is a nonprofit organization that was formed by the World Wildlife Fund and Unilever. It reported £32.73 million of total income in its most recent fiscal year ending in March 2023, which equates to roughly $41.3 million – 19% of the world's wild fisheries are engaged in the MSC program.

In 2023, Stevens oversaw 58 co-marketing campaigns for the MSC.

Stories (with lessons) about what she made in marketing

Here are some lessons from Stevens that emerged in our discussion.

• Turn critical feedback into your strength / learn to thrive in ambiguity
• The importance of a 'hero' metric that you and team work toward
• Take the time to understand your target audience deeply and your value proposition
• Balance the lending and borrowing of trust and credibility in partnerships
• Present research with clear narrative arcs and actionable takeaways
• Structure feedback requests with specific lenses and pointed questions

Discussed in this episode

AI Quick Win Intensive – Get help building an artificial intelligence strategy that aligns with your brand’s value proposition. Join Flint McGlaughlin and the MeclabsAI team for an AI Quick Win Intensive (https://intensives.meclabsai.com/) from MarketingSherpa’s parent organization.

Data as Marketing Fertilizer: You can have piles and piles of data, but unless you know how to use the data correctly, it won’t get you very far (https://www.marketingsherpa.com/article/interview/data)

Customer Value: The 4 essential levels of value propositions (https://marketingexperiments.com/value-proposition/levels-of-value-propositions)

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This podcast is not about marketing – it is about the marketer. It draws its inspiration from the Flint McGlaughlin quote, “The key to transformative marketing is a transformed marketer” from the Become a Marketer-Philosopher: Create and optimize high-converting webpages (https://meclabs.com/course/) free digital marketing course.

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