Anna Musikhina is CMO, Digital Transformation and Ecommerce Acceleration at L’Oréal. Throughout her career, she became fascinated with the digital world and with how “it all worked” – from coding to web design to creating entire virtual worlds. Her top marketing tip is to marry up real data with your gut instinct, but never project your own experience onto what you believe the consumer may be looking for.
Making decisions around marketing strategy based on personal experience alone can backfire. As we’ve heard from many of our advertising and marketing experts on the podcast, you don’t know that your bias is driving your decision making when you’re working in your own bubble. This is why Anna advocates for using data first and foremost.
She doesn’t just mean the “obvious” digital data such as click-through ratios and views and page visits, but also the more nuanced, personal feedback that marketers can get from focus groups and individual interviews. Focus groups can be “eye opening,” especially for those who have been in any given industry for some time already and who feel that they “know it all.” In reality, things change so fast, that when you go and connect with “real people” using your products, you can discover vast insights that you had no idea about.
Of course, if you are truly a part of the target audience and you have relevant personal insights, you should not stop yourself from using those to inform your data set. However, what Anna urges marketers to consider is the danger of pre-conceived notions – from oneself or from one’s social circle. Yes, your emotions are completely valid and impactful and variable, but where do they fit in the broader set of insights and in what you’ve learnt from connecting with consumers?
Listen to more of Anna’s top marketing tips, including how she finds the ideal work/life balance and how this has changed her attitude to what being busy really means, on the podcast here.
The Shiny New Object podcast is a production of Automated Creative, an adtech platform that turns brands’ media impressions into marketing intelligence.
