I read the AdAge.com “Sitting Down With Five Women to Watch” piece this morning and loved hearing PepsiCo’s CMO Lauren Hobart talk about to what she attributes her success as a marketer. She says that knowing your customer “intimately well, so you feel you can trust your gut and [do] just that — trusting your gut and making big bold decisions and sticking to them.”

At ZLR we love that! To our clients, we probably sound like a broken record…research, research, research. How else are you going to know your customer intimately well and market to them in a relevant way? As Ms. Hobart says “that’s where we found our most success”.

If you know your customer extremely well, it’s only then that you can feel safe in making bold marketing decisions and taking some risk. We just had a meeting with a potential new client on Friday in which we pitched a bold creative idea. The potential client told us afterward that he first thought “What the heck is this?” But after hearing our knowledge of the audience, rooted in research, he is eager to explore the idea further.  He knows some will think it’s risky, however, we are confident with our knowledge of the audience that it’s the right thing to do. And, it will make an impact.

Be Smart. Be Bold. Be Prolific.

Are you confident that you are making an impact with your marketing dollars?