The Most Valuable Customer Might Be One You Don’t Understand

By Alison McKinnon, Managing Director, CM.OSX.

Last year I wrote an article about my experience of getting older in the advertising industry. Some inspired editor gave it the title “Too old for the party, too young to leave”, which I found vaguely offensive.

I say with clarity and confidence, I am not too old for the party.

I just don’t want to go because it’s 8.30pm and I want to watch Law & Order. Okay, and yes, too many people overstimulate me. And my feet hurt. Even in flats.

In the past year, I’ve kept my finger on the pulse of this important conversation. Just the other day, I had approximately 700 people send me the Zoe Foster Blake video where she declares perimenopause “kicked my ass”. 

Then this morning, I genuinely debated, for fear of being deemed unprofessional, whether I could get away with reposting an Instagram meme that said, “I don’t have enough oestrogen to give any fucks”. Luckily, I forgot. Sometimes when middle-aged brain fog meets undiagnosed ADHD, it works in your favour.

A year after that first article, I’ve realised there’s another strange aspect of this stage of life and the industry I work in. Because while I might be becoming less interesting to the advertising industry, I’m becoming considerably more interesting to advertisers.

I’m at my highest earning stage; I’m a homeowner; I’m responsible for shopping for myself, my children and increasingly my parents; and I pay for it all – drinks, petrol, school fees, Botox.

Commercially, I’m a pretty good customer.

But there’s a big difference between knowing I have money and knowing how to get me to spend it.

What is it to truly know your customer?

Throughout my career, I’ve done a lot of work developing customer personas. Neat little one-pagers with demographics, psychographics, desires and pain points, all designed to give organisations empathy for their customers and focus on their needs. They’re extremely useful. They’re also reductive. Because, like everyone else, I’m not one persona.

I’m an older millennial, a tech early adopter, a busy working mum, a daughter, and a marketing professional. I’m also a person who has three streaming subscriptions, around ten loyalty cards but only regularly uses one, and a gym membership that delivers significantly more guilt than health.

I shop at Aldi because I believe I should save money, and I do it on DoorDash because I don’t like going to Aldi. I spend more than $250 on 100ml of retinol. I buy home-brand dishwashing liquid.

This is all entirely rational to me, because I value different things at different times. Sometimes I care about price, sometimes I care about quality, sometimes I care about convenience, sometimes I want a tiny luxury that’s entirely mine after spending the day buying things for everyone else.

And sometimes I will happily pay a delivery fee that completely undermines the savings I made by shopping at Aldi because not having to physically go to Aldi is, at that particular moment, worth $8.99 to me. That’s the bit marketers need to focus more on.

The opportunity with consumers like me isn’t simply that we have spending power, it’s that we have complex spending power, all wrapped up in a messy bundle of priorities, compromises and contradictions. We’re buying across generations, categories and price points. We can be value-conscious and premium consumers within the same supermarket trolley.

How can we use data and AI to better understand?

This matters more now because marketers have never had more information about customers.

We have first-party data, purchase histories, loyalty programs, behavioural signals, search behaviour, and increasingly sophisticated AI capable of identifying patterns across enormous volumes of information. We know a lot about who the customer is, but I wonder if personalisation has focused too much on that question “who are you?” and not enough on a much more useful one: “What do you need right now?”

It’s a crucial shift, because simply knowing more about me doesn’t necessarily mean you understand me better.

My age won’t tell you what I need (although apparently it’s more oestrogen). My income won’t tell you what I value, and calling me a “time-poor, working mother” might be technically accurate, but it still won’t explain why I’m prepared to spend $250 on my face and $2 on something that cleans a saucepan.

Now brace yourself for the inevitable inclusion of AI, because this technology might spell the difference between understanding a customer, and understanding what they need. In my view, AI isn’t exciting because it can produce 47 versions of an ad all in the name of personalisation, but because we now have the ability to understand more of the signals and context around what people actually need, at a scale we simply couldn’t before.

The opportunity isn’t to use all that technology to build a slightly more sophisticated stereotype of our known personas, it’s to understand the context and contradictions.

It’s about knowing when convenience matters more than price, when quality matters more than convenience, when trust matters more than novelty, and how my behaviour shifts when I’m buying for my children, my parents or myself.

It’s about more deeply understanding that I’m not really buying the product, I’m buying time, confidence, simplicity, pleasure, or just one less thing to think about.

Let’s shift focus: from knowing what we buy to why we buy

We’ve become very good at knowing who the customer is. The opportunity now is to gain a much greater understanding of what they need at any given moment. The most valuable customer may not be the neatest one to describe, she might be inconsistent, contradictory and hard to segment. She might have an Aldi order arriving at the door while wearing her expensive red-light mask. She might also have considerably more money to spend than she did when everyone in advertising found her interesting.

So if you want to sell to someone like me, don’t try to resolve the contradictions. They’re probably the most useful data points available. Don’t try and perfect the persona, try and understand the context, what matters, why it matters, and go from there.

And if it’s after 8.30pm, what matters to me is Law & Order and my couch.

About the Author

Alison McKinnon, Managing Director, CM.OSX is a strategic marketing and brand leader with more than 20 years of experience delivering high-impact campaigns, digital transformation and customer experience (CX) strategies for leading Australian and global brands. Connect with Alison on LinkedIn here.

About CM.OSX™ (part of BRX Group)

BRX Group seeks to help the world's best marketers drive commercial impact. 

BRX is its agency arm, combining brand building with AI, automation, and proprietary systems to deliver smarter, faster commercial impact for enterprise brands. 

CM.OSX™ takes the capabilities built in BRX, and uses them to support CMOs and their teams in navigating the disruption brought by AI and automation, helping them drive growth, reduce complexity, future-proof marketing skills, and adopt the right tools without adding technology debt. 

Brand.OSX® is a marketing and communications asset production platform built specifically for enterprise consumer brands, enabling brand consistency, cost efficiency, and smarter execution across all marketing & communications touchpoints.