Customer-First Marketing: To truly be customer-obsessed, respect the customer’s time (episode #149)

How I Made it in Marketing

I know the pinch when budgets tighten, customers shift, and deadlines close in. Yet, marketers have a superpower: like Superman’s X-ray vision, we see through constraints to the core idea.

That is the essence of our craft – not waiting for perfect conditions but delivering breakthrough concepts right here, right now.

So I loved this lesson in a recent podcast guest application – ‘every challenge is a creative opportunity.’

To hear the story behind that lesson, along with many more lesson-filled stories, I talked to Dana Bodine, US VP of marketing, Trustpilot [https://www.trustpilot.com/].

Trustpilot is a publicly traded company on the London Stock Exchange. In 2024, it reported $211 million in revenue.

Bodine looks after the entire US market, the US portion of an international audience of 64 million monthly active users.

Lessons from the things she made

• Every challenge is a creative opportunity
• Building a relationship with commercial partners is key
• Stay calm under fire (+ on tight deadlines)
• Get a seat at the table by creating sales materials
• To truly be customer-obsessed, respect the customer’s time
• Ideas are only powerful when they come with context

Discussed in this episode

Strategic Advertising and Marketing: It’s not what you make, it’s what you make possible (podcast episode #117) [https://marketingsherpa.com/article/interview/strategic-advertising]

Team Building: Loyalty, relationships, pre-selling, and other keys to marketing management success (Podcast Episode #16) [https://marketingsherpa.com/article/interview/team-building]

Marketing & Communications: It’s important to ‘take a beat’ (podcast episode #140) [https://marketingsherpa.com/article/interview/marketing-and-communications]

Five Tips From a Personal Care Industry CEO for Setting (and Getting Approval for) Your Marketing Budget [https://sherpablog.marketingsherpa.com/marketing/tips-marketing-budget-approval/]

Marketing: It’s not about you, and when you make it about you, you are never going to succeed (podcast episode #53) [https://marketingsherpa.com/article/interview/marketing-not-about-you]

The Radical Idea: Customer-first marketing prioritizes customer experience over upsells [https://sherpablog.marketingsherpa.com/consumer-marketing/the-radical-idea-customer-experience-over-upsells/]

AI engineering voucher

MarketingSherpa has teamed up with parent company MeclabsAI to produce a research study. We are granting 10 AI engineering vouchers worth $5,000 each to eligible companies. Learn more at https://meclabs.com/research/5k-engineering-voucher

Next event

Join us for AI Hackathon: Build a powerful lead gen agent in just 90 minutes [https://join.meclabsai.com/mec050] on Wednesday, August 20th at 2 pm EDT.

Apply to be a guest
If you would like to apply to be a guest on How I Made It In Marketing, here is the podcast guest application – https://www.marketingsherpa.com/page/podcast-guest-application