What Dyson gets right about marketing: speaking your customers’ language

When we think about a marketing campaign, we often think about moving people down a funnel. But the truth is, your customers don’t think about your brand in terms of awareness, consideration, and conversion. They think about what they need.

I was reminded of this during a recent episode of The B2B Marketing Podcast by David Rowlands, where Rachel Exton, VP of Marketing at Pearson and former Dyson marketer, shared a useful insight.

At Dyson, they reframed the traditional marketing funnel through the customer’s perspective:

➡️ Awareness = Help me discover

➡️ Consideration = Help me buy

➡️ Conversion = Help me stay

This simple yet powerful shift transforms how you approach marketing. It’s not just about moving people through your funnel, it’s about addressing their needs.

What does it mean to be customer-centric?

Being customer-centric is a commitment to deeply understand your audience’s challenges, desires, and motivations. It’s about creating a marketing strategy that feels personal to your customers.

When you frame your efforts as helping rather than selling, you build trust and, ultimately, a more sustainable relationship with your customers.

So, how do you shift to customer-centric marketing?

Shifting to a customer-centric mindset can feel overwhelming, especially if your team is used to the traditional funnel approach.

A marketing persona workshop is a chance to rethink your strategy, reconnect with your audience, and create campaigns that truly resonate.

In a marketing persona workshop, your team can:

➡️ Use empathy-mapping exercises to get into the mind of the people you are solving a problem for.

➡️ Prototype personas to predict who is using (or will use) your service/product. Even if you don’t know much about your customers, a 'proto-persona' gets your assumptions on paper so you can start testing them.

➡️ Turn your persona assumptions into an experiment by creating a hypothesis that you can test.

➡️ Build actionable strategies to test your hypothesis.

As a former marketing manager, out of the workshops I ran for my former employer, the marketing persona workshop was the most popular one. It’s because it creates an opportunity to build a shared vision and align both the marketing and sales teams around what truly matters: their customers.

So, if you’re thinking that your marketing strategy should be more customer-centric, please do reach out, and we can discuss how my strategy programme can help.