Mandy Lozano: Empathetic Agility Planning In Marketing
Mandy Lozano: Empathetic Agility Planning In Marketing
There’s no arguing how difficult it is to market a business. Planning is very important. But being prepared for an unexpected event, crises or not, is a must have for anyone operating within any business. The idea of planning for the unexpected may seem counterintuitive. But someone who looks through to the future of marketing is mature enough to fully recognize the importance that data, agility, and overall empathy play in a business world that is becoming more and more digitized. This also applies to the fact that this business sector is further being subjected to the kind of unexpected occurrences that will never be limited to the chaotic growth of a global pandemic. Mandy Lozano made this point clear in her Pinchforth interview. She illustrated the details of her leadership and marketing capabilities during the pandemic as proof of why agility and empathy are key factors in growth within any business setting. This goes beyond simply Mandy’s experience, when it is an instrumental lesson for all marketing executives/leaders to employ in a work culture that is growing beyond the necessities of a black swan event.
Who Is Mandy Lozano?
Mandy Lozano’s marketing experience revolves around her work with corporate strategizing and marketing/operations. Her former role as a Chief Strategy and Marketing Officer at MiiR entailed the responsibility for the long-term strategic vision, approach & plan of a company’s brand. Mandy spoke about this in her Pinchforth interview, and how it greatly helped shift her focus on branding during the pandemic.
What Mandy Lozano Learned From The Pandemic
As the idea of the business world adopting “The New Normal” becomes more apparent and less abnormal, it’s important to take into account both the impact the Covid-19 pandemic had on businesses, their workforces, and the progressive response made in the wake of what seemed like an unpredictable event. In discussing her background in marketing, Mandy Lozano commented on how by coming from an art-related background, she saw the importance creativity played in not just providing her with a more detailed perspective of the dynamics of human beings, but also the culture that pertains to them in a work environment.
Mandy described her experience with the impact of the pandemic as an opportunity for a lot of adaptability, and the unpredictable nature of the pandemic encouraged that even further. It’s no surprise to recognize that although from a business perspective, the pandemic created a means for many growth opportunities within how businesses in general operated. But this wasn’t simply focused on the accelerated digitization aspect, but also the ability for companies to adopt a model that has now been normalized. Mandy saw the digitized aspect of the pandemic as a way of adopting both a more agile and open-minded gaze of empathy regarding the changes the pandemic was causing for business culture overall, and how it was impacting employees individually from both a stress-related aspect as well as the financial one.
As important as individual responsibility is for employees making up a marketing team, having empathy can be very effective in terms of how a business runs and progresses in the long-term period of its operational capacity and overall growth. Mandy Lozano advises that marketing leaders must have more empathy as well as a greater willingness to listen to their team because as high-paced as a work environment can be, team members cannot run through a wall, nor can they help the brand achieve any growth if all they do is resort to is nothing short of pre-established habits. Eventually, employees, the company, and the overall branding will have to adapt if actual results are to be produced.
Mandy’s Advice To Marketing/Growth Leaders
When asked about the advice Mandy would provide to marketing and growth leaders, she highlighted the importance that data analytics plays in the process. In addition to being a highly analytical person herself, Mandy Lozano said how the consumers of any brand are in a state where they are constantly debating and making decisions about what to buy. As frustrating as that may sound when trying to engage with a consumer, that’s where the algorithms can be very helpful.
The core to engaging more fully with a consumer is for marketing leaders to have a clear understanding of what is going on in a consumer's life and how that is changing. The brand has to be good, and for that to happen, the story has to be focused on the type of consumer looking at the company. Grasping this will not only help marketing leaders better approach a consumer base. It will also enable them to reform their approach to marketing overall. The effect of the pandemic caused most consumers to adopt a more online approach, and this has only become more naturalized over the course of the crises. This degree of change has made data become a much larger priority when looking at consumer patterns, as well as the specific habits that center around them and the marketer’s ability to tailor the brand more appropriately to fit their needs.
Why Data Is Top Of mind
Data is important within the marketing world. The word alone can trigger an assortment of debates centering around the subject of privacy, as well as the more supportive role it plays for businesses trying to market their brand. Mandy spoke about always wanting to accumulate more data and how this helped her become very observant in regards to key factors that help develop a better analysis of consumer behavior when approaching her marketing strategy. Several of the mentioned factors included the amount of time a consumer will traditionally spend browsing web pages, their level of engagement, and the number of clicks on particular pages. These key factors are what assist Mandy into better understanding a consumer’s desire to learn more about a brand. Having an understanding in this level of change can certainly help the marketing team of a company better steer their consumer engagement more in relation to the type of digitization that has no doubt accelerated as a result of the Covid-19 pandemic.
Data And Privacy
Anyone who works within the field of marketing will be faced with the subject of data privacy. Mandy Lozano’s views on the amount of data provided to advertisers is within the realm of a silver lining. As a marketing professional, Mandy sees data as something to appreciate from a business perspective in which it fulfills the need of a commodity. Whenever a consumer goes online, then they are pretty much opting into a service, and behavior of this degree helps in the formation of pattern-oriented data, which in turn helps marketing professionals develop better strategies for presenting their brand. Now, as essential as data is to a marketing professional like Mandy Lozano, she still sees the dangers too much data can pose in terms of the power it grants large companies. Several of the corporate entities she mentioned included companies like Facebook, Apple, and Google which although do not border on being intentionally malicious, are still governed with next to no real laws in data management. Any responsible marketing professional should always use data for strategic innovation, whilst equally seeing the consumer risk too much of it can pose.
“Planning In Agility”
The strategies of any marketing team for a business will determine the trajectory of its success. Every strategy will need to differ in terms of execution. However, dogmatism is the ultimate killer of innovation in any business. Mandy Lozano recommends that marketing leaders plan in agility, which means that they need to be able to jump on things in response to the unexpected. Mandy understands this approach from her own experience of managing a marketing team in something as uncertain as a global pandemic.
When she was leading Marketing at MiiR, Mandy’s “Planning in agility” approach enabled her to listen to every team member and address their needs so that they remained flexible and adaptable. In addition to marketing leaders, Mandy also feels that tech could be integrated in a similar sense, and that should come as no surprise given that business is becoming more tech-ingrained to the point where it will not only be the resilience and agility of the employees that determine the innovation of the company, but also the adaptability of the software implemented in the strategic engagement with a focused consumer base.
