post

Footer About

Footer Contribute

Footer Get Involved

Footer Links

Mind the Product

mission statement

Deep dive: Crafting your product vision and mission

Podcast

Connecting fans to creators at Spotify (Dariusz Dziuk, Product Lead, Spotify)

B2B product management

Artificial Intelligence (AI) & Machine Learning (ML)

Building Product Teams

Business Strategy

Data Driven Product Management

Digital Transformation

Diversity and Inclusion

Minimum Viable Product

OKRs

Prioritisation

Product Design

Product Research

Product Development Process

Product Ethics

Product Discovery

Product Leadership

Product Management Career

Product Strategy

Stakeholder Management

🌎 <a href="https://www.mindtheproduct.com/world-product-day/" style="color:#FFFFFF;text-decoration:underline;">Happy World Product Day!</a> Be sure to celebrate product, yourself, and your peers today! 🎉

Join us at #mtpcon London in 2025 – mark your calendars

How Google makes AI work at Enterprise scale – Miku Jha (Director, AI/ML and Generative AI, Google Cloud)

5 ways to invent and simplify as an AI/ML product manager

Why teams often struggle with OKRs: A conversation with Jeff Gothelf

Building your own user experience and software stack: This week’s product news

Andres is a freelance writer and digital marketer with a background in engineering and a keen interest in the latest technology advancements. He currently helps tech companies and startups tell their stories by turning their complex ideas into easy to understand material. You can reach out to him on LinkedIn

Andres Phillips

<p>In this ProductTank London talk, <span style="text-decoration: underline;"><a href="https://www.linkedin.com/in/abba-newbery-8216905/">Abba Newberry</a></span>, CMO at <span style="text-decoration: underline;"><a href="https://www.habito.com">Habito</a></span>, talks us through how to use data to build a brand. As part of her introduction, she tongue-in-cheek acknowledges that part of the reason why product and marketing sometimes clash is that product teams tend to be very data driven, while marketing teams argue that data “is the enemy of creativity”.</p>
<p>Of course, Abba’s talk is a clear example of how research and data can be used to craft powerful, creative brand marketing that is not only memorable, but enables much more impactful “performance marketing” in other areas.</p>
<h2>Tough Markets</h2>
<p>There are some serious challenges in building a digital mortgage business. To start with, high street banks invest huge budgets in mortgage advertising as it’s an incredibly lucrative market for them. And secondly, trying to get the attention of a potential customer with messaging about mortgages is &#8211; as you might imagine &#8211; incredibly tough.</p>
<p>Getting a mortgage is a tough process and advertising in general can be hard since, in today’s digital climate, no one watches ads anymore. All of that taken together just meant that Habito needed to get creative to get the attention of customers, and to get their brand remembered.</p>
<h2>Peak-end Rule</h2>
<p>To start with, Abba and her team realised that they needed to think carefully about what kind of advertising they invested in. Humans don’t remember the details from a video &#8211; we <span style="font-style: italic;">actually</span> remember the best moment, the worst moment and the end. Abba and her team refer to this as the peak-end rule, and it formed the basis for all of their efforts to tackle the mortgage market.</p>
<p>Essentially, viewers aren’t going to really remember the content of an advertising video, and they certainly won’t remember any product details. So the more “rational” the product, the more emotional you should be in marketing it if you want to stick in people’s memories. Don’t show the product, don’t try to sway viewers with logical product benefits and details&#8230; just remind people of the experience they had and the emotions they felt the last time they tried to solve your target problem.</p>
<h2>Customer Insights &amp; Data-Driven Ads</h2>
<p>Having decided what kind of ads they were going to run, they needed to make sure they had a rock-solid understanding of their customers’ experiences and emotions. So, to run the best ads, Abba and her team conducted extensive research to make sure they understood their customer’s problems, and how they felt about the experience of getting a mortgage. The pay-off of that process was not only a much richer understanding of their customers in both quantitative and qualitative analyses, but all the material they needed to create highly memorable ads. To mention a few examples of what their research found:</p>
<ul>
<li>52% of people feel like they are paying too much for a mortgage, that it felt like they “had been robbed blind”, that there were charges heaped on charges by different parties, and they had no idea whether they are getting a good rate.</li>
<li>Many feel like there is too much jargon involved with getting a mortgage. The team at Habito spent a year with a team of linguists, removing jargon and getting the reading level of their mortgage details down from an 18-year to an 11-year.</li>
<li>Many find the process of getting a mortgage to be stressful, describing the emotional experience as “like they are going to drown” and leading to, on average, about 7 hours of lost sleep during the process.</li>
</ul>
<p>Abba shows off some of the ads her team created with the data. Melding intuitive creativity extensive customer research, they developed a campaign of brand marketing that created a distinctive, memorable experience our their customers and potential customers.</p>
<p>As a result of their compelling brand identity, they managed to grow three times YoY, and to reduce their overall marketing costs by over 75% (bearing in mind that they’re competing against big bank budgets, that’s a huge win). If you take one thing away from this talk, it should be that marketers <span style="font-style: italic;">and</span> product people can use data to help drive the creative process, hone in on customer pain points and ultimately build a brand.</p>

core/freeform

How to lead data-centric product teams: Jon Mora (Chief AI Officer, Zefr)

How to be a better data-driven product manager

User insights for product decisions by Cris Valerio

Data scaling for startups by Crystal Widjaja

Make Better Product Decisions by Using Quantitative and Qualitative Data, by Brian Tran

Using Data to Build a Brand, by Abba Newberry

Andres Phillips