🙉Tone deaf to your audience?

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Let the holiday gatherings ramp up to an untenable level! No wonder alcohol sales spike around Christmas time every year. 

Today, a quick note on what marketers can learn from the biggest news organizations’ face-plant after the UnitedHealthcare CEO slaying.

Then, we’ll get into This Week’s Wrap-Up.

(“AI hybrid” created this new car commercial BTW)

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Knowing Nothing About Your Audience

Unless you’ve been hiding under a rock, you know about the health insurance CEO who got hunted down and shot in broad daylight (murder’s bad, for the record, and more on that in one minute).

What you may not have noticed was how oblivious major news outlets were to how much Americans despise insurance companies.

I saw countless articles where the writers knew there were problems in the health insurance industry, but these journalists were 100% shocked at the lack of sympathy for the CEO who was killed. 

I was not shocked. And if those journalists had been doing their jobs the past few years, they wouldn’t have been shocked, either. 

This shows reporters are out of touch with their audience and prolly more so with the average American who can’t just write a check for open-heart heart surgery.

See, I’ve dealt with a dirty-dealing health insurance company in the past. 

And I’ve read about countless other people having claims denied, and being put on hold for hours by companies like UnitedHealthcare until the “customer” gives up.

Over the years, I’ve seen 60-Minutes reports, documentaries, and read countless forum and social media accounts of the horrors of having to deal with the medical world and then navigate the shark-infested waters of the healthcare insurance companies that are supposed to serve their customers. 

If your average dum-dum like me knows how big a problem this is and the despicable abuse Americans have taken, then professional journalists should have known too.

People have gone bankrupt due to their insurance company screwing them over. And people have been left sick and injured due to having procedures denied for care that would have alleviated some of their suffering.

How Could Highly-Paid Journalists Not Know This Stuff?

If journalists for prestigious newspapers like the WSJ and NYT are caught off guard by scenarios like this, it tells me they’re not paying attention. Not digging deep enough to learn what their readers are going through. What their pain points are. 

Serious pain points, like life-or-death surgeries, not the “stress” of picking the best mutual funds or financial advisor. 

All that to say, you’ve heard this advice a million times as a marketer…

Get to Know Your Audience and Customers Better

When I see that advice in an article, I do what you do. I roll my eyes and move on most of the time. 

However, this CEO story reminded me that it’s more than a cliche to “get inside your audience’s head.”

If we don’t make that effort, how many big insights are we missing?

What offers are we wasting our time putting together?

What content angles are we missing that would strike a nerve?

Ways to get inside your audience’s heads:

1. Create pop-up shops or experiences in odd spots like parks or subway stations. This allows you to directly engage with potential customers and observe their reactions.

2. Organize scavenger hunts with branded items hidden around a city, encouraging participants to visit your store or website to claim prizes. This can reveal customer motivations.

3. Develop personality quizzes related to your brand, like Knorr's food preference quiz. These can gather valuable data about customer preferences and behaviors while engaging them with your brand.

4. Use street art or temporary installations to pose questions to passersby about their preferences or pain points to get honest feedback and attract attention.

Now…

To be clear. The young man who became a CEO assassin wasted his own life.

People can make a solid argument that systems (like UnitedHealthcare) commit murder too.

But what the young man did won’t change a thing in healthcare. I get it though… if he’d “fought the system” legally, for the rest of his life, that too, would’ve been a waste of time. Nothing would’ve changed. Except he’d still have a life outside of a cage. 

Thanks for reading Inbox Hacking. Please share it other fine folk like yourself.

Shane McLendon - Copy Kingpin

Bonus: Axios says reporters today have higher standards than “average media?” Please…