How listening to Marites makes you a better marketer

Everybody in the Philippines knows a Marites. She’s that nosy neighbor who lives, eats, and breathes gossip. She’s the go-to source for showbiz news, neighborhood scandals, and reasons why your daughter needs to date her son.

And marketers love Marites. She’s a strong, easy-to-parse stereotype—the kind of person everyone immediately recognizes whenever you put her in the center of your campaign. She’s a talking point. She’s comedy. She’s relatable.

Above all, she’s familiar, which is marketing gold.

Here’s the problem: everybody knows a Marites, but hardly any marketer knows who Marites is. And by missing out on the person herself, they miss out on 90% of the opportunities she can bring them.

How? Let’s start with another familiar concept: the sales funnel.

Marites and the Sales Funnel

A traditional sales funnel is composed of six stages that consumers go through when deciding to buy a product:

Marites is perfect for this model because she’s at the very top of the funnel: tying your brand to such a familiar stereotype helps boost consumer awareness. If they know Marites, there’s a chance they’ll get to know you, too.

And if you’ve ever seen a Marites in action, then you’ll know how great they are at capturing interest and swaying people’s feelings about something.

She’s basically a shortcut in the traditional sales funnel.

This would be a good thing if not for the fact that the traditional sales funnel is obsolete. And it’s all in how we treat Marites.

She’s a Person, Dangit!

The problem with this type of sales funnel is that it treats Marites as an object. She’s a tool used to gain sales and nothing more.

She’s a catchphrase, a costume, a vibe, an inside joke.

She’s everything except a person.

And when marketers become too used to treating the people in their campaigns as a means to an end, they wind up doing that to their audiences, too. They treat consumers like transactions rather than living, breathing people—faceless numbers that going into the complicated mathematics of making a sale.

While that may have worked in the past, consumers today are much more sophisticated. Because social media has us flooded with ads, we know when we’re being shoved down a dehumanizing sales funnel, and we don’t like that.

There has never been a time like now, where there’s been so much market data and yet so much distrust of marketing.

The solution? Learning to actually listen to Marites.

Marites Says a Lot More Than Gossip

Look past the daster and the hair curlers on Marites. Picture her away from the other housewives crowding around her. Study her face as she speaks, and really listen to what she’s saying.

It’s not just a story about your neighbor cheating on his wife.

When she shares these scandals, she’s also sharing what she values: Love. Marriage. Faithfulness.

She’s telling you how she feels about these things, while implying what she fears.

Every bit of gossip that Marites shares is a reflection of her values, wants, needs, and worries. She’ll slip in details about her own private life that make her unique from everyone else. Her facial expressions will let you know what she feels about certain topics, and how strongly she feels about them.

If you take the time to really get to know Marites as a person rather than a source of gossip, you are going to so much info out of her that you could probably learn to be her bestie.

Now, apply that to your audience as a marketer, and you’ll end up with valuable data that will make your campaigns skyrocket.

Sei-katsu-sha Reimagines the Sales Funnel

This is the underlying belief behind sei-katsu-sha, a Japanese marketing principle that teaches us to treat the target audience as real, living people. By getting to truly understand who their market is beyond consumerism, marketers can gain insights that can dramatically improve sales.

These insights help marketers create direct pipelines to different stages of the traditional sales funnel, which in turn allows them to craft experiences and messages their audiences can trust.

Why the trust? Because they tell the audience that they are being seen. They are understood. They matter.

In a traditional sales funnel, we would see Marites as a 40-something housewife in a middle-income household. She probably does the laundry in between gossip sessions. A marketer might then try to get her attention by blasting her Facebook feed with ads for Brand X detergent.

In most cases, Marites is going to ignore those ads.

She’s probably already heard of Brand X, so there’s no need to put her in the Awareness stage of the funnel. She also already has a preferred detergent, meaning she’s going to be a tough nut to crack in the Interest stage. Her daster‘s many colors are as bright as ever, so it’s unlikely that she’ll even get to the Evaluation stage—she’s happy with what she’s got.

The marketer in this scenario might then just decide to re-target their ads, casting as wide a net as possible and hope they convert.

A sei-katsu-sha marketer, on the other hand, is going to sit back and let Marites live her life, and see what sort of insights they can gain just by listening to her.

She’ll mention how she and her husband are saving up for a washing machine, which means that she’s probably hand-washing the clothes for now. She’ll talk about needing to restock on hand lotion, which tells the marketer that she’s got a problem with dry skin on her hands. Every now and then, she’ll sniff her daster, indicating that she likes the scent.

Using this data, the sei-katsu-sha marketer can craft campaigns that bring Marites directly into different stages of the sales funnel.

They can jump straight into the Negotiation stage and mention how Brand X is 50 pesos cheaper than her current detergent, making it easier for her family to save for a washing machine. They can bring her into the Evaluation stage by mentioning that it’s both skin-moisturizing and washing machine-friendly. They could even try their hand in the Interest stage by highlighting a slew of Brand X scents she might enjoy.

Or, if the sei-katsu-sha marketer is savvy enough, they can create a campaign that addresses all these concerns, and make Marites feel so important that Brand X decided to tailor their ads around her.

Suddenly, the sales funnel isn’t a funnel anymore—it’s a dynamic system with multiple entry points that can flow freely between each other.

Sei-katsu-sha is the Final Piece of the Puzzle

The reason sei-katsu-sha works so well is that it addresses the one need that most marketers overlook.

They’re so busy approaching people’s need for convenience, or comfort, or growth, or good vibes, or material things that they miss the most basic human need of all: the need to feel understood.

People have an inherent need to feel like you get them. When Marites spreads gossip, it’s because she wants you to understand that these are the things she finds important. She wants you to get her.

Audiences want you to get them.

But you aren’t going to “get” anyone if you reduce them to piles of anonymous data. You need to listen to them.

So the next time you see a Marites surrounded by her flock of listeners—IRL or online—don’t reduce her to a stereotype. Find your space in the crowds and focus on her words and action. Do your best to understand her. And while you’re at it, do the same for the other people around you, too.

Learn what it takes to make them feel seen, because that is precisely what’s going to win them over in a world that’s inundated with content screaming at anyone and everyone for attention.

If you want to stand out, you need to treat people like people. Make them a standout in your eyes.