John Hall hasn’t followed the standard route in marketing. Prior to becoming Brand and Product Marketing Director at Whirlpool, John started his career in the military and communications. This rich and varied experience informs his view on the current state and future of marketing. 

Throughout his career, John has focused on archetypes drawn from psychology to design brand strategy. He uses this as a starting point for his Shiny New Object: mapping marketing activities across the shopper journey. 

After he left the military behind, John’s marketing career began at Kraft Foods, where he started to learn about consumer journey and brand strategy. 

Moving across to Whirlpool, he became introduced to Carl Jung’s concept of archetypes and the idea of archetype mapping. This would become a useful resource thereafter, as John says that everyone is drawn to certain archetypes and they are the ones we notice around us most often. 

From the rebel to the ruler to the caregiver, these archetypes are easy to identify and to be attracted to. Therefore, if your brand can align with its archetype and be very clear in its marketing message and the way it expresses its archetype, it will naturally do much better at its brand strategy.

Linked to these archetypes is John’s Shiny New Object of mapping marketing activities across the shopper journey. 

John thinks the era of integrated marketing communications (IMC) is gone and that we are moving more towards the “desired customer experience” where brands need to express their message throughout the customer journey and create an ecosystem that the customer wishes to remain in. It all starts with a clear brand strategy rooted in the archetypes. 

Once a strong brand strategy exists, John advises brands to translate that into the business processes internally, then finally map it against the customer journey. This involves fully understanding the experience of the customer and taking on the learnings, while believing in the strength of these learnings so much that you’re “willing to get fired over [them].”

 This understanding of the customer journey can yield a strong return on investment from any point within the process and should point out to brands that there are many new types of marketing investment to be made. For example, John thinks that “content creation is becoming just as powerful as price manipulation or strategy” – delivering the right message that influences the consumer into a sale.

Some brands that illustrate this approach include Nike and airlines like Southwestern. Nike’s personalisation-centred customer journey, whereby they actively retain and manage consumer data to keep them in their ecosystem, is cited as a particularly useful example.

To find out more about John’s career evolution and his advice for budding marketers, listen to the podcast here. 

Tom Ollerton is the Founder of Automated Creative. Subscribe to the ‘Shiny New Object’ Podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube and Soundcloud.