Maurice Allin | Debunking the Myth of The Customer to Drive Successful Branding

 VP of Quarry Integrated Communications, Maurice Allin, joins Alan in this extremely insightful interview of AQ’s Blog & Grill. Alan and Maurice debunk the myth of the customer and share ideas of how to create powerful experiences in branding.

Maurice unpacks the thinking of some of his favourite brand thinkers and anthropologists such as Joseph Campbell, Jonathan Haidt and Dr. Robert Deutsch. He discusses how the brands that we interact with help us as consumers to become more of ourselves. “We have an archetype, a self that we’re playing out and it guides all of our decisions in life,” he states.

In referencing author Jonah Sachs, Maurice believes the author is missing half of the equation of brand storytelling. That being that our customers are telling a story throughout their lives and the real power of brand storytelling is when your brand meshes with the customer story.

Alan and Maurice debate quantitative vs. qualitative research in unveiling brands’ customer archetypes. They discuss the archetypes of classic brands such as American Express, Mastercard, Budweiser and Harley Davidson, challenging the viewer to discover if Harley Davidson is a ‘rebel’ or an ‘outlaw’. They wrap up by stressing the importance of leveraging these strategies as the customer driven economy becomes more prevalent.

About Our Guest

Maurice Allin is the vice president of strategic insight at Quarry Integrated Communications. He strives to help marketers be more effective by finding and telling customer stories. He uses multi-modal anthropology based quantitative techniques to create hypotheses, testing those hypotheses and creating business cases through rigorous quantification.