Marketing Is Not About Your Product. It Is About Your Customer's Best Self.
Marketing Is Not About Your Product. It Is About Your Customer's Best Self.
Lessons from Bianca Bass, Marketing Director, Fintech
Most marketing starts in the wrong place. It starts with the product, the features, the value proposition. Bianca Bass starts with a different question: what is the best version of this customer, and how does our brand help them get there?
That philosophy took her from junior marketer to board director at 29. It is worth paying attention to.
Stop Selling the Product. Start Selling the Feeling.
Airbnb has thousands of budget listings. But the brand has always felt premium. The design is consistent, the communication is warm, the community feels aspirational. People are not booking a room. They are booking the version of themselves that travels with intention.
That same logic applies in B2B. At 3S Money, Bianca's team was working with non-resident directors who struggled to access local banking. The easy route would have been to position the product as a workaround. Instead, they built a premium experience that made customers feel understood and valued. Not an option for the underserved. A brand that genuinely cared about them.
Takeaway: Before writing a single word of copy, ask: what does the best version of our customer look like, and how does our product help them get there? That is your brief.
The CEO Does Not Speak Marketing. Learn Their Language.
Walking into a new company and talking about brand, content and email campaigns is a fast way to get marketing treated as a cost centre. Bianca's advice is blunt: start with revenue, churn, dormant customers and commercial objectives. Show the CEO that marketing cares about what keeps them awake at night.
Her favourite question to ask any senior leader on day one: what is your biggest problem right now and how can I help you solve it?
It works in interviews. It works in the first CEO meeting. It works any time you need to build credibility quickly.
Takeaway: Never leave a role without being able to quantify your contribution. Not "led email campaigns." Specific numbers. Open rates, revenue from social, traffic increases. Without that, career progression stalls.
B2B Companies Are Sitting on a Referral Goldmine and Ignoring It
Bianca made a point that is so obvious it is embarrassing that more companies do not do it. If you are a B2B business with customers across different sectors, why are you not connecting those customers to each other? Why is there no referral scheme within your customer base? Why is the customer base not being treated as a community and a directory?
The network effect is already there. Most companies just never activate it.
Takeaway: Map your customer base by sector and look for natural connections. A referral scheme within your existing customers costs almost nothing and creates compounding loyalty.
Personal Branding Is a Career Asset Most Marketers Neglect
Bianca built her personal brand not because she wanted followers but because she needed tangible marketing experience she did not yet have on her CV. Posting content taught her analytics, audience behaviour and channel strategy in a way that her day job at the time did not.
Her framework is simple. Write your own tone of voice guidelines as if you were a brand. Define your visual identity. Commit to two posts a week for one month. Measure what got comments, not just likes. Pay attention to who messages you privately. That is where the real value lives.
One of her best performing posts in terms of career impact got five likes. Someone rang her the next day. You never know who is watching.
Takeaway: Treat yourself like a brand brief. Write the guidelines, build the templates, commit to the experiment. The vanity metrics are not the point. The relationships are.
Marketing Has a Mental Health Problem. And It Is Not Talked About Enough.
Marketers often have no clear seat at the table. They can be viewed as sales support, content producers or brand people depending on who is in the room. That ambiguity, combined with creative frustration and the pressure to justify every spend, takes a toll.
Bianca is studying neuroscience at masters level partly because of lived experience managing teams through mental health challenges from the age of 23. Her practical advice: prepare thoroughly before meetings where you know your voice will be hard to get in. Listen to customer calls not to monitor sales but to stay grounded in who you are actually serving. And know when to leave a role that is not valuing you. The only person who will truly look out for your career is you.
Takeaway: Either you succeed or you learn. There is no failure. Move forward.
Bianca Bass: LinkedIn
Suds Singh B2B Video Content Specialist London for Interesting Content, LinkedIn.
YouTube: https://youtu.be/HtvcVAaPiWs?si=DXzGFrmqI90yCQwA
Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/episode/1pJxeCvQ8e5Gbv7ib7nPzp?si=7SfBifECSTqGGrRIT6zjgw