Martin Pierson, Chief Creative Officer at Tag, explores how brands can earn the right to a customer relationship by capturing meaningful attention and delivering seamless experiences, using creativity to create real connections.
As we inch nearer to Christmas, it’s obvious that advertising has never been louder. We’re operating in a landscape saturated with channels, messages, formats, and data points - all designed to reach customers who are, ironically, harder to reach than ever. Because despite the sophistication of this set-up, customers remain fundamentally human: emotional, distracted and selective.
And that creates an uncomfortable tension, as while brands want relationships, customers often just want things to work.
Marketers spend a lot of time, effort and money on customer loyalty, connection, value and brand affinity. But the reality is, most people don’t wake up wanting a relationship with a brand. They want seamless, friction-free experiences. They want services that fit into their lives, not demand more from them. When those expectations aren’t met, even the smartest strategy, the best creative or most personalised journey falls flat.
Creativity is the one consistent force that cuts through saturation and bridges the gap between a noisy industry and an overwhelmed audience because it speaks in ways people actually respond to. Creativity uses emotion as a language, and creativity that showcases humour, tension or humanity for example will always be memorable and distinctive. It gives meaning to information, context to data and is the craft that elevates a message.
The truth is, the customer journey doesn’t start with an obvious pinpoint on the funnel stage of awareness or consideration, but it starts with a feeling.
A moment where something resonates, interrupts, or provokes enough interest to matter. And that leads us to the first challenge brands face today: before we can talk about relationships, connection or loyalty, we have to confront a simpler problem – attention. Most brands are still struggling to earn attention in the first place.
What breaks the customer journey first? Bad Targeting or Bad Creative?
I came across a quote recently from former Macedonian President Kiro Gligorov (as you do) which said, “Bad targeting is shouting in the wrong room, bad creative is talking rubbish in the right one.” So, if the customer journey begins with attention, then the first place brands tend to fail is either by getting the wrong people’s attention, or saying the wrong thing to the right ones.
Most marketers today do well to avoid the first mistake. We know how to reach the right “room”, the right demographic, the right segment, the right audience. We have richer data, better tools, more granular signals than ever before. Yet even when we’re in the right room, we’re still too often saying… nothing meaningful.
This is because relevance alone isn’t enough anymore – what continues to matter is resonance. This only happens when brands understand customers beyond the data points, and as individual people - with problems, behaviours, emotions, habits, humour, contradictions. Data may tell you who they are, but emotional and behavioural insight tells you what they care about. This is where creative connection starts.
The industry’s bigger challenge is that much of the creative work people encounter feels safe, indistinguishable, engineered to appeal to the masses, and therefore doesn’t inspire the individual. The result is that most creative gets politely ignored; one size rarely fits all and one narrative rarely connects with all; unless it’s incredibly good and that’s a real challenge to deliver.
In this context, it’s not enough to churn out creative and hope it captures attention, but it must be specifically designed for. Creativity is the red thread that ties together strategy, data, technology and execution. It is the element that gives meaning to a message, story to a product, and humanity to an interaction. Storytelling, narrative, craft aren’t indulgences but they transform information into something people actually care about, and therefore, give attention too.
This is why brands need to build creative processes that encourage risk, variation and experimentation. At Tag, our Content at Scale approach allows brands to produce multiple creative variations quickly, test what resonates, and optimise in real time, rather than betting everything on a single, one-size-fits-all execution, designed for a world where attention is earned moment by moment. We’re never just chopping up assets and pumping them into Social channels. We react, we ideate, we write, we design and build, often in an express fashion, to connect with people and generate an emotional response.
Do Customers even want a relationship with your brand?
If designing for attention helps brands break through the noise, and if great targeting and creative earn you the right to be heard, what earns you the right to a relationship with your customers? Which brings us to the real creative challenge - do customers really want to let you into their world at all? Do people genuinely want relationships with brands, or are they just looking for seamless, functional experiences?
The uncomfortable truth is that most customers don’t want deep relationships with most brands. That’s not a failure of marketing or our industry, but a reflection on how people live.
Most customers don’t wake up seeking deeper intimacy with a telco, an energy provider or an insurance company. In these worlds, the best “relationship” is often invisible, with things working seamlessly, consistently and functionally - relationships here come second.
There are brands with a natural “right to play” emotionally, sectors such as retail, entertainment and lifestyle. These are categories where storytelling fits effortlessly into the experience and where audience welcome a little sentiment or personality. But for everyone else, emotional connection has to be earned, not assumed. Take my recent experience buying a brand-new MINI. Every journey in it is a joy, but the customer journey was just as impressive. From the moment I wandered into the showroom, every touchpoint was spot on - the POS, the sales script, the emails, the app. Seamless, positive, engaging.
And at the heart of it, the car itself is brilliant: beautifully designed and genuinely great to drive. But MINI don’t stop there. Their communications build on that foundation and create something bigger; a feeling, a relationship, a brand experience that stays with you.
If people don’t want relationships with brands but want brands that fit easily into their lives, creativity isn’t an additional layer at the end of the process, but the mechanism that turns utility into experience, and experience into connection. When it’s built into the strategy from the start, not attached as decoration, it helps brands express themselves with tone, distinctive and emotional clarity which are the qualities that make a brand feel human rather than transactional.
Earning a place in people’s lives
Brands that stand out aren’t the ones shouting the loudest or chasing the deepest “relationship” by default but are the ones who earn their place. They win attention with ideas that feel human, they build trust through seamless experiences, and they use creativity to add meaning rather than additional noise. Customers don’t owe brands a relationship; it’s something that’s granted through the way a brand behaves, communicates and shows up across the journey. In a world that’s only getting noisier, creativity remains the most powerful way to turn a functional interaction into something worth remembering.
As we all, including me, embrace AI to help us develop new creative solutions to connect with consumers, I’m holding tight to my Why’aye... my personal humanity and natural North East instinct which will hopefully help my work keep its heart.
