Listening as a strategy, not research admin

The best South African marketers we've interviewed treat listening not as a box to tick but as the engine that produces the strategy. Four of them, four vocabularies, one discipline.

Outside-in, not inside-out

Natalie Druion's compass at Momentum Group asks which direction the question travels. Inside-out asks "how do we sell more?" Outside-in asks "what are people actually searching for, worried about, trying to do?" Her proof case is the best CX story on the podcast. Metropolitan knew customers will always complain about claims, so instead of telling people not to complain, they taught South Africa how to complain properly, fronted by the CEO, inevitably titled Hello Peter. The insight underneath, that people want to be heard, is invisible from inside the building.

The four listening posts

Melanie van Rooy, an econometrician, is the least likely champion of qualitative listening, which is why her list carries weight: a real conversation, a normal focus group, an in-store observation, and sitting in the call centre hearing customers describe their frustration. "Sometimes those words tell you something the data just can't."

Imke Dannhauser's term completes the method: immersion. Qual and quant told Carling Black Label that sport mattered to their consumers, and sitting in the tavern watching the game with them produced the Carling Cup, a world-first "you be the coach" mechanic that ran for over a decade. "If I asked users what they wanted, they'd say faster horses. There's a very important, overlooked place for consumer immersion."

Complaints are a listening post too

The hardest listening is the kind that criticises you. Charné Munien notes that fragmented review platforms (Google, Facebook, Reddit) are "a genuine reflection of customer experience," and with AI engines now quoting them, they're also your brand copy. Justine Nienaber's private communities are the deliberate version: "It's okay to get a complaint about your brand. It's not okay to ignore it. Handled well, it converts people into advocates."

The common thread is that strategy starting from the customer's side of the glass beats strategy built in a boardroom, every time. And most of it comes from showing up where your customers already are, notebook in hand, agenda left at the office.

Try this week: book your listening-post hour for this quarter now, because the calendar is where this habit dies. Rewrite one live brief outside-in, starting from a verbatim customer question or complaint. And find your brand's most upvoted complaint online, then answer it properly.

Sourced from recorded, on-the-record interviews on the South African Digital Marketing Podcast. Every practitioner quoted above is named in the text.

First published on the SA Marketers' Circle.