1. THE CONTEXT:
Marketing isn’t a field built on judgment calls or gut feelings, especially when you are the one paying the pills.
That’s the romantic version people like to tell themselves: “Listen to your heart, follow your dream, let’s be yolooo”.
We just love to believe it is. Because it feels safer, and easier to rely on “gut feeling” than to face the truth, the clarity, or the pain.
This thoughts came since I changed my mindset from spending money from coporate, or spending big budget at big agencies to spending on my own, my logic to survive.
Yo know, nowadays, competion is fierce & unseen and for that competence does require hard-work, not just merely talking & debating or just title proof. Things liked:
- The actual is that marketing is fundamentally about balancing logic & emotion.
- ❎ Logic builds the house, the brand, the rationale & the stucture.
- ❎ Emotion invites your consumer, fuel the love, & build the reputation.
- ❌ Without logic, you are creating noise, talking & fighting for just nonsense.
- ❌ Without emotion, you are merely a machine, or just AI agent.
2. THE PAIN
After all, nothing changes that core reality: THE PAIN, the sufferings we all have equally or more in life.
Humans are wired to avoid pain. We’ve been practicing survival for thousands of centuries.
You may see a lot of tips & tricks for avoding pains, but not solving anything of them.
Here’s something most marketers get wrong:
you cannot truly understand user insights if you’ve never been them
Tommy Nguyen (h.thinh)
Things like:
- never lived their life
- never seen the world from their perspectives
- never experienced their viewpoint, their pain points, their struggles, their daily reality.
In my early years, I made the same mistakes many of us do, yeah it was real me in the past early year of my career, such as:
- Tried to “understand” customers through colorful charts & thick reports.
- Sought truth through others: suppliers, partners, decks, review…
- Found for answer via number & data.
Because it looked professional on table desk, it made my on own title looking good, shiny & successful on my own.
It is liked profile shining, but nothing real & just shallow & likely hollow on the inside.
WHY?
Because reading about someone’s pain is not the same as feeling it.
(Tommy nguyen)
When you sit too far from your customers, you start telling stories that may sound good, relevevant, instead of stories that are true.
You CREATE campaigns that win applause in the boardroom but get ignored in real life.
You feel proud of the output, but the outcome isn’t your.
3. THE POV
So, I changed how I work. Last 3 years, I invested & spent rememdous times for flipping that.
It is hard but dorable, & it takes slow pace but give a sense of clarity.
I stopped treating empathy like a buzzword and started treating it like fieldwork.
I tried to feel the weight my customers carry: the lack of time, the tight budget, the inflation, the social pressure, and the small, silent trade-offs they make every day.
I stopped chasing “vanity numbers” (likes, views) and started looking for real signals of trust.
Be honest, It wasn’t comfortable. It certainly wasn’t fast. To me, it was the only way to make marketing feel real again.
If you want true insight, don’t just buy the data. Go out there. Get closer to the reality. Earn it.
That is how marketing stops being a myth and becomes a craft. That’s not even comfortable. That’s not even efficient.
It may be very slow but surely the only way the understanding becomes real instead of theoretical.
See more the part 2 in tommyacademy.io
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