Marketing
How direct, unfiltered audience feedback transformed a regional marketing campaign
The Challenge
Meet the People hosted a live session with audiences from the target region, bringing together people with different backgrounds, lifestyles and levels of engagement.
Marketing teams observed the discussion directly rather than receiving a filtered report.
The session explored:
Attitudes towards the organisation
Awareness of available services
Perceptions of existing marketing activity
Messaging that resonated
Language that felt authentic
A marketing team was preparing a major regional campaign and needed to improve engagement with audiences from this area who had historically been less responsive to their messaging.
The challenge wasn't a lack of data - they had the numbers, it was understanding how real people interpreted the advertising push and whether it reflected their lives and priorities.
Our Approach
What We Heard
The discussion surfaced several important realities:
Assumptions made by marketeers and campaign managers internally were not always reflected in the lived experiences of the respondents
Some messages were failing to connect because they reflected organisational priorities rather than audience priorities
People responded most strongly to simple, direct and relevant language
Certain barriers to engagement had been underestimated
“I want to see people like me and I don’t want people talking the area down. It might not be perfect but good things happen here too, you just never hear about them.”
What Changed
Following the session the team:
Refined campaign messaging
Updated social and digital content
Adapted creative assets
Strengthened audience targeting
Built more audience-centred communications
The revised approach performed significantly better with groups that had previously been difficult to engage.
Overall Impact
Campaign messaging redesigned around audience reality
Better engagement with harder-to-reach audiences
Increased confidence in marketing decision-making
Stronger connection between strategy and lived experience
“We changed our messaging for our regional strategy based on simple, direct and clear feedback from the sessions. We adapted and created new social and digital messaging and it’s working well in areas that we’ve struggled with in the past.”