Episode 267 / Aurea Mauries / Cargill / Strategic Marketing and Technology Leader Animal Nutrition Mexico
Following Your Heart in Data Driven Marketing
Aurea Mauries, Strategic Marketing and Technology Leader for Cargill’s Animal Nutrition Mexico branch, is no stranger to the world of data-driven marketing - in fact, she's made it her mission to help brands move beyond just crunching the numbers and really understand the emotional drivers behind consumer behavior. And as it turns out, the key to unlocking those insights may lie in an unexpected place: the human heart.
Through using insights from app and research platform HeartMath, Aurea has been focusing on the connection between neuroscience, intuition and decision-making. That’s why this is her shiny new object.
Much of human behaviour is influenced by subconscious emotional responses, rather than pure rational thought. "We tend to think that the brain is the one that's data processing, and then we make assumptions or react on our conclusions," Aurea explains. "But what they have proven is that the first filter is not the neurological connections within the brain - it's the imprint of our previous experiences and emotions."
In other words, our "gut feelings" and intuitions aren't just romantic notions - they're actually a key part of how we process information and make choices, often before we're even consciously aware of it.
For marketers, this research has huge implications. It means that relying solely on data and analytics isn't enough - you also need to understand the emotional landscape that's shaping your customers' decisions. Things like past experiences, personal values, and even the subconscious associations we have with certain products or brands can all play a major role. As Aurea puts it, "Don't walk away and only see [data] through the PowerPoint - you need to be outside and really try to see it and observe and understand what's not being said within [spreadsheets]."
So, how can brands start tapping into this deeper level of customer understanding? Aurea suggests starting by exploring the research and resources available through organisations like HeartMath. Dig into the studies on human behaviour and decision-making, and look for ways to apply those insights to your marketing strategies and customer experiences. It may require a shift in mindset, but blending data-driven insights with a deeper understanding of emotion and intuition is the key to unlocking the next level of marketing innovation.
"It's uncovered a different layer about human behaviour as a whole," says Aurea. Ready to open your heart (and mind) to a new approach to data-driven marketing? Give the full episode a listen.
Transcript
The following gives you a good idea of what was said, but it’s not 100% accurate.
Aurea Mauries 0:00
We tend to repurpose data that wasn't created with one idea or objective, and we use it in a completely different one, and that will tend to misuse if you're not doing the right questions,
Speaker 1 0:16
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Tom Ollerton 0:48
Hello and welcome to the shiny new object podcast. My name is Tom Ollerton. I'm the founder of Automated Creative, the creative effectiveness ad set platform, and this is a podcast about the future of data driven marketing. Every week or so I have the privilege of interviewing one of our industry's leaders, and this week is no different. I'm very lucky to be in Mexico City with Aurea Mauries, who is strategic marketing and technology leader animal nutrition Mexico at Cargill. So Aurea, for anyone who doesn't know who you are and what you do, could you give us a brief background?
Aurea Mauries 1:24
Sure? Cargill has a lot of enterprises. Mine is the animal and nutrition enterprise. We have a business in Mexico that offers nutrition solutions for animal owners or animal producers within the country, we, as a team design a portfolio and value propositions for the new solutions in nutrition for those animals here in Mexico.
Tom Ollerton 1:49
And how did you get to that job?
Aurea Mauries 1:51
So my major is in animal production. I've worked a lot in in sales and marketing and sales enablement for a long time, especially in the animal health space. I got here I'm a pandemic recruit, so they recruited me during pandemic, through LinkedIn, and I was excited to learn about a new job with the same animals, the same customers, but in a completely different space, and it has been a great journey ever since.
Tom Ollerton 2:21
And so what new belief or behavior has changed your work life, your career in the last five years or so?
Aurea Mauries 2:28
So pandemic, I think, hit a hit a great vein around what's really life about. I was coming out from a global, well, I was in a global role, but I was coming out from a long journey, kind of approach, going back home and, you know, sitting yourself all alone, and having to deal with a lot of virtual relations that were not the common. And the two things that set me back was what was really, what I had forgotten about, what's out, besides work, you know, how do you reconnect about the world around you in a completely different state? Now, you're not traveling, you're not seeing people, not your label is not the one that identifies you. So how do you get that grip of identity without being that traveling solo all the time and grounding myself into that it has been a lot about, you know, reconnecting with the security of the world beside your job, the people and the relations, besides seeing them. And from there, you know, a huge new way of reconnecting to the world that changed my mind and changed my life, and actually drives a lot of how to go back to the center within my work.
Tom Ollerton 3:42
And so what has happened now that you've done that so you've reconnected with the world outside of work, how's that affected your work? What? What has happened to change your perspective?
Aurea Mauries 3:57
I'd say two things. One, it's become even easier now to bring what we call the outside in, so bringing the outside in regarding not only competitors or the customers, but other industries, other practices that probably you think are completely disconnected. I'm seeing here a work of art, and you know, even sitting down and understanding how art can play into your your work life can can be interesting or, you know, zoos, circuses, you know, entertainment whatsoever, can really Dawn into how your innovation processes and business models can align into different perspective and inspiration. And the other side would be relations. You know, sometimes you are too tied up into relations and discussions within work that you forget the personal side of people or how to address it in a different way and bringing the outside in. It's also, you know, acknowledging that somebody might have an interest on fashion or plants or something different that can reconnect and you. Revamp that discussion in a completely different way.
Tom Ollerton 5:02
So moving on, what would your advice be to become a better, data driven marketing person?
Aurea Mauries 5:10
So I'm gonna share a story myself. I, and this is a professional secret, I did fail statistics when I was in college. That was the one, you know, subject that I wasn't good at. We were more into experimental design and everything, and I wasn't understanding a bit of it. So going back through life and going into marketing, I had to go back into really, really going deep into understanding data. Especially, we do a lot of animal science. So we do need a lot of statistics, so regrounding myself and relearning myself into that, that would be the basics. You know, understand what really data is there basics? You know, representation, reach, biases, outliers. I know there are really basics, but sometimes we tend to forget and get lost into flashy graphs or flashy data that can pinpoint and you need to regroup into what's really that universe and what are we trying to do? Second, this is a lesson I learned in MBA. In the MBA, you know, people are usually be sat behind data transformation or data interpretation, so you you can't walk away from what's really driving that data conclusion. So you need to be really into understanding the numbers, but figuring out what's really the underlying piece of it, and who is really targeting and what was really need to address, because we turned, at least in my experience, we tend to, we tend to repurpose data that wasn't created with one idea or or objective, and we use it in a completely, completely different one, and that will tend to misuse if you're not doing the right questions.
Tom Ollerton 6:57
We so something that's on my mind at the minute is there's a fascination with data, right? Because it's clean, it's nice. You put it in a spreadsheet and it all adds up.
Yeah. Everybody loves, everything will match, yeah.
However, data is a record of something that happened exactly, not the thing that happened, but something that happened. But in reality, brands need more than records of things. They need to have an understanding. So in your experience, what is the best way to move from data to understanding?
Aurea Mauries 7:36
So I think you can do it in different ways, but the first one is to understand what hypothesis is data showing up? You know, I don't know, people will buy chocolate in the end of the month. Let's say, right? That's data sales pack. But what's really behind it is it that they are celebrating the end of the month? We have more birthdays. There's more anniversaries. What's really driving that? Those are the questions, and you will only will be able to have hypothesized into some level, but then you will need out to see and validate it's not only, and I, I tend to use this word of not making the the Excel or the decisions based only on sheets or spreadsheets. You need to go outside and really match it to reality.
Tom Ollerton 8:22
Yeah, so someone said to me in some research I was doing that you can't get to know a customer through PowerPoint.
Aurea Mauries 8:27
Never, ever.
Tom Ollerton 8:30
So we're going to move on now to your shiny new object, which is completely new for this podcast, and it's an organization called Heart Math, H, E, A, R, T, M, a T, H, what is that and why is that organization your shining new object that you think represents the future of data driven marketing?
Aurea Mauries 8:52
Okay, so it's quite a long fetched tool for me. Heart Math is a research institute that's been working on science to show what's really the connection on neuroscience with intuition, emotions and how they play in our life, completely different. It's not a marketing driven or anything driven through marketing, but what it really shows me, and when I look at the research, is going into data. They really show up with crisp information around questions that we had never asked, scientifically proven, if the situation exists, how do we make decisions? Do we know what we decide even before thinking about it? Right? So for me, it's a golden nugget around human behavior. We as marketers tend to understand and try to understand human behavior in the perspective of shoppers, and really, you know, dig deeper into what are our motivations and how will they show up? So for me, it's a completely disruptive literature research, but in a completely different way on emotions, which is more of we know that consumers are working with emotions and how we make decisions, and sometimes it takes a myth of pure rationality into things.
Tom Ollerton 10:05
So someone such as myself that's never come across this organization and their research and their provocative insights, can you share some of that stuff? Like, what? What do you know that a lot of marketers won't know now that you've you've investigated their research.
Aurea Mauries 10:21
So that's a tough one. The first thing, do you believe in intuition in a way that you can prove it as driven decisions made by the intuition?
Tom Ollerton 10:34
Or, yeah, do you asking me? Yeah, okay, and I probably don't believe in intuition. I think it is a nice word that encompasses, in a vague way, how you have processed inputs or data from the outside world. And you have, like people call it gut feel. But really, as a human being, you're you've processed inputs, and your output is an opinion. People call it intuition, and I think it sounds quite romantic. It's quite nice. Okay, in actual fact, like, I don't know if you are going to come up with a completely stupid example here, but no if, like, you're walking through the forest and you see, like, you know, 10 reindeer run by your intuition might be the next one would be red, right? But really, for me, all you've done is you've taken on data and processed it and processed it. And obviously that's a stupid example, but in a in a sales scenario in business, you know, like, I've sat across 1000s of people in these meetings, and I have an intuition, but really it's just my brain processing all of those tangible, intangible inputs in order for me to have a feeling about what will happen next. But poets would call it intuition. I just think it's processing.
Aurea Mauries 11:52
So the first one would be, we tend to think that the brain is the one that's data processing, and then we we make assumptions, or we react on my conclusions. What they have proven is that the first filter, it's not the neurological connections within the brain and probably Heart Math will kill me, because I don't represent science well. But for me, the basic nugget is we do tend to pre conclude, and that pre conclusion, it's not rational or cerebral, but it's more around what has has been our previous experience and the imprint within emotions before even going into rational thought. So we are already driving into that. So yeah, intuition in a romantic way, it might be what what you're saying, but they are going more deeper into how previous relations, previous experiences, previous reactions and previous emotions are driving the way of our thought, makes sense?
Tom Ollerton 12:44
And it makes sense. I'm struggling a bit because it's completely
Aurea Mauries 12:49
into a different side. Yeah, but being honest,
Tom Ollerton 12:57
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If we are choosing a like a partner or I don't know, the holiday, or a restaurant or something. How does the data within Heart Math give us insight into the difference between something that's like, low consideration versus like, what washing powder I'm gonna buy, for example, because are people buying washing powder emotionally, or are they in the supermarket and it's got 50% off. So like, I'm open to learning much more about this.
Aurea Mauries 14:04
So let's take that example and try to dip that I probably won't convince you, but this is something that's helped me, you know. So do you go exactly in the same move, same mood, to buy this powder on a weekend after you forgot and they kicked you out of your house because you didn't bring it. Are you taking the decision because it has some imprint around every time I go to buy that powder, something happens, and sometimes we are not even connecting that, but you are within yourself without noticing. We called it sometimes unconscious. We called it bias, whatever, but it's actually something that's had more connections that are really being science proven. So for me, it's uncovered a different layer about human behavior as a whole, and marketeer as a human behavior and driving consumer experiences in the basics makes sense.
Tom Ollerton 14:57
And can you give me an example of how you've used this?
Aurea Mauries 14:59
Okay, so I'll give you one from the past, because some of them I can't disclose right now, but from the past. A lot around we were working into immune therapy for for an animal, for a species, in a reproductive animal health space. And what we were seeing was all these beds driving into science. You know what really happens, in happening with science, immuno science, and how we're doing and everything. But what we weren't understanding was their own concept of disease, what it makes for the animal, and what caused them to see the disease in the animals, right? So you needed to trigger and if you were science based only the only things that we would get from them was, it's not worth the treatment. It's not worth the payment, right? That's what you were getting, and you weren't going to be able to introduce it. But if you walked away from that and really understand what was the disease generation around them, and what it meant for for them, the prevalence of that disease in their facilities. It completely drove a different conversation. Everybody walked away from that emotional conversation at the time because they weren't used to it, you know. I'm a sales rep. I sell, Oh, I sell high tech pharma products, and I need to sit down with a veteran understand how he feels about this. It's completely crazy, you know. But once we understood that, if you were talking about disease, how they were reacting at that moment in the animal, the life stage of the animal, it opened to them a completely different space, into conversations, how to relate with them and really make the product successful.
Tom Ollerton 16:37
So if you're going to advise someone practically how to use this service. How would you? How do you advise them, so say, for example, a friend of yours, or in a different market or a different vertical, was like, oh, that sounds interesting. What what do you do? How do you, how do you approach this organization in a way that gives a practical benefit to market.
Aurea Mauries 17:01
So the way I advise them would be, first of it, working it for yourself, it's gonna drive a complete different way of thought for you, and how do you reground in your line of thinking. Secondly, when you bring it to the team, especially for ideation, provide these nuggets of knowledge around behavior, so that it triggers a different thought of motivation for your customer, your targets, whatever you're trying to solve within the different customer experience or customer funneling that you're working on, that would be my biggest advice.
Tom Ollerton 17:35
But when you arrive on the website, what do you do? Like, how?
Aurea Mauries 17:39
So you go so there's a lot of resources. I'm a subscriber. I'm using it. But if you go into the top line, you have research. If you go for research, try to drive a lot into human behavior and start from there, you know, don't read through the whole papers. You're gonna go crazy if you're not familiar with peer reviewed journals. But go for the abstract and the conclusion, you know, and work into that a little bit more, and you will see it applicable.
Tom Ollerton 18:03
And can you search within the tool? So you go in and you say, right, I don't know. I'm selling emotions, but if I wanted to sell a soft drink, for example, how would, how would that work? Was it? Is it? Would you go find research on what, what emotions drive attention? Or, like...
Aurea Mauries 18:19
Yeah, probably more into emotions and attention. How do we handle different emotions? Low vibration emotions versus high emotions? Where are there? Probably you'd go there. Yeah.
Tom Ollerton 18:27
So it's a an extensive resource of peer reviewed papers, and it's going to require some dedication.
Aurea Mauries 18:34
Yeah, it's gonna, it's gonna require for you to deep ticker. But don't go into details. Don't go into that.
Tom Ollerton 18:40
I haven't made it too easy, but if you say you need to kind of take a walk around the the organization and say, Oh, that could be relevant for me.
Aurea Mauries 18:47
Yeah. And if not, there are some two cool books. One is, oh, God, I can't remember that. Well, yeah, I'll share it in the link. But there are cool books around how, how, really, it's called heart math, because what it does, it's driving to the rational about heart so, yeah, I'll send you the two titles of the books for sure.
Tom Ollerton 19:13
What's the most surprising thing that you've got from Heart Math?
Aurea Mauries 19:17
That won't relate to marketing directly?
Tom Ollerton 19:22
Go on...
Aurea Mauries 19:22
I've so there, and there's a lot of it's going a little bit into, at least, I won't call it mainstream, but it's coming up a lot more now into my my feed. It's more around nature and how trees communicates, which is a completely different approach into communication. You know, I don't know if you've heard it, but all the roots and everything within the, you know, the underground life about it and how really, and it's put me more into understanding that communication, it can come through in so different, so many different ways that we haven't even uncovered all of the dimensions.
Tom Ollerton 19:57
Well, look unfortunately, we're at the end of the podcast, and. So if someone wants to get in touch with you about anything, trees, animals, or whatever statistics, then where would you like them to get in touch and and what makes a message that you'll actually respond to?
Aurea Mauries 20:17
So you can reach to me through LinkedIn. I'm active there, and I'll certainly see the messages through the posts. I'm as Aurea Mauries, so it's easy to find. And the last message, I think data has been showing us for a long while in marketing that it can really show us to uncover different insights and needs, but don't walk away to only see it through, as you say the PowerPoint, you need to be outside and really try to see it and observe and understand what's not being said within it and from their act.
Tom Ollerton 20:50
Brilliant. Thank you so much for your time.
Aurea Mauries 20:52
No thank you for the invitation.
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