Your Digital Marketing Coach with Neal Schaffer · 2026-03-19 · 40 min
In a marketing world increasingly driven by AI-generated content and data dashboards, it's easy to start treating customers like data points instead of people. Phil Treagus-Evans - founder of UK social media agency Giraffe Social and author of Human First Marketing: The Art of Being Seen, Trusted and Remembered - makes a compelling case for why human-first marketing isn't just a philosophy. It's a competitive advantage. In this episode, Phil and I dig into what it really means to understand your audience (hint: it goes well beyond the customer avatar), why Phil believes the traditional marketing funnel is built on a fiction, and what a pinball machine (for those that remember what one is!) has to do with the modern buyer journey. You'll also hear Phil's take on where AI helps marketers - and where it quietly undermines everything they're trying to build. Whether you're a solopreneur, a corporate marketer, or an agency owner, this episode will give you a new mental model for how customers actually move toward a purchase - and what you can do about it.
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