Through a series of conversations titled 'On Brand', host Andrew Lewis will be meeting Senior Marketing Leaders to uncover the successes and setbacks, insights and perspectives, that reveal the truth about what it means to build successful brands in today's world.

In the first episode, Andrew is joined by Emily Turnbull, Audience Director at Trade Me, to hear more about managing one of New Zealand’s most loved and well-respected brands.

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Andrew: Brand building is tough. It's an art form. The craft of building a bridge between your product or service and one of the most complex things in the universe – the human brain. We hear so much theory about brand building, but what about the reality? What can we learn from the lived experience of those out there building some of our biggest and brightest brands?

Andrew: Hello and welcome to FRAME, a podcast dedicated to the art of knowing people. I'm your host, Andrew Lewis, Managing Director at TRA – The Research Agency. In this series, I'll be meeting with senior marketing leaders to uncover the successes and setbacks, insights and perspectives that reveal the truth about what it means to build successful brands in today’s world. We'll be getting to the heart of the lived experience to see if we can identify some of the themes and ideas that drive our best marketers forward.

Today, I’m joined by Emily Turnbull, Audience Director at Trade Me, to unpack the insights that inform decision-making for one of New Zealand’s most loved and well-respected brands. Hello Emily – thank you for coming in today.

Emily: Such a pleasure and what an intro. Amazing.

Andrew: Yeah, fantastic. Fantastic. So, let’s start with some fundamentals, shall we? You’ve worn many hats at Trade Me. Can you give us a little insight into who you are, the role you do, and what drives you as a brand builder?

Emily: Yeah, yeah, for sure. I’ve been at Trade Me for six years, and it’s actually my second stint here. I started many, many years ago in a short consultancy capacity, then went away, and eventually ended up rejoining the business. The way I like to articulate it – or prefer to articulate it – is that it was a bit like I had a summer holiday fling with Trade Me. They got under my skin... and now we’re married.

I just feel incredibly lucky to be part of such a much-loved Kiwi brand, and in a role that’s focused on how you can connect with and really add value to Kiwis in New Zealand. I work with the most phenomenal team of humans – they’re the real magic behind the brand, not me. It’s a mix of Trade Me, accountability and a team really focused on Trade Me Property specifically – from brand, marketing, comms, lifecycle, design – right across the board. So, a hugely diverse team.

And yeah, we’re trying to connect and engage with Kiwi. Your question around what drives me? I’m very competitive. I love to have fun. But I think if I were to say the key thing that really drives me... it’s that I’m just so curious about humans. I find us fascinating as beings. I’m fascinated by what can influence us, what makes us tick, what makes us think or feel a certain way. I find us fascinating.

And I think why I love this role so much is that it’s a passion outside of work too. I’m very passionate about mental health – particularly how humans can connect with each other in a more meaningful way and have very rich conversations, and chat and talk about the big things, really.

Andrew: That’s really interesting. I think there is something in this curiosity in people – this idea of having an innate interest in understanding us humans – is really quite a critical precursor to being a good brand builder.

Emily: I think it's key, because at the end of the day, to create this amazing brand is actually about walking in the shoes of a Kiwi and really connecting with that emotion.

And the curiosity part is so important to that, because it's the thing that actually drives us to think differently and look at things differently.

And it's interesting – we've actually embedded this within the team now. It's almost an expectation to be curious. They tease me – the folk tease me – that I'll often say, “I'm curious about why?”

Andrew: Yeah, if they made an Emily dial, that would be like the top button.

Emily: Totally. It totally would! Probably with a few swear words in there as well, if I were to be honest.

But yeah, you're absolutely right. And it's that curiosity though that allows us to step into a safe space, to really find that way that we can emotionally connect with humans.

Andrew: No, I think that's fascinating. And like I said, you kind of sense it in a lot of people you talk to that are good brand builders – there exists this curiosity.

Brands, really, at the end of the day, are just collections of memories and emotions – stories we hold in our heads. And if you're not setting out with an intention to really understand whole people, to uncover that story-

Emily: And that human truth. That very rich, magical human truth.

Andrew: I think it's very hard to build an authentic emotional connection with an audience if you're not setting out with that.

If you just took an idea of understanding the human condition, it feels like something for poets and therapists – actually, I think it's really essential for business practitioners too.

So yeah, great to see it and great to see it being embedded in the team! I think that's fascinating as well.

Emily: And it helps the team feel engaged and interested as well. So it’s worked for our team joy, as well as creating this amazing insights.

Andrew: Well, that's really my next question. So how's this curiosity playing out with your journey at Trade Me so far? Where do you find yourself on the journey of brand building?

Emily: Deeply curious. To be honest – deeply curious.

It's been a really interesting time for us at Trade Me, in terms of having these amazingly exciting business ambitions. But actually, it's been a curious and interesting time for Kiwi, right? It's really hard out there. And Kiwi are holding an awful lot.

But where we found ourselves as a business last year was that we just needed to get really clear on where we needed to focus.

Among other things, what bubbled up was this amazing opportunity with Trade Me Property. You know, we are a nation obsessed with property.

We did some research actually, last year, and found 95% of people aspire to own a home – but 60% of us actually dream scroll, which is they just spend time on their phone looking at beautiful homes.

Andrew: It's such a part of our psyche. Isn't it amazing?

Emily: Amazing. So, we are absolutely obsessed with property.

But when we sort of realised we had this focus – that we really needed to lean in and look at this opportunity with Trade Me Property – we all paused for a moment and went, this may sound like the most obvious question, but we sat there and went: ‘Why do we exist? What are we trying to do, or offer, or how are we trying to help Kiwi?

And I think brands can sometimes forget to have these pause moments. We think we've got it. We're all under control–

Andrew: “I’ve got the brand blueprint-’

Emily: “I’ve got the book, we're good to go.”

But we paused. And that's where this concept of curiosity, and uncovering that human truth, really, really came into it.

And as a result, it was fascinating from a brand perspective. We had to kind of have a bit of a reset – which is really scary, big conversations – but felt really right.

And that was because of the fact that we had been building this Trade Me master brand for so many years, and realised actually what we needed to do, if we really wanted to emotionally connect with Kiwi – with Trade Me Property – was focus on that brand.

Andrew: Right.

Emily: And it was a big shift.

But if we need that emotional connection, we need to focus on the human truths. We need to focus on how Kiwi are relating to that specific brand.

Andrew: So like the master brand's just too big?

Emily: Too big and exciting. Kiwi love us. We're a national treasure. They love Kev the Kiwi – he is so, so well loved. But it's really hard to be all things to all people. And what we realised was – you know, Kiwi engage with Trade Me for different reasons, different times of their journey. They'll feel different things. They have different needs.

You know, it's that sense of trying to buy your first home, versus selling, clearing out your wardrobe on Marketplace. There are needs, there are emotions with both – but they are so different.

And we were trying to do all things to everybody, which meant we were actually not emotionally connecting at all with anyone.

That was pretty confronting. Pretty scary. But it set us off on a really exciting kind of path – to have that genuine kind of connection, which is pretty cool for property.

Andrew: Yeah, I love that. And I think there's a really powerful insight in that lived experience for brand builders. This idea of curiosity leading us on the search for the emotional connection, and this idea that if we want to find a place to authentically connect with people in a moment of emotion, you do have to zero in. You can't do it at a kind of super generic level.

And I love this idea that you've kind of identified property as a really emotionally rich ground to look in, which is really powerful.

And, you know, like what we know from obviously all of the theory around kind of brand building and the ideas of how we work is this idea that even when you're thinking about – one of our big jobs as a brand is building memory structures, right? Sort of like associations of us with key moments and those kinds of things – that we tend to encode memory more strongly when the emotional resonance is higher.

It's the same part of our brain that deals with memory and emotion that actually also deals with decision-making as well.

Emily: You're dead right. It's my validation when I buy shoes!

Andrew: We are led first by the emotions. It's our amygdala firing up before the upper hemispheres are kind of doing much at all – if they get a look in at all.

But I love that in the sense that finding a place of connection that has an emotional richness and resonance allows us to do a better job for ourselves, I suppose, in terms of more effective brand building, in terms of creating these memory structures and resonance but also for people, in terms of being able to reflect back and connect with something that matters.

Emily: Because it's got to be that value exchange when you're building a brand. A Kiwi has got to walk away feeling they've got something. It's like any relationship – feeling they've got something out of it. This is a two-way relationship. That connection has just got to be authentic.

Andrew: Absolutely. So we had this reset, we had this aha moment, and realised Trade Me Property – zeroing in on a moment with emotional resonance – was going to be really important for the brand building journey. How did that insight come about?

Emily: Yeah, it was again the curiosity to understand Kiwi better than we did at that moment in time. Trade Me Property has been around for many years, so you could make an assumption that we've got all the answers sitting in our back pocket and we're good to go.

But again, those moments of pause and reflection – understanding that a nation kind of shifts and changes and we flux as people and every now and then we do have to reset and just sort of check ourselves a little bit again.

And the human truth that we landed on – it just ignites this little fire in my belly, to be honest – is that a home isn't just about the roof over your head.

You know, a home is about how you feel when you walk in the door. It's about how you live. It's about, to your point, the memories we create, whether it's with friends or family, or as a student in your first rental, or you've got grandkids coming to stay.

It's about those memories under a roof. It isn't about a functional brick and mortar.

And that was this incredible human truth. I remember this amazing meeting we had as a team – an audience team, and I challenged the team and said, I'd love everybody to share what home means to them.

And now I think I may have actually had a bit of a tear – got a little emotional at times, but every story was different. We've got folk with young families, and they talked about, oh, home is busy, it's chaotic, there's carnage, we've got Lego on the floor. We had one of our team who's based in Queenstown talk about it as a sanctuary. We had someone who said their family home was how they thought about home. Someone who had just moved up to Auckland said, I'm still trying to define home. And it was this amazing, rich moment where we realised home is just so different to everyone, but it's based on emotion, and it's based on feeling, it's based on memory.

It's such an incredibly powerful thing. And we held onto that so strongly – that it is different to everyone, and it’s different at different times in your life. And that human truth actually led us to – can I say it cheesily? – open the door to endless doors. That was what really landed us in this beaut new creative concept we have at the moment.

Emily: The magic of this campaign is that it allows us to tap into the diversity of what home is really nicely – that it is different to everybody. I think from a creative execution perspective, we kind of got ourselves into a place of being comfy with being uncomfortable.

And that was about – we didn’t put human beings into this creative. We used experiential moments, audio, to try and trigger memory in the brain and allow people to think ‘what room resonates with me?’ Or ‘what sound connects?’

And yeah, really celebrate the different ways that Kiwi live.

Andrew: Yeah, and I love that. And it’s really challenging when you’re a brand as big as Trade Me with such a diverse audience. Like, how do you connect? There’s a real emotional resonance and core in this idea of the ‘home’ but at the same time, as you said, it’s a vastly different experience for so many different people.

So, I mean, well done in creating one piece of creative work that somehow manages to capture that diversity of experience in that moment

Emily: It's exciting, isn’t it? And we think, boy, we’ve just opened – almost pushed the door open just a squidge – on this opportunity.

Because you can imagine the stories that we can tell around the different lives. It’s exciting. It’s really exciting.

Andrew: Yeah. So if we're thinking about what we learn from your lived experience as a great brand builder, there’s a really interesting insight here – that the insight itself really comes from understanding a genuine lived experience, really immersing yourself. It’s not just data – data is important, of course – but it’s the richness of that kind of experience that’s so, so interesting.

Emily: And I think having something or a moment that allows you to trigger genuine empathy for people. That moment where we realised everybody’s different, lives differently, and that allowed us to put our feet in different folks' shoes. I think that empathy creates the ability to connect a little more genuinely.

Andrew: Absolutely. It’s exactly that. When we demonstrate an understanding of people, when we reflect back their lived experience, we create real value for them. I think if there’s one thing we know about people, it’s that we probably seek – almost above all else – to feel seen and understood. That sense of “someone gets me.” It’s kind of like being loved, in a way. I mean, that’s the extreme version, but it’s that feeling of validation when we see our own experience reflected back.

Emily: Absolutely right. And you're part of a community. You're part of something where people are saying, “Yeah, I love it.”

Andrew: So I think that’s really interesting from a brand learning perspective. You're finding a truth and an emotional connection, but the act of actually reflecting that lived experience back through brand and comms work – that creates value.

We talked earlier about creating emotionally satisfying relationships going both ways, and I think that's really important. A lot of practitioners think they add value by offering something – a feature, a function – but actually, it’s this act of seeing people, reflecting back their lived experiences, that’s an incredibly powerful way of building brand.

Emily: And building that long-term kind of strength and resonance and foundation. Because people connect a lot more strongly – and to your point, create memories –when there’s an emotional connection. Rather than just a function that...

Andrew: Exactly. You're taking a moment of high emotional resonance, connected with a lot of memory and associating with that by reflecting it back to people. That’s good brand building.

Emily: It’s fun.

Andrew: Yeah. So that’s a really interesting insight. I think we’re starting to see a path here in your lived experience. It starts with curiosity. Curiosity and empathy towards humans. That leads to a search for a truth about people, which then takes us to a ground where emotional connection can happen, where a mutually satisfying exchange can take place.

Emily: And I love your point of “seeing each other.” I think that is so special as a build.

Andrew: Yeah. And of course, it’s great to see that the insights at the heart of the brand really did start from an authentic understanding of people – it started from the outside, where it should. You can see that in the campaign as well.

Big question, I suppose, is we’ve got this great campaign out there. How do we know it’s working or not? What do you put in place to understand that?

Emily: You sound like my board and the exec! Yeah, great question.

We talk to Kiwi often – we make sure we’re connecting a lot. But one of our absolute core tools, something we lean on all the time, is our brand tracking. It’s critical. And to me, if you’re trying to build a brand and you don’t have a tracker in place, you’re flying blind. It’ll be incredibly hard.

The magic of our brand tracker – I mean, the data’s great, the numbers, the graphs, but it’s the insight we can gather and pull from it that’s phenomenal. It keeps us honest. It shows whether we’re connecting in the right way. It gives us watchouts, areas to be cautious of or focus on. And it helps us make better decisions. It’s incredibly powerful. I’m a bit obsessed with it, Andrew.

Andrew: I'm obviously going to agree with you, brand tracking is critical. I always describe marketing, especially brand building, as a really tough job. You’ve got to build this bridge between your product or service and people’s wants, needs and emotions.

And this bridge – it’s invisible. It only exists in people’s heads, as a collection of emotions and memories. Not only do you need to make those links work, you have to do it without being able to see them. That’s why brand and comms tracking is so critical. It’s really the only way – as you said – to get a sense of how well you’re doing. Without it, we really are flying blind.

Emily: And the beauty is we can look at so many different aspects of what creates a meaningful brand. From how it feels to use it, through to the emotional connection we're creating. It gives us this beautiful, rich diversity of information.

It helps us ensure that once we’ve made that emotional connection and people come onto Trade Me Property – are we meeting their needs? And then suddenly it flips from emotion into the functional. It gives us a lot of rich detail beyond just the emotional stuff, which is beaut.

Andrew: Yeah. Brilliant. There’s quite a lot in this. I think it’s super interesting. Starting with curiosity – I love the embedding of that in your team. How it leads to the search for truth, to emotional connection, how zeroing in on true, authentic experiences gives us that foundation.

And then, really, the importance of making sure we understand how well we’re building that practically. That goes both ways. We need to know we're on track and we need to be able to pivot if things aren’t working.

But it's also a test – to check we’re delivering what we said we would. That mutual, two-way relationship. It’s important to know.

Emily: Because to your point, it is love, right? And if you break that trust of love, it’s pretty hard sometimes too... Yeah, I think about ex-boyfriends very, very quickly! No, I'm kidding.

Andrew: Oh dear! So maybe we end on a reflective note. Looking back, is there one thing you wish you’d known earlier in your role as a brand builder?

Emily: What would now-Emily say to young-Emily?

Andrew: Yeah.

Emily: Oh, how much time have we got? I’ve got a lot of advice for young Emily! Yeah, there’s probably a few things.

First, I’d encourage younger Emily to be a little more vulnerable. A little braver. A little more comfortable not knowing all the answers.

I reflect on the pressure I put on myself earlier in my career to always have the answer. And I think maybe that put a bit of a blocker on my curiosity. It’s really hard to be curious when you feel like you always need to say, “I’ve got this.”

There’s a real power in saying, “I don’t know, but that’s a curious question. Let’s dive into it.” So, be vulnerable. Be brave. What’s the worst that can happen?

Second, something really embedded in our teams and with our brilliant product team, is standing in Kiwi’s shoes. I’d pull younger Emily aside and try to rip the blinkers off. It’s really easy when you’re close to a brand – when you love the brand – to end up only seeing it through your own lens. You’ve drunk the Kool-Aid. But the magic comes from being empathetic. From getting out and walking in your customers’ shoes. So, get out, get close to Kiwi.

And third? Don’t sweat it. Have fun. Celebrate the wins. It’s going to be okay. Younger Emily, it will be okay.

Andrew: I love that. I love the idea of being more vulnerable and comfortable with not knowing all the answers because it’s only then, with an open, curious mind, that you can really search for human truth and connection.

Emily: And you see differently. You’re not walking in with a pre-determined answer. You see things differently.

Andrew: There’s a lot in there for people on the brand-building journey. So, be vulnerable. Be open. Be comfortable not knowing. Rip the blinkers off. Get outside.

Emily: Outside of your own space. Outside of your own brand. It’s amazing.

Andrew: Yeah. And don’t sweat it. Have fun with it. Playfulness is a really important part of good brand building.

Emily: The number of times I’ve read your research on playfulness – I talk about it a lot. I’ve got a Nerf gun beside my desk and I’m not afraid to use it. That ability to make people feel safe – to think differently, to use play in the work. I think it’s so powerful. I could’ve hugged you all when you released that research last year.

Andrew: It’s so interesting. That idea of where the value is we deliver for people – it’s often in the how. How we show up.

The simple act of reflecting back lived experience – of having fun with it, that’s a huge part of building a great brand. Purpose is good. Strategy is good. But it’s the how that makes the difference.

So, thanks, Emily. There’s so much in this. Your lived experience really highlights some of the most important fundamentals in great brand building: innate curiosity, empathy, and a deep interest in understanding people.

Emily: And a genuine, genuine interest.

Andrew: Yes! And a recognition that authentic emotional connection is the base we build from. That zeroing in on the moments that matter, even just reflecting those moments back to people to show that we see them, we get them – that’s emotional value. That’s brand building from human insight and truth, with the blinkers off.

And finally, making sure we put some rigour around it – tracking what we do. Making the invisible work of brand building visible. So we know what’s working, and where we can improve.

Thank you, Emily.

Emily: Oh, thank you for having me.

Andrew: I think there’s a lot in here for people. I really appreciate your time.

Emily: And thank you for your support on our journey. It’s such a partnership with TRA –it means the world.

Andrew: Thank you. And thank you for listening to FRAME, a podcast by TRA, dedicated to the art of knowing people. TRA is an insight agency. By layering perspectives from the science of human understanding, we see what others don’t. The uncommon truth.

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