Why Your Brand & Marketing Isn’t Converting - How a Human Focus Can Fix It

Interactive workshop to learn how human-centered design can uncover real insights, reduce friction, and make your marketing work harder. Coffee Connections: The Evening Blend We're staying on theme for Coffee Connections but making it a happy hour edition: same setup, different location/time. Located at Love, Katie Distilling, we will have an interactive workshop lead by Rebecca Farabaugh and rather than coffee, we will have a cash bar featuring handcrafted coffee-themed cocktails available for purchase. Topic: Why Your Brand & Marketing Isn’t Converting—And How a Human Focus Will Fix It (Interactive Workshop) You can have a beautiful brand, smart strategy, great creative and the latest marketing technology… and still fail to connect with the people you’re trying to reach. Why? Because too much marketing is built on assumptions. We assume we know what customers want, why they buy and what will make them click, engage, convert or stay loyal. Then we launch and hope the data tells us we were right. But better execution can’t fix a bad understanding of the problem. In this fast-paced, interactive workshop, you’ll explore how human-centered design can replace the endless cycle of guess, create, launch, measure, repeat with a more insight-driven approach. Through practical examples and hands-on exercises, you’ll learn how Voice of Customer research, journey mapping, and other tools can uncover hidden assumptions, customer friction and missed opportunities. Whether you’re early in your career, a seasoned marketer, or leading a marketing team, you’ll leave with practical tools to create clearer messaging, make smarter decisions, and build marketing around what people actually need, not just what you think they want. Because in a world where everyone has more tools to create marketing, the competitive advantage may not be creating more. It may be understanding people better. About the Speaker Rebecca Farabaugh is an award-winning marketing and customer insights leader with more than 20 years of experience across industries. She brings together marketing strategy, customer research, brand positioning, experience design and storytelling to help organizations better understand what drives customer decisions and translate those insights into more relevant, effective marketing and strategic action. A certified Human-Centered Design practitioner, Rebecca believes the strongest marketing starts with curiosity about people. She helps teams move beyond what they think customers want to understand what customers actually need, value and experience. Her work connects customer insight to messaging, journeys, campaigns, brand experiences and business outcomes. Rebecca is particularly interested in helping marketers navigate a rapidly changing landscape where AI and data are transforming how marketing gets created… and deeper human understanding becomes an increasingly important competitive advantage.