This article was based on the interview with Georgia-Pacific’s Melissa Blunte on deepening connections to customers by accelerating our understanding by Greg Kihlström, AI and MarTech keynote speaker for The Agile Brand with Greg Kihlström podcast. Listen to the original episode here:
In the relentless pursuit of efficiency and scale, we marketing leaders have armed ourselves with an arsenal of technology that would have been the stuff of science fiction a decade ago. We operate in a world of predictive analytics, automated customer journeys, and AI-powered personalization engines. The latest dashboard promises, as they all do, a single source of truth, a crystal-clear view into the customer’s soul, rendered in perfectly charted KPIs. Yet, for all this technological prowess, a nagging question persists: as we get closer to the data, are we inadvertently moving further away from the human? Are we building systems that know everything about a customer’s behavior but understand nothing of their motivations?
This is not a Luddite’s lament against progress. It is a strategic imperative for every enterprise brand. The very tools that allow us to operate at an unprecedented scale risk creating a sterile, transactional relationship with the people we exist to serve. In a recent conversation with Melissa Blunte, Director of Consumer Experience at Georgia-Pacific—a company whose products are woven into the quiet, often unconscious, moments of daily life—we explored this very tension. The challenge isn’t about choosing between technology and humanity; it’s about using the former to accelerate our capacity for the latter. For brands like Angel Soft, Brawny, and Dixie, success isn’t just about winning a click or optimizing a conversion funnel. It’s about earning a place of trust in the consumer’s home, a trust that is built on a foundation of genuine understanding, not just aggregated data points.
