About us

Hi. I’m Brendon Bennell, owner of Advocate Marketing. I started this consultancy because I see a huge disconnect between the challenges brands and their marketers face in grabbing and holding the attention of their target audiences, and the lack of sophistication in the database marketing programs of those same companies.

In a world where audiences are bombarded with content and better trained than ever to filter out marketing, database marketing offers some relief. The audience gives you their permission to take some of their time and attention, they reach out to you. It seems crazy to me that brands, by and large, haven’t gotten more strategic in this space, it remains an operational concern for many. I won’t waste time with my clients wondering further why that is, I just want to enable them to exploit that market inefficiency to its fullest for as long as it exists!

Our simple philosophy is to humanise data, to communicate with the actual people a database represents. Each email address, phone number, app login, or postal address takes on much more importance, there could be a great customer there, or potential great customer so that makes it harder to bundle them all together and blast them with sales messages. We just need to tap into their needs as people and discover what they want to hear next to keep growing and reach their full potential.

Lifecycle marketing aligns with this more human approach and I worked at embedding its principles in my agency and client-side marketing roles. I’ve been lucky enough to work with some of the brightest thinkers our industry offers and was able to pressure test ideas inspired by them (or shamelessly stolen)  with  some world-class brands. My bespoke lifecycle marketing framework gives any brand a realistic shot at taking something as humble as an email address and developing it over time the best type of customer there is – a raving brand advocate.

I’ll find any excuse to chat about database marketing. Let me know a bit more about your business and I’ll give you as much obligation free advice as I can. Who knows, it could be the start of something big and if it isn’t well it’ll be good networking at the very least and I hope you take away a couple of ideas you can use.