Data-driven, deeply human marketing: A lesson in listening

The marketing approach wellness brand Hiya takes is a useful reminder that ‘art vs. science’ is the wrong framing. The best teams use data to pinpoint friction (drop-offs, churn, shifting conversion rates), then use human insight to generate the conceptual leaps that solve it; think new creative angles, new packaging experiences and new ways of explaining the product. In short, the art and science of marketing is a feedback loop.

In this episode of the Marketer's Alchemy podcast, our host sits down with the chief marketing officer of Hiya to explore how the brand uses post-purchase surveys, customer DMs, iterative launches and more to build a data-driven yet deeply human brand.

What’s inside this episode: Communication, clear objectives and calculated risks

In our conversation with Corinne, the loop between instinct and analytics came to life through a few repeatable practices: treating core KPIs as a connected system, staying unusually close to customer truth, leveraging post-purchase surveys that go far beyond basic attribution, and turning those insights into calm, de-risked growth via iterative launches.

A lesson in listening

Most marketing teams can spot the symptoms of poor brand performance in a dashboard: AOV dips, a cohort churns in month five, a winning ad fatigues. Spotting symptoms is easy; the harder part is diagnosing the cause fast enough to respond. Hiya’s answer: stay in the conversation.

Corinne and other leaders at Hiya spend time in the brand’s Instagram inbox, watching ad comments closely to uncover what customers are confused about, what they want next and what’s starting to frustrate them.

The reason?

“If you are talking and listening to your customer every day, you know what they're excited about,” Corinne explained. Essentially, customer truth lives in places dashboards don’t: DMs, comments and post-purchase surveys.

De-risking product launches

One big takeaway from this conversation is Hiya’s product launch philosophy: Don’t gamble on a single “big reveal.” Direct-to-consumer brands tend to mimic enterprise launch mechanics, with massive concepting, long lead times and a huge spike of spend, only to discover the market doesn’t respond. Corinne recommends a different approach.

“When it comes to launches, we don't over prepare,” she explained. In her words, Hiya follows a ‘beta launch’ approach, where they essentially soft launch their product, gather initial data, then use that data to inform the continuation of the launch.

“We'll get data back and we'll tweak it… and then we'll say, ‘Okay, now we know what people think, let's put a little more money behind it.” From there, the company makes a series of educated changes, re-evaluating with new data at each step.

“It's a slow, iterative build where every single step is pretty de-risked because we are gathering data and building it,” shared Corinne.

The kids are on board

Hiya’s product strategy highlights another often-missed point: brand experience can solve what formulation alone can’t. Because Hiya avoids the sugar-and-gummy playbook common in kids vitamins, it needs a different mechanism to earn kids’ buy-in. Their answer is an unboxing kit experience: premium packaging, a refillable child-resistant glass bottle, and stickers so kids can personalize the bottle before they ever take a vitamin. It’s behavior design dressed as brand.

“Kids are able to decorate their bottle before you even put the vitamins in,” Corinne detailed. “Kids are already engaging with the brand before they even see the product. So, by the time they’re taking their vitamin, it's out of their favorite bottle anyways, so it's a much easier sell. That's how we're also connecting healthy habits and enjoyment.”

The domino effect of it all

The brand’s KPI discipline is in line with other direct-to-consumer companies: CAC, LTV, AOV, conversion rate, and the relationships between them. But Corinne emphasized something many teams forget: These metrics behave like a system. Change one lever and you change the rest.

“I think of data much like a symphony,” Corinne explained. “We never really look at one KPI without the other because they all influence each other and have such a symbiotic relationship. We're never laser-focused on one KPI; we look at the entire system.”

It’s for this reason the brand reviews performance with broad visibility, so every function can understand how day-to-day work translates into business health.

“[The perspective] around finances amongst our team is extremely transparent,” Corinne shared. “Every Monday, the entire company looks at the entire business top to bottom, all the way to EBITDA, cash flow — everything. We all know what's happening. I think that connects people and brings them back to an understanding of how their job is translating to a high-level business KPI.”

Brain trust inside, scalable execution outside

Corinne’s reflections on Hiya’s growth also offer a lesson in organization design. Over the lifespan of the company, the brand scaled rapidly with a small internal team, keeping strategy and decision-making tight while using external partners for execution. According to Corinne, that model reduces coordination overhead, keeping teams close to customer truth. It also preserves speed, especially when paired with company-wide transparency on business performance.

“If you want to move really fast, have a small team and a small [operating expense] allowable that forces you to do that,” she shared.

This conversation with Corinne is a timely reminder that the most effective marketing teams don’t choose between art and science, but they build a feedback loop between them. It’s about seeing core KPIs as a “symphony” to get a better understanding of what’s moving in the business. The takeaway is straightforward: design a listening system you can trust, connect it to disciplined measurement, and you’ll be better prepared to move faster with less guesswork.

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