Karen Yu
Head of brand proposition
Trainline
Karen Yu joined rail booking platform Trainline just under two years ago and has recently been promoted to head of brand proposition. She started her marketing career at Unilever, following a number of internships, working her way up to global associate, brand and product manager for Comfort before moving to furniture startup Zinus.
Described by her nominator as a high performer with high potential, Yu is credited with shifting the marketing strategy from being product-led to customer-focused across a number of markets at Trainline.
She explains she has done this through an “abundance of data and real-time feedback from customers” which has allowed her to continuously pull relevant insights to remain “agile” in developing the brand and product experiences for customers.
Yu believes the availability of data has been one of the major shifts she has witnessed in the eight years since she started in marketing. She says marketing has moved from “we think” to “we know” when it comes to customers, meaning marketers can now be totally audience aware, and act effectively on those insights.
“Stay focused on the customer. At the end of every data point, trend or campaign is a human being.”
Today, Yu believes the biggest opportunity for marketers is not only selling to customers but representing them. She adds that internally, marketers can bring “customers’ needs into every stakeholder meeting”, while externally they can support consumers' interests and “use their platform for good in order to drive change”. She believes customers are looking for brands to care about the world, citing Trainline’s ‘I Came By Train’ campaign as an example because it highlights the positive environmental impacts of switching from road to rail.
Looking forward, she recognises the seismic shift AI will have on marketers, adding that “the job of marketing is intrinsically linked to the shifts in technology” meaning “AI will revolutionise many parts” of the job. She believes marketers will be “leveraging AI and predictive analytics to hyper-personalise their propositions and experiences for their customers”, while at the same time “consumers will have shorter attention spans and trust will become increasingly difficult to earn”.
Despite the incoming industry changes spurred on by new technologies, Yu advises marketers coming up through the ranks to “stay focused on the customer”. She says “at the end of every data point, trend or campaign is a human being” and “by putting the customer at the centre of everything you do, you’ll always find ways to add value”.
