Coworking with Kate Fairweather

Each week, we spotlight Marketing Brew readers in our Coworking series. If you’d like to be featured, introduce yourself here.

Kate Fairweather is co-founder and head of human behavior at Electric Innovation, a consultancy. She has also worked at the design services firm frog and the strategy and design firm Fahrenheit 212.

Favorite project you’ve worked on? One that genuinely stopped me in my tracks was a project inside the US healthcare system looking at why people with Medicaid and Medicare coverage weren’t engaging with their primary care physicians, even when the access was fully covered. The conventional assumption was that barriers were logistical: wait times, transportation, complexity. And yes, those were real. But when we got deep into the human truth, we found something far more profound. The biggest barrier wasn’t structural, it was existential. Isolation was quietly dismantling the motivation to seek care at all—motivation to care for yourself is fundamentally linked to feeling like you have someone to live for. Once you see that, you can’t unsee it, and it reframes the entire innovation brief from “How do we reduce friction?” to “How do we restore a reason?”

What I love about this project is that it demonstrates the power of genuine consumer immersion over category assumption. A healthcare client, left to its own devices, would have built a better scheduling app. We built concepts rooted in combating loneliness, simplifying the overwhelming task of finding a new doctor, and rebuilding trust in the patient-physician relationship, because that’s what the humans actually needed. The best innovation almost never lives where the category thinks it does. It lives in the unspoken, the normalized, the quietly endured. Your job is to go find it.

What’s your favorite ad campaign? Dove’s “Real Beauty”—not for the creative execution, but for what it reveals about where great commercial ideas actually come from. Someone looked at a truth that millions of folks were quietly living every day and had the courage to name it out loud, then build a business proposition around it. That’s strategy at its best: not inventing a trend, but excavating something real from culture and giving it language.

One thing we can’t guess from your LinkedIn profile: I have an encyclopedic knowledge of drag culture—RuPaul’s Drag Race specifically—and I’m genuinely convinced it’s one of the most sophisticated masterclasses in innovation on earth. The way queens tap into true emotional and human insight, construct a personal brand around it, evolve it under pressure, and communicate it in a short stint on stage is extraordinary. You’re much more likely to find me using drag as a boardroom metaphor than sports or war.

What marketing trend are you most optimistic about? Least? I’m most optimistic about the pendulum swinging back to joy. After years of clinical minimalism, functional credentialism, and optimization-obsessed everything, consumers are desperately reaching for products that make them feel something: that surprise, delight, and spark of magic. Texture, scent, sensation, ritual. The kind of product experience you want to tell someone about not because it works, but because it enchanted you. Categories that learn to engineer wonder alongside efficacy, and that treat sensory experience as a core innovation pillar rather than a packaging afterthought, will own the next decade of consumer loyalty. Joy is underrated as a business strategy. It shouldn’t be.

I’m least optimistic about the creeping conflation of AI-generated “insight” with actual human understanding. AI is an extraordinary pattern-recognition machine, and we use it at Electric for making things more efficient, crunching data, etc. But no algorithm can yet sit across from someone and understand the texture of their life: the contradictions, the unspoken frustrations, the small joys. The risk is that companies mistake speed for depth, and end up with strategies that are technically correct and humanly hollow.

What’s one marketing-related podcast, newsletter, or account you’d recommend?

Honestly? None! And I say that without apology. I don’t have a roster of founder podcasts I swear by, I’m not drowning in newsletters at 6am, and I’m not speed-reading whatever business book LinkedIn is collectively performing its way through this month. That’s sourcing inspiration with a net. I hunt with precision: out in the world, in culture, by watching and talking to real people in real places.

The method I’d actually recommend is this: find a category completely unrelated to yours, go deep into it, and ask what it knows that yours doesn’t. The insight you can port from hospitality into CPG, or from gaming into financial services, is almost always worth more than anything circulating in your own industry’s echo chamber. Familiarity breeds blind spots. Strangeness breeds breakthrough. So no, I can’t give you a podcast—but I can tell you to go outside!