The Marketing Gap No One Talks About: Emily Lyman on Empathy, Behavior, and What Really Drives Customers

Emily Lyman will tell you her best professional skill is co-dependency. She's only half joking. Growing up as a military kid, perpetually the new girl in the room, she developed an almost involuntary ability to read people and anticipate what someone needs before they say it. That instinct followed her through a winding career: corporate finance, PR, a stretch in book editing, and eventually marketing.

For over a decade, Emily worked with top global brands on both the agency and brand side. She loved the craft. But she grew increasingly frustrated by a gap no one seemed to want to talk about: the industry had built an entire infrastructure around measuring what customers did. Almost no one was asking why. After years of watching good thinking get watered down in execution, she opened her own shop. Branch & Bramble is a marketing agency for DTC lifestyle brands that turns audience curiosity into customer obsession using behavioral psychology and empathetic marketing. We sat down with Emily to talk about what's broken in modern marketing, why empathy isn't a soft skill, and what brands need to understand before AI leaves them behind.

This is part of our ongoing 20 Founders On a Mission series. New editions publish regularly. To be featured or nominate a founder, write to us at hi@foundedbywomen.org

What inspired you to start? After more than a decade in marketing, I kept running into the same problem: the industry had built an entire apparatus around measuring what customers did, and almost no infrastructure for understanding why they did it. We had data, frameworks, personas with names, and stock-photo faces. What we rarely had was a real answer to the question that actually mattered: why does this person care? 

After years of watching good thinking get watered down in execution, starting something of my own felt less like a leap and more like the obvious next step. 

I built what I actually believed in. The agency I wanted to exist was one rooted in behavioral psychology and empathy, one that goes deeper than traditional data to understand not just what customers do, but what actually moves them. 

What problem are you solving?

Data has become the holy grail of modern marketing, and for good reason. But the pendulum has swung too far. 

Most DTC brands are making decisions based almost entirely on logic and rationality, without accounting for the emotions that actually drive purchasing decisions. To quote neuroscientist Antonio Damasio: "We are not thinking machines that feel. We are feeling machines that think." 

If your marketing strategy doesn't account for that, you're not reaching your customer. Just their inbox. The most uncomfortable part is that most marketers think they're already doing this. Research by Dr. Johannes Huttula found that the more empathetic marketers believed themselves to be, the worse they actually were at predicting their customers' emotional responses. We're all working from our own biases and calling it customer insight.

What's missing is the layer underneath behavior: values. 

Our values drive our emotions, which drive our decisions. But most marketing programs are built on demographics and surface-level data that tell you what a customer does, not why. Branch & Bramble's work starts there. We build clever, empathetic campaigns that feel human and work like hell. A program built on these principles for a major outdoor brand produced a 59% increase in consumer engagement and a 104% increase in clicks. Not because we had a bigger budget. Because we understood what we were saying and to whom.

What’s next for you?

Empathetic marketing isn't a new concept, but it's becoming the most urgent one. In an AI-accelerated world, brands can generate more content, more campaigns, and more targeting variations than ever before. 

What AI can't do is understand what actually moves a person. It can predict behavior but it can't decode values. The brands that win won't be the ones with the fastest content engines. They'll be the ones who understand their customers at a genuinely human level.

That's the conversation I'm taking to national and international stages. Empathy isn't a soft skill. In a world where AI can execute almost anything, the competitive advantage shifts to understanding the psychology behind why customers make the decisions they make. And the brands that build it now aren't just ahead of a trend. They're building something their competitors can't replicate. For brands ready to start, Branch & Bramble's guide to empathetic marketing is the place to begin.

This is part of our ongoing 20 Founders On a Mission series. New editions publish regularly. To be featured or nominate a founder, write to us at hi@foundedbywomen.org