Andrea Lobo

There are people in this world with a natural ability to empathize with others and truly understand them in a fraction of a second. There are people with the rare capacity to anticipate what’s coming next, to sense how people will behave based on a deep reading of the present. And there are extraordinary individuals who act from their values with unwavering congruence, even in times when moral flexibility seems to be the norm. If you want to understand what that looks like, let me introduce you to Andrea Lobo.

Trendwatcher, Human-Centered specialist, Founder and Partner at Business as Unusual since 2015. Her vision has transformed the way companies understand and apply the HUMAN-CENTERED approach to marketing, innovation, and business strategy.

“Humans seem too complex to understand, especially when seen from a corporate perspective. The first step toward a true HUMAN-CENTERED approach is to stop seeing people as consumers or customers, and start seeing them for who they really are: humans. The moment you stop trying to sell something and become genuinely interested in what they need, how they think and behave, and what problems they face, that’s when you can create REAL VALUE PROPOSITIONS grounded in empathy, acceptance, and congruence.”

Andrea was an expert in Communications, the Human-Centered Approach, and Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP), which she applied with outstanding results across private companies, government institutions, universities, and non-profit organizations. She worked with people from diverse cultures, ages, beliefs, educational backgrounds, and socio-economic contexts. Over the years, she developed a range of content, tools, and models grounded in her strengths in empathy and rapport, active listening, persuasion, resilience, social responsibility, creativity, communication, and a global perspective. These capabilities shaped a distinctive and powerful way of understanding human behavior and belief systems.

“Think about this: most marketing approaches are still rooted in Philip Kotler’s 4Ps model (Product, Price, Placement, Promotion), aimed at demographic targets almost like strategies in a battlefield. But the world has evolved. Today we live in a bidirectional, interactive, informed, and over-communicated environment where people ultimately decide the survival of your business. A new strategic paradigm is needed. We must reorder our priorities and start from a different P: PEOPLE, embracing a post-demographic perspective.”

Raised in a family deeply committed to human development and social service, her life was always about active participation, continuous learning, and sharing better ways to support others, solve problems creatively, and nurture the innate human drive to grow and live consciously within communities and organizations.

She studied Communications at Instituto Tecnológico y de Estudios Superiores de Monterrey, Neuro-Linguistic Programming with John Grinder, co-creator of NLP, and the Human-Centered Approach at Universidad Iberoamericana. She has always been, in every sense, the “unusual” part of Business as Unusual.

Andrea passed away in 2025, and her legacy will live forever in everything we do at Business as Unusual.

See more at linkedin.com/in/andrealoboniembro

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Andrea Lobo

Founder

Business as Unusual