One of the biggest challenges for business leaders today is connecting a bold vision with the practical steps that drive results. Without a clear plan, marketing and operations become siloed and reactive, wasting valuable time and resources.
In this episode of The Roundtable podcast, Glenn Marvin, Kate Kennedy, and Marty Jenkins-Lyttle explore how businesses can align brand, strategy, and execution to create momentum, strengthen customer relationships, and achieve long-term profitability.
Watch the full discussion here:
Podcast: CTD Roundtable
Episode: Episode 02 – How to Align Brand, Strategy and Execution in Your Business
Host: Glenn Marvin
Guest: Kate Kennedy, Marty Jenkins Little
Duration: [00:38:19]
Published: August 29, 2025
Hey everybody and welcome to another episode of the Round Table. We have myself, Glenn Marvin, we have Kate Kennedy, and we have Marty Jenkins Little, and we are going to be talking all things in regards to aligning brand, strategy and execution.
Now I want to start off with strategy, because in our business the way we work with our clients is strategy first — and that’s for a very specific reason. Without the strategy, you are being reactive. In my area of expertise, in and around business strategy and business coaching, those long-term big-picture goals are just as important as the short-term actions you’re taking on a daily and weekly basis.
…you then break it down. We need to look at what we call the three-to-five — where do you think you’re going to be in that 3–5 year period? That’s directional, because as we know things change, but that big massive goal should be your north star — the thing you’re focusing on for everything outside of business as usual.
Once we’ve got that 3–5 year plan in place, we look at what we can have a tangible impact on in the short-to-medium term. What needs to be accomplished in the next 12 months to achieve that? This is where it really starts moving the needle on marketing and business performance, because certain things take investment and certain things take time — and both are incredibly precious. We get busy reacting to whatever happens every day. So when we’ve really committed and have it documented, we can step back and ask: if we’re going to achieve that 12-month goal, what do we need to achieve next quarter?
What are those things, over and above business as usual, that we’re going to commit to, to help achieve the bigger-picture goals? When we look at the impact on marketing, that’s when it gets really exciting — also very stressful, but very impactful. Once you break it down to quarterly, you can follow that rhythm: what are you doing this month, this week, today? It’s a simple process when you look at it like that — breaking big things down into concise actions towards the bigger goal.
So once we nail those big hairy audacious goals — what is that 10-year vision for where you want to be? Or if you have a specific event you’re working towards, whether it be exiting the business, a particular revenue number, or a particular headcount — what do you need to be doing over and above business as usual to achieve that? To say you know exactly what you’re going to be doing every day for 10 years to get there is a big ask, which is why…
…people are coming in and purchasing — what’s happening for their second purchase? I’m developing purchase nurture to turn a first-time buyer into a repeat customer. At what point does that happen, how do I set up that messaging, and how is that audience connected back to the mediums I’m talking to — is it SMS, is it email, or am I segmenting that audience for targeting elsewhere on Meta? Enabling lifecycle through something like that is both theoretical — what am I trying to achieve, with whom — and practical: how am I trying to achieve it.
I might have a three-step email flow, I might have an offer in it, I might be A/B testing an offer, but I should be focused on that element. When I look at that over a month, I’m trying to achieve two or three things this month, with this team or manager, and we prioritise them one, two and three across the month. If component two ends up taking more time, maybe three gets bumped, but we’ve got three months’ worth of plan to call on — this is what we’re developing, these are the actions we’re taking. In between, yes, we’re running something like a winter sale, but the winter sale isn’t the strategy — the winter sale is the activation. The strategy lives around that. That’s the piece we should always be developing in the business, not just reactively repeating last year’s marketing calendar.
Yeah. That’s where I think a lot of businesses get it wrong — they have a marketing strategy and a business strategy and they’re not necessarily aligned. People really need to start thinking: how does marketing help us achieve our business strategy? What’s that pick-and-mix wish list of things we could be doing over the next 3, 6, 12 months? Then, based on impact and importance, what are we going to do today, tomorrow, this week, this month? We all have time and budget constraints, so this gives us the ability to look at the bigger picture and make data- or impact-driven decisions based on budget, time, capability and capacity. What’s going to be most impactful for our business to work on today?
Yeah, and there’s always the component of how we measure it too. Your higher-level goal and strategy has a target on it — what you’re trying to measure. Everything we do through that action plan should be measurable in terms of impact: are we retaining people for longer, is lifetime value increasing, is cost per acquisition coming down, is the marketing efficiency ratio improving? Launching a new creative isn’t going to solve your acquisition problems, and one email isn’t going to solve a lifetime value issue — but those channels working together, that’s your action plan. We try to focus as much as possible on the priority actions that make an outsized difference year on year.
Kate, you’re in the weeds with this every single day, driving paid media execution — where do you see this being impactful, or maybe more to the point, where do people get it wrong these days?
There are two big pitfalls I see regularly in the day-to-day execution of a larger business strategy. The main one is content selection and style of communication. You need to think of your paid ads as a window into your brand — how you want to show up for customers, what’s your brand promise to them, what are you offering. I often see people get sucked into trending content and new channels because that’s where the young people are moving — but that might not be where your audience is, or how they want to be spoken to. When you’re thinking about channel selection and content creation, you need to keep that starting point in mind — your brand strategy, your goals — and align your creative by channel to attract the audience that will drive lifetime value.
Yeah, and I can think of two massive cock-ups out there in the world over the last while — Budweiser and their Bud Light campaign, and the Jaguar rebrand, which was completely off the mark and got absolutely crushed when it was released.
The other thing you were talking about there was the brand promise, which I think is really important. When it comes to the fundamentals of business, there are two absolutely critical things we need to do well. They play into each other, but need a different mindset. One is values — all too often I see values used as a marketing tool: look at us, we’re all-inclusive, look at us, we care about the environment. That’s great, but the mindset around values should be: this is who we are and this is how we operate. Your brand promise is what we are going to do for you, and how we stand behind it.
Marty, those are the kinds of things that can be built into a longer-term nurture strategy, rather than leading with paid — how does that work with email and the longer-term owned media space?
I see that a lot in customer research — brands think their sustainability is a huge selling point and should lead with it, but when you talk to their customers, being a sustainable brand is often eighth or ninth on the list of things they actually care about. So when creating content, knowing what your customers want to see and like about you should be right at the top of what you’re delivering.
There’s a hard part to that too. If I purchased from a company once, the reason was because I had a need or was given an incentive — that’s very different to developing a relationship. A relationship, when you talk lifetime value, typically isn’t built on discounts, and a loyal customer isn’t built on discounts. You can get people to come back with a percentage off time and time again, but really they’ll just swap you for whoever else discounts — they don’t actually love you as a brand.
There’s a hard part in establishing something like a sustainability promise, because those comms — post-purchase, repeat-purchase nurture, extended welcome series — usually aren’t the thing that drives the next sale right now. You’re doing those things so that component of your brand resonates with the customer, but because they’re not shopping right now, you never get a click-attributed purchase off the back of it. You might get a good click rate to read more on-site or watch a video, but the translation to lifetime value doesn’t show up in that 3, 5, 7-day attribution window — so it never looks like it’s performing well. That’s where I see it most, in flow messaging around a purchase. Those things work, but they don’t have a revenue-based immediate reaction from the customer, and that’s the hard bit.
When you have a survey or feedback from customers, it pays to look at it and ask: how can I weave this into my narrative long-term? I’d typically suggest email over SMS for that, given the richness of media you can send — particularly in the New Zealand market it’s easy and cost-effective. You can link out to a reel, a blog post, YouTube, whatever it might be — but where they land has to resonate with them long-term. That’s the next little incremental bit of love they form for the brand.
I see some brands do a phenomenal job with it, particularly in video — usually the founder, or someone in the business who becomes the face and voice, which makes the difference compared to a bland text-only message with no face, which anyone can imitate. Sustainability messaging is almost expected and normal now — it’s no longer a standout piece, it can’t be what you build everything on anymore. The delivery of the message matters more than saying you are that thing.
I tell you what, I only yesterday experienced that terrible disconnect Kate was talking about, between what a brand pushes in their initial paid and the experience once you purchase. And I was mortified. It wasn’t a big purchase — I recently moved to a reMarkable notetaker instead of my iPad, and wanted to move away from my paper-based planner.
Yesterday I saw a brilliant piece of paid media — a video ad for this planner, everything you could do with it. It looked so good, because there are specific things I like to journal and track daily. You could customise the planner with stickers and move them around the PDF. I actually commented on the ad beforehand because everything in the video was done on an iPad, and asked, “is this compatible with a reMarkable Pro?” Great experience — they replied within half an hour: “yes, absolutely.” So I went ahead with the purchase.
So, like probably many other people, I asked for a refund. Others might just think “that was a bad decision” and the brand profits off it. But I would be a repeat customer every single year if I found a digital planner that worked on the reMarkable — even though it’s a digital product, if it gives me what I need, I’d be an incredibly loyal customer, because once I find something that works, I stick with it. I don’t think it’s a reMarkable problem — I think it’s a product problem, with whoever’s producing those digital assets not thinking about the other devices they can be used on.
That’s a classic example of what you’re talking about, Kate, around brand promise — the content, everything needs to flow through and you need to deliver on that promise. The experience once you come to the site, and the experience post-purchase, needs to be so aligned with what you’re promising — because we all love to promise the world. So that was my rant.
But also, Marty, that’s where those flows can be so powerful — even asking those questions at the time of purchase. Using that example, even asking that question, or cloning the product — this one for a reMarkable purchase, this one for an iPad purchase — you could have a different sequence of comms tailored to that user. How would that work from your perspective? I’m just thinking out loud here.
Yeah, it’s probably one of the common mistakes I see — firstly, what’s triggering the message, and secondly, why they’re getting that specific message. You’ve done a lot of selling to get someone to the point of wanting to buy — you’ve made the promise of what they should expect. So there’s setting the expectation at the point the order was placed: here’s what’s going to happen next, here’s what to expect, standard confirmation and tracking off the back of it.
The next gap I usually see is where you’ve made a promise and sold on something, and there’s a degree of help required, or a check-in point — does this meet expectations, here’s how to get the most out of your new product or service — sent off the back of a fulfilled or delivered order rather than just the placed order. It pays not to fire those comms if there’s been a problem in shipping or a refund — that’s the easiest way to make a customer like you even less. Reviews going out before the product has even arrived, or firing too soon, are probably the fastest ways to let people down on the promise you’ve made.
Outside of that: what next, what do I start talking to this person about? There are two routes most of the time — a data-driven, predictive component, where you’re similar to these customers and this is when they bought next, so you start nurturing that sale two weeks out. Or, I believe this customer needs 30 days to fall in love with my product, so I check in at the midway point and start pushing towards the next purchase with evergreen content that isn’t subject to season, usually with a degree of dynamic product in it — most relevant, most popular in a category — and the branching of those flows needs to be based on: if this, then push this next.
Sometimes that’s done by system, sometimes through analytics — start pushing them towards the value of the next product and how it complements what they’ve already bought. Recognise that they’ve been here before and bought this thing — but especially don’t send anything pushing product A again if it isn’t replaceable. That’s the one I see people get wrong — batch-and-blast versus a flow component, where you deliberately exclude and let post-purchase care and nurture take care of it. Sometimes it’s done purely through branching — they purchased product A, so send them down this path, and if they naturally purchase again, they don’t need that extra support.
There’s always the kind of customer who organically comes back and buys again under their own timeframe. If they do, don’t start the nurture sequence twice — maybe they’re buying it for someone else, you can’t predict everything — but if they do buy again, stop sending those emails and start again at the next nurture point.
It’s really important to make sure you keep them on that journey towards the next purchase, because that’s your lifetime value. Then you’re pulling on levers like improved quality of life, more enjoyment, a degree of consumption, a bolt-on — the reason they’re buying could be loyalty points to spend — and only then moving towards an offer, rather than jumping straight to a percentage off right now.
The other one that works well on some sites is a post-purchase add-to-order, while they’re still excited — they’ve just shopped, spent enough for free shipping, so why not add the extra item? That’s typically discounted a little to bundle it in, but it has to make sense for the merchant too — you don’t want to discount a high-value customer who’s happy to pay full price. That’s a trap I see with loyalty systems or suggested bundling.
Kate, it’s not just restricted to the email side in regards to that follow-up sequence and targeting, right? Building those systems for execution is so much more powerful than the individual effort of doing it yourself time and time again. So how does that play out in the paid space?
When you have your paid campaigns and understand the purpose of each one and the audience you’re talking to, you need to be clear on their level of brand or product knowledge — have they shopped before, what kind of customer are they — to tailor your communication. We touched on this last week around the sale customer, who’s really loyal when there’s a discount. We don’t need to show them high-value new products to drive a sale, and we don’t need to dilute our always-on VIP customer with aggressive discount messaging.
And one of the other things you touched on, Glenn, is customer service — comments on Facebook and engagement across social content. Brands sometimes forget that’s a human wanting to engage, and the way you answer questions and share information needs to align with your brand promise. If you’ve engaged with a chatbot or live support and got the wrong information, it immediately puts you off building trust with the brand again. So it’s not just your content — you need to think about how people are responding and engaging with it, and how you keep that conversation going to prevent misinformation.
Yeah, we’ve all seen comment fields get completely out of control on certain content, and that’s all part of content for your brand that aligns with your strategy and the paid environment.
And look, in the end, we’re all in the business of giving people what they want for a profit — and that’s probably what so many marketers forget: the profit piece is so important. It’s not return on ad spend, it’s not cost per click. What are all the other factors going on in the business that we need to factor in to make this profitable?
As a business leader with a marketing team, you can’t just constantly add cost to the business or product development and expect your marketing team to get a cheaper cost per acquisition just because it costs more — we need to maintain that profit. You need better systems and structure to keep as much gross margin as possible, and marketing efficiency is part of that. But unless marketing, sales and ops are all working together, you’re at massive risk of missing the all-important thing we’re trying to do: make a profit from our product and service.
Two things I want to touch on. First, alignment between where the business is going, what you’re doing to get there, and the promise you’re making — how you’re delivering on it. I want to talk about the disconnect that happens when you either just aim for a target return, or when you’re internalising versus using external resource and skill set.
The number of times I see an external, single-channel provider with a siloed mentality driving leads to nothing — no connected email, no retargeting off the back of the purchase, just spending money to generate a cost per lead and calling that a job done. Businesses now seem to have the appetite and talent to bring a lot of that back in-house, understanding these things work together, and that there’s an experience for that customer — probably the most important thing. You need to deliver on the literal resource you promised, but more so the wider sentiment towards your brand — I’ve seen ads where people ask, “is this a scam, why didn’t I get my PDF?”
That happens because whoever’s running it externally has no connection back to customer service comms, isn’t monitoring the comments, and just keeps spending budget — then the business wonders why they’re not acquiring at a more efficient cost, not realising something’s broken. It happens because of the externalisation of that resource, and the lack of alignment to the overarching strategy and promise — they’ve interpreted the job as “spend a budget to generate a metric.” That mindset can exist internally too: “it’s my job to spend a budget,” rather than “it’s my job to acquire customers on a pathway towards a first purchase, and repeats.”
And the right person, too — that’s really important when deciding how you resource your business and strategy for monthly planning. The other side is a general trend around targeting — particularly a top-of-funnel ad with almost no consideration that you’re acquiring towards a lifetime journey. Beyond that, there’s no thinking about who to target next, or when — it’s just spending money as if it’s a one-time occurrence and people buy from you forever.
The same applies in paid media — I often see cold acquisition through to retargeting for a purchase, and then what happens next? Do they just disappear, are they excluded naturally, or do they drop back into the top of funnel? There’s a mindset of “well, I’ve acquired them and remarketed, my job’s done, that’s not my department.”
And this connects to what I see so often in campaigns — there’s nothing worse than treating someone who loves your brand like they’ve never purchased from you before. So many times there’s no segmentation in campaign content, or in which version of the email — or whether you get the email at all. It’s a batch-and-blast mentality: they’re in the database, so send them everything, and hopefully that translates to lifetime value — when really it just translates to mixed messaging, with no thinking about northern versus southern hemisphere, lightweight versus heavier weight, what country or currency someone’s in. Those things really matter, but I see so little attention paid to them.
The number of times I’ve bought something and they’ve actually put me off the repeat purchase, just by putting me into the standard flow everybody gets, without even knowing I’d purchased — not excluding me from it, and trying to sell me what I’ve already bought.
The other one is once you’ve bought something, you start seeing their ads all the time and you’re somehow back at the top of the funnel.
I can get that for TV and radio, but in the digital age, with so many touchpoints where they can track you, not having those things in place is just an expensive way of putting people off your brand instead of nurturing them into advocates.
Yeah, it’s a really poor use of data across the system. I also want to talk about the measurement side of converting a strategy into an action plan. There’s literal reporting you can never get away from — how do you know how your channels are performing? As more agentic tools come into the space, the heavy lifting may get easier over time, and you spend more time on iteration — the next creative output to support the following month, or feeding back to creative what would help with the overarching goals your execution is aligned on.
Without that reporting, without monitoring your core metrics — how am I performing in sales year on year, how’s my cost per acquisition, why is it up 50%, have I engaged channels I didn’t used to work in and is that valid, how’s it tracking this quarter — and with lifetime value, you’re not going to see a massive change in a 30-day window, particularly for a mature business. That’s the one you revisit as a team once a quarter: what are we doing next quarter, when, and when do we expect it to have an effect.
I think that channel performance piece is a big one for me too — Kate, Marty, you triggered me. The number of businesses I’ve worked with have been so focused on pumping money into the channel with the best return on ad spend, instead of having a mindset of what we’re prepared to pay to acquire a customer. If a channel performs at or under that metric, we should keep investing in it — it’s not about finding the cheapest, it’s about what a customer is worth to me, because not every customer is in every channel, and every channel has a different cost structure. Change the mindset from “go with the cheapest channel” to “what am I prepared to pay for a customer” — and keep investing in any channel that meets that, until it doesn’t.
Absolutely — and you need to understand the role the channel plays, and the value it brings to acquiring new customers versus retaining loyal ones. Some channels are great at acquisition, others work better for retention and building community. Understanding where your customers are in their journey, and where they spend their time, should determine your investment in line with cost per acquisition. You shouldn’t put all your eggs in one basket just because it’s cheap — once you look at all your channels together, you might not be looking at the right number.
I think that’s one for a future episode, because we could go down a rabbit hole right now on one of Marty’s favourite topics — marketing efficiency ratio and overall performance. I’m stoked with what’s been spoken about today, I’ve learned stuff myself. Thanks to both of you, and we’ll see everyone in the next episode, where we’ll be talking more marketing garbage for you.
Looking forward to it. Sounds good. Thanks — have a good one.
Strategy is the anchor point for everything else. Without it, businesses tend to lurch from one initiative to another, responding to short-term problems rather than building towards long-term success. Strategy begins with a vision of where you want the business to be in ten years’ time. That might be a revenue milestone, an exit event, or a headcount target. While nobody can predict exactly what they’ll be doing a decade from now, having that “North Star” provides direction.
From there, the vision is broken down into a three- to five-year plan, giving the business a clearer sense of direction even as circumstances change. Once that’s in place, leaders can identify the milestones that must be achieved within the next twelve months. Each year’s objectives can then be divided into quarterly priorities, and from there into monthly, weekly, and daily actions. What initially looks overwhelming becomes achievable because it is framed as a series of smaller, manageable steps.
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