Expert Advice for Marketing Leaders on MarTech, AI, & CX
Articles about brand strategy for modern marketers.
For too long, the industry has treated PR as a vanity metric—a way to “sound good” rather than a strategic tool to “do business.” This is a fundamental misunderstanding of market dynamics. PR is not the “after” of business success; it is a critical input.
This article was written by Greg Kihlström for CustomerThink. If your
customer stays with you in a downturn, is it because they love your brand?
Or is it because they just don’t have the energy to try someone else again?
In the relentless pursuit of customer loyalty, we marketing leaders are often caught in a familiar cycle. We build intricate points-based programs, optimize our funnels for retention, and pour resources into personalized communications, all in an effort to keep customers from straying. We treat loyalty as an outcome to be engineered, a line item on a P&L to be maximized.
In the boardroom, the debate often plays out like a zero-sum game: “Should we put the budget into PR or Marketing?” The CFO wants measurable ROI immediately, pointing toward the granular tracking of digital advertising. The CMO argues for brand sentiment and long-term positioning. They are both asking the wrong question.
With generative AI accelerating production cycles to near-instantaneous speeds, the industry-wide obsession shifted toward how much we could produce and how fast we could ship it. Yet, as we look back at the creative that actually moved the needle, a different story emerges: speed without soul is merely noise.
Brand is often relegated to the “nice-to-have” column, a luxury to be indulged in during boom times and the first thing on the chopping block when belts tighten. Yet, this perspective misses the most critical point: a strong brand is not an expense, but the ultimate economic engine. It’s the invisible hand that lowers acquisition costs, commands pricing power, shortens sales cycles, and fosters the kind of loyalty that no loyalty program can truly buy.
For any enterprise marketing leader, the tension between global brand consistency and local market relevance is a familiar, and often fraught, balancing act. On one hand, the power of a global brand lies in its recognizable standards, its operational efficiencies, and the trust it has built at scale. On the other hand, we know that true customer connection—the kind that drives loyalty and lifetime value—is forged in the fires of local nuance, cultural understanding, and personalized relevance.
The distance between the brand voice meticulously crafted in a boardroom and the way it’s perceived in the wild can be vast and treacherous. Marketing leaders spend fortunes defining their brand promise, only to see it refracted, distorted, or sometimes completely ignored across a chaotic landscape of customer reviews, social media commentary, and support tickets.
The era of the “corporate megaphone” is dead. For decades, traditional public relations relied on a centralized command center: a small group of executives crafting sanitized messages to be broadcast from the top down.
For enterprise marketing leaders, the mandate is clear: grow. But the path to that growth is a landscape of paradoxes. We’re tasked with building a powerful, recognizable national brand while simultaneously forging authentic, personal connections within hundreds of disparate local communities. We must harness the immense power of sophisticated MarTech stacks—AI, automation, and predictive analytics—while also recognizing that sometimes the most effective tactic is sponsoring a high school football team’s new uniforms.
