Marketing With Purpose Kit: Aligning Marketing with Business Growth

**SPEAKER_1** (0:04)
The Bliss Business Podcast, the show about empathy, connection and consciousness in business. Today's episode is brought to you by Zero Company, your paid search, social media and programmatic ad experts.

**Michele Brasfield** (0:16)
Welcome to Marketing With Purpose, a segment of The Bliss Business Podcast, where we explore what it really takes for marketing leaders to create impact that goes beyond the numbers. I'm Michele, and in each episode, we sit down with marketing experts to explore their leadership approach and strategies that drive performance and resonate with their audience. Together, we'll dive into what's working, what's not, and how purpose and empathy can transform the way brands connect with people. Let's get started. Today, I'm joined by Kelly Struble, Vice President of Marketing at Just Between Friends, and CEO and co-founder of Tama Tea. Kelly is a seasoned entrepreneur and marketing leader with experience spanning food, beverage, retail, home services, and franchise growth. At Just Between Friends, a kids consignment pop-up franchise with 150 locations across more than 30 states. She leads marketing efforts that support expansion and strengthen brand connection at the local level. As the founder of Tama Tea, she has scaled a beverage brand with distribution from the East Coast to California. We're going to explore aligning marketing with business growth, and I'm excited to dive in to how strategy, entrepreneurship, and brand building come together to fuel sustainable expansion. Kelly, before we dive in, I'd love to hear why was aligning marketing with business growth the topic you chose to explore with us today, and what makes it so important right now?

**Kelly Struble** (1:54)
Oh, goodness. This is a big one. So I think in marketing, it is so easy to become distracted by all the shiny objects out there. And I think what you really have to do is take a step back and kind of re-center yourself before you think about scaling and how to align marketing with business growth. Because if you're not focusing on the right thing, or if you're trying to scale something without really having that foundation set first, then I think you're going to set yourself up for failure time and time again. So that's why I really feel passionate about aligning marketing with business growth and making sure that you're set up properly from the beginning.

**Michele Brasfield** (2:33)
Yeah, that's a powerful perspective, Kelly, and it really sets the stage for this conversation going forward. CMOs are often pulled between near-term campaign results and long-term brand building. How do you keep your marketing strategy aligned with the company's long-term growth goals and what are some of the main friction points you encounter along the way? Yeah.

**Kelly Struble** (2:57)
Oh gosh. I think you really have to look at where the bottlenecks are and solve those first. So looking at the bottlenecks, is it brand awareness? Is it something that has to do with operational efficiency that trickles down into marketing? Is it something else?
So first, I think you have to take a look at that and establish and figure out where you are. And then I think in terms of the friction point, I think the biggest friction point is internal patience. So when you think about growth, you're typically thinking about quarterly goals or annual goals or something like that. But really brand equity compounds over several years. It doesn't happen overnight. So I know from myself and my experience in terms of my company, Tama Tea, I've been building that brand for 10 years. And it's a slow, methodical process of every year, every month, slowly adding to that brand equity. So it really does take a long time. But then in terms of the CMO's job, their job is to really translate that brand investment into near-term business goals that executives understand. So how do you break that apart, then, into quarterly goals that are obtainable? And like I mentioned earlier, sometimes that looks like really taking a step back and doing the hard work before diving in to these big, fun, shiny things. So I know for me, there's been several times in my experience with brands where we had to completely pause and we almost had to move backwards a little bit before moving forwards. And sometimes that's not a matter of weeks. Sometimes that's a project that takes two or three years, sometimes more. But ultimately, you're investing in the brand over time. And you have to balance those two things because if you over invest in brand, then you're not moving your initiatives forward and your revenue made up. So you have to balance that. You can't over invest in revenue, particularly on the franchising side, because if you completely ignore the brand aspect, then that long-term value is being forgotten as well. So it's certainly this push and pull kind of thing that happens, and you're constantly bouncing back and forth the two and trying to find the right balance. And I certainly think there's times when you might have to focus completely on brand or you have to focus completely on revenue. It's just really going to depend on what's happening in the business and the stage of growth you're in, and then all the other factors that are happening with the organization at the time.