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.

Tullio Siragusa (0:17)

Welcome back to Marketing With Purpose, a segment of The Bliss Business Podcast, where we explore what it really takes for marketing leaders to create an impact that goes beyond the numbers. I'm Tullio, and in each episode, we sit down with a marketing expert 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 excited to welcome Abby Fogel, who's Vice President of Brand Management and Communications at Unleashed Brands, a youth enrichment platform behind brands like Urban Air Venture Park, The Little Gym, Sylvan Learning, and Snapology. With more than a decade of experience in franchising, Abby brings a unique perspective on how marketing connects brand strategy with real business growth. She's worked across nearly every aspect of franchise marketing, from local store marketing and franchise development, to consumer brand strategy and corporate communications. Today, she leads brand marketing for Water Wings Swim School, and it enters an exciting period of franchise growth and national expansion, by also shaping brand and communication strategy for Unleashed Brands. Her leadership has earned her recognition as one of entrepreneurs top influential women in franchising and a franchise assembly marketing trailblazer.

We are not worthy.

We're going to explore aligning marketing with business growth, and I'm excited to hear how Abby brings together strong brands, franchise relationships, and marketing strategy to help businesses grow. Abby, 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?

Abby Fogel (2:13)

Yeah, I love that. Tullio, it's great to spend some time with you today talking about all things marketing.

Aligning marketing with business growth is very important to me. As you said in my very nice bio there, I've had the opportunity over the last 10 years to really be in every facet of franchise marketing from helping locations open, to selling franchises and franchise development. In my current role, I oversee internal and external communications, as well as master brand strategy. So all of those roles are in marketing, but all of them have very different business outcomes. Franchise development, we're looking for the right candidate who can open an $8 million urban air adventure park. For a local store opening, we're looking to help those owners open successfully, whether they're first-time business owners, multi-unit owners, and they've got different objectives from pre-sales to serving their customers. So I've had that experience in being all these roles, and I'd like to consider myself a utility player.

With that, I think getting into those roles and being able to quickly understand what is the business objective that we need to chart towards. Again, as I mentioned, some of those things, attracting the right buyers, opening successfully. You've got to be able to be nimble, understand the outcome, and then create the project plan that's going to get you there. And so I love starting with what the objective is, and then we can backtrack and figure out the marketing plan, the campaigns, the data we need, the teams we need to bring it from there. But anytime I've stepped into a new role and I've stepped into a couple over the last five years, just in my tenure at Unleashed Brands, being able to understand what we're all charting towards is extremely important.

Tullio Siragusa (4:02)

That's wonderful. Now, let's face it, sometimes we have these amazing plans or how we want to show up in the marketplace, but we get polled, especially as head of marketing, CMOs, we get polled between near-term campaign results and long-term brand building. And that's always this dance. That's a difficult dance to balance.

How do you ensure your marketing strategy stays aligned with the company's growth goals? And where do you find the biggest friction points in making that happen?

Abby Fogel (4:33)

That's a great question. I feel like for us, and one example I can give you is really what we're doing right now to open and grow our Water Wings Swim School. And so that's a brand that we acquired that had 11 open, corporately owned locations. And we've got a pipeline of over 55 locations that are going to open the next couple years. And so there's a great deal of business outcome tied to that, of getting these locations opening.

But also, the brand is in such an infancy of having just a few corporate locations opening. They don't have a huge brand awareness. They don't have national awareness because they're in a couple of different states. And so really balancing how to build the brand that becomes a recognizable national brand while being tied to those business outcomes of opening these locations successfully in local markets. And so that's been a really interesting just like balance that we've had to focus on these last couple of months as we've been closer to opening. We opened one at the beginning of September, just one last week, and we've got four more opening by the end of this year. But it's been a balance of making sure that we're building the brand really strong. So when we go into these markets to have no brand awareness of what is Water Wings Swim School, we can compete with other businesses in the area because swim is a highly competitive business. There's a lot of options out there for parents to consider. And so we have to build the brand in such a way that would make a parent want to bring their child to our swim school over a brand that may be open for 10 years already and established in the community. And so it's a really fine balance of building that brand, getting the parents to trust us, and then opening successfully that's tied to some very specific business outcomes.