Marketing With Purpose Kit: Breaking Down Silos Across Teams

**SPEAKER_2** (0:03)
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.

**Michelle Brasfield** (0:17)
Welcome to the Marketing With Purpose series 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 Michelle, 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 Katherine LeBlanc, Senior Vice President of Marketing at 4Ever Young Anti-Aging Solutions. Katherine is a dynamic marketing leader with over 20 years of experience in franchising across industries like food, health, and beauty. Known for shaping brand strategies and driving revenue growth, she's also led powerful collaborations between IT, operations, and marketing teams, creating unified high-performing organizations. At 4Ever Young, she's spearheading the brand's expansion in the fast-growing med-spot industry, where aesthetics and wellness converge to redefine aging experience. We're going to explore breaking down silos across teams, and I'm excited to dive in. Katherine, before we dive in, I'd love to hear, why was breaking down silos across teams the topic you chose to explore with us today, and what makes it so important right now?

**Katherine LeBlanc** (1:44)
Hey, Michelle, thank you so much for having me on your podcast and for that awesome intro question. So for me, when I think about marketing, marketing is the revenue driver for businesses. We are charged with driving new customers into the businesses. We are charged with developing programs that are going to be interesting to those customers to come back and spend more with us and come back more often into our location. So when we think about those revenue drivers, there's only so much marketing can really execute once those plans are set. So it's really working across departments on that execution portion of the marketing plan that makes it successful. So I chose this topic because it's very important to me because I don't think I can be successful without partnership from multiple departments across any industry.

**Michelle Brasfield** (2:41)
Love that you said that. I read that teams with strong collaboration are five times more impactful and more successful across the board and more likely just to perform at the highest level too.

**Katherine LeBlanc** (2:56)
Well, I was going to say, when you're all working towards the same goal, you can often get caught up in the, I'm in charge of this section, you're in charge of this section, and you don't often talk about, well, how do they work together? And so I have found that, look, my marketing programs fall flat if I do not have the ops support and team behind it. My marketing programs aren't well executed if I don't have IT involved in order to make sure that the backend systems are working the way that they should work. So yeah, I don't think I can be successful without that collaboration.

**Michelle Brasfield** (3:36)
Oh, love that you said that. CMOs are often pulled between near-term campaign results and long-term brand building. 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?

**Katherine LeBlanc** (3:57)
Michelle, you have hit a nerve for me. This is truly an existential crisis that marketers face in every single organization. How do we put the foundational plans in place that are going to be impactful for the brand in 6 to 12 months while solving the issues of today? And it's the place that we live. We live at this intersection every single day. We have stakeholders really pounding down the door of how are we fixing these marketing problems as soon as possible? And you have marketers reporting back, I cannot fix this tomorrow, right? So I always talk about with my teams, anyone that wants to listen, marketing is momentum. And what we do today is what is going to impact six months from now. And so if we're not hitting our goals today, I take a look at, okay, well, what were we doing six months ago, three months ago that made us miss today? And what are we doing to fix that problem? Now, most of the time you get yourself in a rut and you do have problems up today that you have to fix tomorrow. And you really just have to find the balance of, you know, I think it's a parallel pathing. Anything that I do and anything that the teams work on are always parallel path to, what am I working on today that I know is going to be impactful in three months? And what am I working on today that needs to be impactful tomorrow? So I'll give you an example. We are working on our program for the new year and what we should be kind of promoting and pushing in that new year.