Marketing With Purpose Kit: Customer Connection in a Data-Driven World

**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.

**Michelle Brasfield** (0:17)
Welcome to the Marketing With Purpose Kit 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, I sit down with CMOs 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 Lindsey McFadden, Chief Marketing Officer at Stretch Zone. Lindsey brings deep experience in multi-unit marketing, branding, PR, and communications with hands-on experience helping franchise and corporate teams scale together. Since joining Stretch Zone, she's overseen rapid growth, opening 140 new studios to date while supporting over 400 locations across 41 states and without a single studio closure. In her role, she leads a dynamic team focused on aligning brand messaging, franchise support, and customer experience. We're going to explore customer connection in a data-driven world, and I'm excited to dive in. Lindsey, before we dive in, I'd love to hear, why was customer connection in a data-driven world, the topic you chose to explore today, and what makes it so important right now?

**Lindsey McFadden** (1:44)
Yeah, I think this is so relevant to what I talk about all day, every day. Here at Stretch Zone, we're in the people business.
We provide a personal one-on-one service, and while we need the data and all the KPIs and insights to make smart decisions and guide different initiatives appropriately, at the end of the day, it's about the people, and not just with our end user, the member, but also with our internal team and then our teams at the store level. I think to me, everything can get so caught up in the data and the KPIs, and we need to take a step back sometimes, and let that pendulum correct a little bit from being on one far side, and talk about why are we here? And for Stretch Zone, that's to help people, right? And that connection, people want to do business with people that they like. People want to go to places that they enjoy being at. And with our service, you're in one of our studios one, two or three times a week. If you don't have that connection, it's not a great place to go, you're not going to come.

**Michelle Brasfield** (2:50)
Exactly. And that connection really builds trust, right? And data can tell you what a customer is doing, but not why, what their feelings and emotions are behind it. So, yeah.

**Lindsey McFadden** (3:02)
Yeah. Really important. You know, people, I say by all the time, people want to interact before they transact. And people want to do business with people they like. And so having those two as kind of pillars with the things that we do here is kind of like our North Star.

**Michelle Brasfield** (3:17)
Perfect. Yeah, I agree. CMOs are pulled between short-term campaign results and long-term brand building. How do you ensure your marketing stays aligned with the company's growth goals? And where do you find the biggest friction points in making that happen?

**Lindsey McFadden** (3:33)
I mean, find me a marketer that isn't pulled between those two things. I mean, that's a universal struggle, right? I think building strength in the brand is really important.
And being something, whatever that thing is, right? For us, it's really a singular focus. We do one thing and one thing only, and that is Practitioner Assistive Stretching. And so when that is the backbone of every campaign, every idea, every initiative we do, it comes back to that singular thing. So to me, as long as you have a really clearly defined singular focus, you can build on that. You can add, subtract and kind of maneuver that, but you've got to keep true to your core. And so for us, it's really, really focusing on our service, and that has never wavered. And building upon that gets you the brand strength and that brand equity, and then you can do fun campaigns tied to new initiatives or data or seasons or whatever it is.

**Michelle Brasfield** (4:27)
Yeah, or target or emotional drivers at each stage, right, of the customer journey as well. Okay, very nice. Okay, in high stakes situations like brand crisis or market turn down, how do you maintain a sense of purpose and empathy while making quick strategic decisions?

**Lindsey McFadden** (4:47)