Key Takeaways
- Brand, Product and Growth Marketing often have different priorities, but customers experience them as one brand.
- Many marketing problems are actually alignment and governance problems rather than capability problems.
- The strongest marketing teams don’t communicate more—they communicate with more structure and purpose.
Three Marketing Teams. One Customer. Completely Different Priorities.
One of the biggest misconceptions about marketing leadership is that you’re leading one marketing team. The reality? You’re not. You’re leading several specialist teams, each with a different job to do, different metrics to hit and different ideas of what success looks like:
- Brand is thinking about trust, awareness and long-term perception.
- Product Marketing is focused on launches, adoption and helping customers understand what’s new.
- Growth is thinking about acquisition, activation, conversion and revenue.
The funny thing is that every one of those priorities is valid, but the challenge is that they’re not always aligned.
Read More: Driving Business Growth: 3 Customer Value Lessons from a Butcher
Setting Marketing Priorities When Everything is Important
Many years ago when I joined my employer at the time as Head of Digital Marketing, I spent as much time helping teams work together as I did talking about campaigns. Looking back, some of the toughest conversations weren’t about creative or media budgets. They were about deciding whose priority came first.
Everyone believed their initiative deserved the spotlight. Most of the time, they had a good reason for thinking that.
The problem wasn’t that people disagreed, it was that everyone was making good decisions for their own team without anyone stepping back to ask a much bigger question – what’s the customer experiencing?
How Misaligned Marketing Teams Affect the Customer Experience
I remember how shocked I was after opening my customer account to receive multiple messages from the bank in the same day. Like, seriously? Three different emails from the same bank in a single day?
One email promoted a new feature of the mobile app; another supported a brand campaign; a third was driving adoption of USSD banking, a commercial objective that the Product team needed to deliver before month-end.
Every one of those emails had been signed off, and each had a solid business case. I remember how every team believed their communication couldn’t wait. From inside the organisation, it all made perfect sense, but from the customer’s perspective, it just didn’t.
Customers weren’t thinking about product launches or quarterly targets. They weren’t distinguishing between Brand Marketing, Product Marketing and Growth Marketing. They were simply wondering why their bank kept showing up in their inbox. It wasn’t surprising that open rates, click through rates and other email engagement metrics started to suffer. Our emails weren’t competing with other banks anymore, they were competing with each other.
This was not a lone experience, as many years later, I encountered this same peculiarity at a fintech I had a brief consulting contract with. Different market. Different customers. Different leadership teams, yet, I found exactly the same pattern.
I noticed something similar on social media, where every team had something worth talking about and kept jostling to have their posts run. The result? Social media pages over-burdened with the plethora of information we kept churning out.
Building Better Marketing Systems Through Governance
While every request was reasonable, collectively, we were asking customers to pay attention far too often. In both instances, it became clear to me very quickly that the issue wasn’t whether every team’s message was important to the customer; what we had was a systems problem.
The solution wasn’t to send fewer emails or post less on social media, it was to introduce better structure around how communication decisions were made. This involved two critical actions:
- We created one central communications calendar that everyone worked from. Suddenly, teams could see what was already planned before adding something new.
- We agreed on much clearer rules around when an update could be sent as a standalone email. Instead of asking, “Do we have something to say?” we started asking, “Does this deserve the customer’s full attention?”
That approach changed a lot of things, because some announcements became part of the newsletter instead of another campaign. Others moved to social, while some waited until they could support a bigger story rather than becoming one more message competing for attention.
This also helped for easier conversations, because instead of teams defending their own priorities to the exclusion of everything else, we started discussing what made the most sense for the customer and the business.
Marketing Leadership and Building Systems
People often think senior marketing leaders spend their time approving campaigns or reviewing creative. The longer I have worked in leadership, however, the more I realise that at a certain level, your job is to build systems.
Systems that help teams make better decisions, reduce duplication and stop departments competing with one another to the detriment of the customer. That should be the goal of every marketing leader at the top of the decision making matrix – how do we build systems that make the customer experience feel intentional instead of fragmented?
Brand, Product and Growth Marketing are different parts of the same growth engine. They just have to work together if sustainable growth will be achieved. If they are pulling in different directions, marketing becomes noisy.
But, if they are aligned, everything gets easier. Customers receive fewer, more relevant communications, teams stop competing for attention and budgets work harder because channels reinforce one another instead of overlapping. Most importantly, the customer experiences one brand instead of multiple.
Conclusion
Growth doesn’t come from getting Brand, Product or Growth Marketing to work harder, but from getting them to work together. While this may sound obvious, it’s not always the case that you see this happen by default.
As organisations grow, so do competing priorities. Without clear governance, shared planning and someone looking across the whole customer journey, even great teams can end up working against each other without realising it.
If your marketing teams are producing plenty of activity but the customer experience feels fragmented, the answer may just be better alignment. That’s a big part of the work I do with businesses today, so please reach out if you would like to have a conversation.