How To Escape Marketing Stagnation

The Guest

Katie Smith, known as the Queen of the Customer Journey, is a visionary marketer dedicated to transforming chaos and stagnation into strategic success. Her approach empowers businesses to connect with consumers, promote shared values, and be a force for good in

today’s world, and she’s here today to tell us how to escape stagnation in marketing. 

What is stagnation in marketing?

The interview starts with an exploration of stagnation in marketing, how it’s defined, how it happens, and what to do about it.

“Stagnation is when a company has been going along, and growth stops, creativity halts, grinding halts,” explains Katie. “Everything starts to feel like a slog, and you don’t know what the next step in the path is. You might throw spaghetti at the wall, it can feel scary.”

Katie goes on to describe the ways stagnation evolves, which like success, is a unique combination of factors to the organization.

“We can define what stagnation is, but the ways stagnation shows up are different for everyone,” says Katie. “Sometimes it can happen after growth spurts, where you realize the tactics and techniques that got you there, might not get you to the next stage. Audiences change, trends move fast, marketing is always shifting, which is why it’s so important to curate a flexible understanding of how your brand intersects with customer behaviors.”

How to identify and fix stagnation

Our conversation then switches to Katie explaining how leadership teams can identify and fix stagnation before it gets worse, and it starts with a simple truth.

“Marketing isn’t as magical as we’d all like to believe,” says Katie. “it tells a story and leaves a data trail. If you’ve set up measuring for this, you need to have the goals, metrics, and then ID the charts that are leading you away from that. Measuring marketing is OVER TIME, you need to be looking at how things are performing over longer windows of measurability. Data tells a story and gives direction, but when you match that with qualitative measurements of staff performance, you can gain important insight into stagnation and squash it.”

Handling external and internal threats

Katie goes on to describe how she uses SWOT analysis to help clients in stagnation properly identify the external and internal threats to overcome.

“For me, the strengths and weaknesses of a SWOT illustrate the internal issues, and opportunities and threats signify the external factors,” says Katie. “My goal is to leverage the internal strengths and weaknesses against or with the external threats. Typically most ad agencies and clients want to get to the “fun parts” of tactical marketing, like colors and taglines and logos, and they end up forgetting about the research and strategic significance of marketing & sales alignment.”

To find out about Katie’s awesome work with Ohio Children’s Alliance, hear what a real marketing stagnation horror story sounds like, and if Katie prefers Willy Wonka to Wile E. Coyote, listen to the full episode at the links provided on this page. 

The Links

Follow The Wild Path
Katie on LinkedIn 

LISTEN TO THE FULL SHOW -> Stay tuned, stay curious and subscribe to What Gets Measured on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube or add it as a Favorite on your podcast player of choice.

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