Jessica Hawthorne

expert panel

The modern marketing calendar can feel like an airline flight board—constantly updated, rerouted and in need of attention. When a trending conversation erupts, a platform changes its algorithm or a competitor jumps on the meme of the moment, sitting out can feel like falling behind. But a brand that’s always changing course may never give its customers a clear sense of where it stands.Timely marketing certainly has value, but speed and effectiveness aren’t the same thing. Maintaining a coherent identity across channels helps strengthen recognition, trust and loyalty. Constantly shifting a brand’s messaging, voice or presentation in response to external events can make that invaluable customer bond much harder to build.At the same time, brands can’t afford to tune out cultural shifts or emerging conversations altogether. Trends can reveal changing customer interests, new expectations and opportunities to participate in moments that matter to an audience. Brands today have many ways to engage with culture as it unfolds, but doing so effectively requires speed paired with sensitivity and sound judgment. The challenge for marketing leaders, then, isn’t to ignore what’s happening around them. It’s to recognize which moments can strengthen the brand—and which will merely pull the team off course. Below, members of the Senior Executive CMO Think Tank draw on their expertise in brand storytelling and customer engagement to examine the mistakes leaders make when immediacy takes priority over long-term brand-building and explain what teams should do instead.

expert panel

Is your marketing team producing more content than ever, yet still failing to convert customers or align employees around a single story? The problem might not be content at all; it's clarity. Members of the Senior Executive CMO Think Tank break down the specific signals that separate a content gap from a clarity gap, and the first, often counterintuitive, steps to close it.Ask five people inside the same company what it actually does, and you might get five different answers: The VP of sales talks about solving one problem. Marketing's slide deck talks about another. The newest hire on the support team simply repeats whatever's on the website. Customers notice the mismatch even when they can't name it, and the result is hesitation, not conversion.It's tempting to solve that hesitation with more content: another landing page, another explainer video, another round of ads. But volume rarely fixes what's actually broken. According to a Forbes Agency Council analysis of e-commerce checkouts, a Baymard Institute study found that the average cart-abandonment rate is more than 70%, driven largely by confusion and surprises at checkout—not by a lack of information. The same pattern shows up well before checkout: when a brand's story shifts depending on who's telling it, messaging confusion sends buyers straight to a competitor, no matter how much content sits behind it.So how does a leadership team tell the difference between a company that needs better content and one that needs a clearer story altogether? And once that diagnosis is made, where's the right place to start? Below, members of the Senior Executive CMO Think Tank, whose backgrounds span brand strategy, performance marketing and high-stakes corporate communications, share the signals they watch for and the first moves they'd make to turn a fuzzy narrative into one everyone in the building can repeat with confidence.

expert panel

Marketing teams have never had more data, automation or channels to work with. Yet the problems that stall growth, weaken trust or drain a team’s energy often aren’t technical at all. They’re rooted in people: how customers feel, how teams collaborate, how leaders handle uncertainty, and how organizations respond when old assumptions stop working.That tension is becoming harder to ignore as AI changes both the volume and nature of brand communication. Americans remain cautious about AI’s broader impact, and recent industry conversations have pointed to a related marketing reality: As AI-generated content and commerce tools multiply, brands still need real trust, relevance and direct human connection to stand out.A marketing problem may look like a messaging issue, a measurement issue or a channel issue, but to resolve it, leaders often need to look deeper. Because no matter how many campaigns launch or what dashboards say, marketing is only effective if it reaches and connects with the audience—and that requires both inward and outward focus on the humans who write and receive the story.Below, members of the Senior Executive CMO Think Tank, a curated group with expertise in brand storytelling, customer engagement and the rise of AI in marketing, share and discuss examples of the human challenges that will always impact marketing and how teams can adjust their strategies once they adopt a human-centered viewpoint.