When I think about marketing, I don’t see it as a department or a campaign or a stack of ads and posts. To me, marketing is the connective tissue of a business—it’s what binds together brand, people and performance. And unless that alignment starts inside, everything you try to push outwards will eventually fall flat. You can pour the best top-shelf whiskey into a cracked glass, but it’s still going to leak. That’s what happens when businesses spend big on marketing before fixing their internal brand alignment.
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Over the years I’ve seen this play out time and again. A business will come to me convinced they have a marketing problem—sales are dropping, customers are churning, or a competitor has shaken up the market. But more often than not, what they really have is an alignment problem. Their people don’t fully understand the brand promise, the culture doesn’t reflect the values, and so the customer experience becomes inconsistent. You can spend all the money in the world on Facebook ads, but if your receptionist doesn’t feel empowered to deliver on the campaign, those leads are going nowhere.
I remember a hospitality role I held years ago where I was leading a team at a new resort in the Barossa Valley. The menu changed weekly with the produce, and I knew that if my staff were only reading notes or tasting food before service, they’d never fully connect with what we were offering. So I took them out. We foraged for vegetables, picked grapes, visited local farms and saw flour milled in front of us. They lived and breathed the Barossa. Suddenly, they weren’t just carrying plates—they were sharing stories with pride. Customers could feel that, and it changed everything about the experience.
That’s the difference when your internal culture matches your external promise. When it doesn’t, the cracks show up as high turnover, low morale, confused campaigns and endless rehiring. I’ve walked into businesses where the culture was so misaligned that even brilliant marketing campaigns collapsed under the weight of disengaged staff. One campaign generated leads worth tens of thousands of dollars each, but because the receptionist wasn’t engaged or equipped to handle them, conversion was dismal. It’s not a marketing failure—it’s a people and alignment failure.
The brands that get this right build from the inside out. Take Marriott, which has grown into the fastest-expanding hotel chain in the world by putting people first. Their internal reward system makes staff feel recognised weekly, not just annually. Or Starbucks, who manage to open a flagship café in Milan—the heart of coffee culture—because they empower staff to create a local, personal experience. Closer to home, you can see the difference between retailers who treat staff as cost centres and those who make them brand ambassadors. The latter not only retain their people, but also their market share.
I’m a big believer in running values and personality exercises with teams. Not because it’s a nice HR tick-box, but because it’s how you connect personal values to business values, and business values to customer experience. When a team member feels that alignment, they stop being “just the receptionist” or “just the barista” and start owning their part of the story. It shifts marketing from being an external broadcast to being a lived, daily culture.
The other piece is rituals—those everyday practices that reinforce what you stand for. It could be a Monday warm-up meeting where the team shares wins, or a Friday debrief that acknowledges effort. It could be family events if “family” is a core value, or go-kart racing if competitiveness is part of your DNA. The point is to take values off the wall and make them muscle memory. Because when they’re lived inside, they’re delivered outside.
This matters now more than ever. Platforms change every week—algorithms shift, features come and go—but what cuts through is authenticity. Customers can spot performative marketing a mile away. They’re looking for businesses whose culture, people and purpose actually match what they’re putting out into the world. If your team is aligned, it doesn’t matter if Meta tweaks its ad rules or if TikTok rises or falls. Your consistency will carry you through.
For me, it always comes back to alignment. When purpose, people and performance line up, you don’t need to hustle. Nature doesn’t hustle—it aligns. Marketing then becomes like fascia in the body, holding everything together in synchronicity. Or, as I like to say, culture is like sourdough: it needs feeding from the inside if you want the loaf to rise on the outside.
If any of this struck a chord, I’d love to keep the conversation going. Let’s grab a coffee, or better yet, join me at the next Masterclass where we’ll go deeper into building marketing from the inside out.