In this episode of The Digital Edge, host Mark Reed-Edwards speaks with Amy Norton, Executive Client Partner at Incubeta, about why growth stalls for modern brands and how marketing leaders can fix it. Amy breaks down the real challenges facing CMOs today – from data overload and broken tech stacks to channel fatigue across platforms like TikTok.
Read the Full Transcript Here
Mark Reed-Edwards: This is The Digital Edge from Incubeta. I’m Mark Reed-Edwards. Today I’m joined by Amy Norton, executive client partner at Incubeta. Amy and I dig into the common problems brands face when growth stalls, the warning signs of a broken tech stack, how you can simplify systems, and when to upskill in-house versus relying on trusted external partners. And Amy shares some great nuggets of advice for CMOs. Let’s get to the discussion.
Amy, really interested to learn about your role as executive client partner at Incubeta. What do you do day-to-day and, you know, what kinds of brands are you working with?
Amy Norton: Yeah, as executive client partner, I serve as a senior strategic leader for our clients, with a mission to drive commercial growth and business transformation. So I tend to look beyond the typical performance and brand day-to-day metrics and kind of go much broader, deeper, essentially bridging that gap between my client’s wider business objectives and Incubeta’s service and expertise. So every day is genuinely different. I could be working on measurement proposals, I could be working on creative proposals. I could be back in my background of media you know, looking at performance metrics and making sure that things are marrying up to the wider, bigger picture.
So every day is different. You tend to have to have a broad knowledge of all our different service areas, but also a really deep understanding of our clients’ challenges, their business objectives that go right from a junior level up to C-suite level. The kind of clients that we work with are retail, FMCG, travel. We have a vast range of different clients, and to be fair, the challenges are quite similar. It doesn’t really matter on what area they’re in, what market they’re in, I think marketing challenges are quite general across the board.
Mark Reed-Edwards: Well, let’s move into that. It’s not news to anyone that the marketing ecosystem is moving faster and most internal teams are having trouble keeping up with it, right? Yeah. And so what are those friction points brands are bringing to you right now when they feel like their growth has stalled?
Amy Norton: I think one of the biggest ones is around data fragmentation, but more specifically the overwhelming amount of data that brands have and what to do with it. Like who should we be targeting, and where should we be spending our money? They’re not short on data, so no one ever comes to us and says, “We need more data. Help us.” They’re actually short on actionable insight. So when we probe internally, we find that teams spend more time pulling reports from like seven channels more so than making strategic decisions. So this is obviously where, like, your marketing mix models can be hugely effective in helping make those strategic decisions, and something in my role that I will speak to our measurement team and the teams on the brand side to kind of marry up that data and to create that actionable insight. In the same breath as this, I feel like a big friction point is something that I call “channel treadmill fatigue.” So teams feel forced to be everywhere these days, just like the consumer does. So TikTok, LinkedIn, retail media networks. But they don’t have the resources to execute properly on any of them, and they feel that if they’re not on them, then their growth will be hindered. And again, this is kind of looking at what is right for the brand. So meeting its consumers where they are, not just spraying and praying across multiple channels. TikTok shop is actually a really good example of this. So for many of our clients it’s a huge operational investment which requires distribution elements, trade and merchandising, finance. It’s not cheap. And to run a proof of concept in this space, it is difficult due to the initial uplift just to find out what the return could look like. Again, we work with them to model lifetime value, strategize a longer term retention acquisition plan, which makes sense for their customer segments. But I think they’re kind of the three main ones that I’m getting a lot of questions around at the moment.
Mark Reed-Edwards: Are these really urgent questions? Are people kind of in panic mode?
Amy Norton: I’d say on the social elements, not even social, but knowing where to be. So for example, you know, should we invest in retail marketing? It’s when you get a buzzword. It’s when something starts to trend. You know, if you take AI as an example, probably the biggest buzzword of the past five, five years. But if you take AI as an example, what should we be doing with AI? And I specifically didn’t mention that in this part because I think it’s such an easy thing to talk about, when actually if you remove AI, marketers and marketing teams are still really grappling with the fundamentals. And I love it when these acquisition retention challenges are coming to us because it’s like, yes, like you have recognized that before you start running, you need to walk. AI can certainly help this, but before we get into that, we need to really find the nitty-gritty. But yeah, I’d, I’d say it’s mainly kind of where they don’t really have the experience, and a lot of that is new social platforms like TikTok, Snap. I guess it’s not really new, but in terms of advertising on it and, yeah, areas like retail networks.
Mark Reed-Edwards: Yeah, marketers have this bad habit sometimes of when performance falters, they reach for a new tool or just say, “Well, the strategy’s broken.” So how do you, with your calm personality, help a brand figure out whether their real problem is technology, strategy, or a skills gap? And does it usually turn out to be one of those, or is it all three at once?
Amy Norton: I mean, I tend to flap with them a little bit because, because there … and the reason why I do that is because there really is kind of no right or wrong answer when it comes to this. I will always say, “Look, like let’s just take it back to basics and look at like the rule of threes.” So if we can apply like a simple framework across the things that we know move the needle in this area. So processes, people, tools, and within that we look at tech and how these benchmarks work again. So let’s say if your team spends 70% of their time manually moving data between systems or complaining that, “Oh, what, what did I actually have the other, like a few months ago?” It’s like, “our tool doesn’t talk to our CRM,” like something that we’re hearing a lot, then you have a tech integration issue. If we look at strategy, if your team is actually executing tactics flawlessly, but your customer acquisition cost is rising, no one can really articulate why your value proposition actually wins against the competitors, you have a strategy issue. And finally, is there a skills gap? If we buy expensive tools like HubSpot, but only 10% of its functionality is being used because no one’s trained properly, you have a capability issue almost like masquerading itself as a tech problem. And I think a lot of people are like, “It’s the tech.” And it’s like, we don’t have training or know how to deliver on it. So I would say like a new piece of software that actually rarely fixes a broken value proposition, before spending any money on tech, you’d need to ask like, is the engine broken or do we just not know how to use it or how to drive it? There is a huge blame game when it comes to technology. But we just need to take a step back and look at the people and the processes behind it, first and foremost.
Mark Reed-Edwards: Yeah. So it’s really a holistic problem usually. There may be one squeaky wheel but that squeaky wheel, say skills gap impacts strategy and technology, right? So you need to step back and think of the problem holistically.
Amy Norton: Yeah. Absolutely. And, you know, it’s really easier said than done because you’re running at 100 miles per hour. You know, you’ve got revenue targets to hit. You’ve got, you know, recruitment in place to get new people onboarded, and you’ve got a skills gap. And it is easier said than done. Sitting in this position I can be like, you know, “These are the things that you have to look at.” But I think we don’t, especially as marketers, we don’t often take the time to just stop and approach a problem with, like, a people hat on. And, you know, when it comes to dealing with software and technology, you know, the human element behind it is so important, and we can’t lose that.
Mark Reed-Edwards: Let me dig a bit deeper on this and think about the warning signs, the clear warning signs that a brand’s tech stack is working against them. And how does that friction usually show up in practice?
Amy Norton: So I’d say that if your tech stack requires a full-time employee just to, and I’m using system like translation here, but if your tech stack requires a full-time employee to translate data between systems, it isn’t an asset. It’s like a digital blocker. It’s a digital debt. And I think one of the most obvious signs which people tend to overlook, but I’ve seen it time and time again, is when teams rely on personal, like, Excel spreadsheets … to kind of like bypass official platforms because the core stack is too slow. It’s not fit for purpose. It hasn’t been updated. Again, no training on it, so people are reverting back to those old-school things that they feel comfortable doing. Also, I think multiple departments paying for overlapping subscriptions. So social teams using one analytics platform while the performance team pays for another, and that’s actually really common in-house when you have multiple divisions in the marketing team and they’re focused on different areas of the funnel, even though it should be looked at holistically. So the brand marketing manager and the performance marketing manager will be having separate conversations with tech suppliers. There’ll be two sales processes going on without either of them knowing. I’ve been there. I’ve done that. I was on one side of that. You know, I think generally if it’s taking your team three, four, five days to pull uniform performance figures, say, for a board meeting or for example, you know, whatever it may be, then there’s a tech bottleneck there for sure. I’ve actually got a good example of this. So Boots and Currys, like, both of them actually at separate times, but did the same workflow, they’ve integrated these legacy point-of-sale systems, which are obviously super relevant, especially in stores. The consumers know it well. It’s tried and tested, but in the back end it’s running on more modern e-commerce platforms. So rather than laying all these SaaS products on top of old infrastructure, they’ve stripped everything back, and they’ve got one system in the back end, which then directly inputs to these point-of-sale systems. It’s meant that it’s a super slick journey online to offline. Their point of sale in store is captured well within the membership data. And overall, there’s just a really nice ecosystem flow, which I think deserves a shout-out because again, I’ve worked in businesses where people have left and no one knows the password to log into. Yeah. You know? Yeah … and that’s obviously just, like, a small part of the tech stack, but it all adds on to each other, and it all affects everything.
Mark Reed-Edwards: And the idea of a tech stack is to take all these silos, and bring it … and eliminate them. You know, so eliminate the Excel spreadsheet that only Joan knows how to use, right? And then when Joan leaves, you can’t even access it, and no one knows what the situation is. But the – you know, the idea of having HubSpot, Salesforce, whatever it is, is to eliminate that, not create that.
Amy Norton: Yeah. And we’re doing an amazing piece at the moment where we are working with clients on creative for YouTube, but rather than going down the route of, you know, getting all of the brand assets sent to us via email or via WeTransfer, or getting the KPIs or the brand guidelines or what each performance or brand marketer wants to see from the campaign, it’s all running through a portal. So you’re not gonna be losing vital information. Everything’s stacked in one place. We can then pull all of that information to create case studies, to create creative analysis, to create the output of what we want to achieve in this process. In all honesty, I think it is a bit of a change in mechanism that people are gonna have to start going through. I say for my generation, like, uh, we—I started off where we didn’t even use Google Sheets or anything like that, where it wasn’t collaborative. Everything was siloed on like a standard Microsoft Excel document, and then you’d be sending that to finance. They’d be making their amends, they’d send it back to you. We’ve obviously moved on so far from then, but that was a learning curve at that point, and I think now we’re going into a new era of technology making our lives a hell of a lot easier, not necessarily from an output perspective, but from a collaboration perspective as well.
Mark Reed-Edwards: Yeah. Moving on from Excel hell, right? Yeah. Kind of what it is.
Amy Norton: Oh, Excel. RIP.
Mark Reed-Edwards: It’s a great tool in some regards but it’s, it just—it becomes a morass for certain things because one person has access to it.
Mark Reed-Edwards: So once a brand identifies a capability gap, how should they think about the build-versus-buy decision? Should they upskill internal teams, or bring in outside expertise? And what, what thing in that process do organizations get wrong most often?
Amy Norton: Oh, gosh. I’ve got a lot to say about this. So I’ve been at Incubeta for seven years, but before that I was in-house, so I’ve seen both sides of the coin. And I think we’ve seen this shift to in-house roles, like brands taking channels and activity in-house over the past five to six years. Because I’ve seen both sides, like, I’m telling you now, nothing would have happened without my agencies when I sat in an in-house role. We just didn’t have the resources, but saying that, like I am pro upskilling team members as long as they aren’t expected to be a jack of all trades and a master of none. So what we can’t be having happen is just because, you know, we’re looking at cross-channel campaigns that you have somebody who is a brand marketer who has experience with the mid-upper funnel in terms of creating beautiful campaigns for out-of-home, et cetera, suddenly be expected to take on the conversion elements of a campaign. So like your more performance-heavy roles because they are different skill sets and they should complement each other. And I think that’s what I mean by like jack of all trades, master of none. I was that person for many, many years. I was running affiliates, I was running email campaigns, I was heading up the CRM teams. I was making sure that what we had on our website was in line with what the merchandisers had in a buy behind. Now, it was huge because we didn’t have the resources or the money to be recruiting 10 of me. So I would say upskill internally when a capability kind of like represents a core long-term strategic advantage, I think that’s where you get the best bang for your buck. So in a brand marketing world, like this could look like defining and maintaining a brand narrative, something that’s always going to be on, or maybe like first-party data strategies or like customer servicing where you’re reliant on many internal teams to kind of make stuff happen. And then you bring in kind of external expertise or rely on your agency for setting the strategy behind these long-term goals. So they should be there at the beginning. But also for these fast-moving, like, specialist execution projects where, you know, we spoke about this already, but tech evolves too quickly for internal training or for transformational projects. These could look like scaling creative for speed or like specialized programmatic buying or AI workflow integration. So we built tech controls in this business faster than our clients could even get legal sign-off for using a third party which isn’t part of their ecosystem, and I think the fact that we have that relationship and background knowledge with the business from being a trusted partner means we’re able to get going much quicker. So while you can absolutely in-house certain areas, you need to ensure that people behind it aren’t taking on too much, aren’t taking on more than they can chew, that they’re skilled necessarily, which obviously requires a heavy financial investment. But also ensuring that you are using your trusted partners and your agencies to bring that knowledge and expertise that you just don’t get the time to do in-house. But I just want to kind of caveat that. That’s not to say that external expertise should just be project-focused. So I’ve used this word “partner” and I think that no business should hire an agency. They should hire a partner on a mandate to build systems, identify workflows and bottlenecks, launch campaigns with media houses, like based on expertise and long-standing relationships that we have with them. The word agency is really old-school. I think “trusted partner” is the perfect way to kinda describe what we are with our clients at the moment. They rely on us a lot. We rely on them a lot to give us the information that they have at their fingertips that we need to know to do a good job. And it is, it’s a working partnership, it’s a working relationship. So, I don’t think that the two can coexist without each other.
Mark Reed-Edwards: Yeah, the old concept of an agency you’d go to for a campaign, and they do the campaign, and then you talk to them six months hence is—
Amy Norton: Yeah …
Mark Reed-Edwards: I think is old hat. What people are looking for is an extension of their team.
Amy Norton: Yeah.
Mark Reed-Edwards: And, hand-in-glove kind of relationship so that they understand the strategy, you understand their point of view on the strategy, and you can kinda do interesting work together over a long period of time.
Amy Norton: Absolutely. I think one of the great things about being in-house is that you know that brand inside out. You live and breathe it. When you’re sitting on a partner or agency side, you only get a snippet of that. So it’s very—it’s very important that you are working, like you said, in that way, because again, we need to know everything about this brand, but we can only be, you know, in so many trade meetings, or we can be in so many meetings with C-suite or whatever who are talking about the bigger challenges. But then it’s the same with them. They can’t be in all the Meta meetings. They can’t be on all of what TikTok is focusing on in 2027. That’s where we come in. So it’s a shared experience, bringing it all together under one roof. And again, like I said, just having that collaboration is super important, which you just don’t get when you’re in-house.
Mark Reed-Edwards: For the last question, I want you to put yourself inside the head of a CMO. You know the marketing engine needs an overhaul—
Amy Norton: Mm-hmm …
Mark Reed-Edwards: but you don’t know where to start. So what’s the first honest conversation a CMO needs to have, and who do they need to talk to first?
Amy Norton: Yeah, so we spoke earlier about taking a step back and reviewing things on a wider level, and I think, again, that would be my first point is, like, stop looking at individual kind of channel metrics like clicks and, you know, conversion rate, et cetera. Like, map out the entire end-to-end customer journey from the first touch point to the retention. And conduct this value stream audit, so making sure that, you know, your customers are at the heart of every one of those touch points. You then start to see that those metrics like clicks, conversions, et cetera, like what they mean for different parts of those touch points. That then makes it a lot easier to kind of like talk back to your finance team or the CEO, et cetera, in terms of like saying, “This is an area that we’ve noticed across this customer journey where we need to mature, and it’s because we’re too focused on sales. This point should be nurturing them.” So I would take a step back and look at that journey. I’d also actually just talk to the junior campaign managers and the performance marketers and people who are like on the ground doing the doing. They know so much more than you do, CMO. It’s sad but true. They know every single nook and cranny, and I think I would ask them, like, “What is the single most frustrating manual task that you perform every week?” And you as a CMO are there to make sure that your team becomes more efficient, and they become more aware of how they can be doing better at their jobs. If you have a happy member of the team, then you have a—a happy cohort of a team and I think, making sure that you’re aware of what’s performing well and what’s not performing at such a minute level is something that people take for granted. I’d also say probably like—I guess establishing what that baseline maturity metric looks like if we’re talking about like evaluating that maturity. So benchmark your brand, your business across data architecture, tech integration, team skills, which I’ve kind of like spoken about before and the strategic alignment as well.
In the UK, many mid-market brands jump straight into hiring a new agency instead of benchmarking internally first, so you can brief external partners with total clarity. And I think from that, before you build a roadmap, you need to like have an accurate map of where you’re standing. So again, goes back to talking to the frontline, to the people who are, you know, on the frontline. Press pause on new campaigns and audit where the team’s time and budget actually goes, what’s working, what’s not working. You’ll start to get a big picture of your marketing efforts and the people who are working to get that done to then get to that point of where you need to mature and what you need to do to get there.
Mark Reed-Edwards: Yeah. It’s almost counterintuitive, isn’t it? This kind of bottom-up approach because generally a CMO is gonna think about strategy—
Amy Norton: Of course
Mark Reed-Edwards: um, you know, and talk to his VPs or her VPs—
Amy Norton: Yeah …
Mark Reed-Edwards: and then, you know, it filters down. But if you wanna find out what’s going on in an organization, talk to the people who are doing the work, right?
Amy Norton: And that, you know, I said it’s a, it’s a sad but true thing. It’s not sad that these people on the ground are, are doing it. They are doing… Like, they are there for a reason, but, our execs, our account managers, they are the talent. They really are the talent. They are the people who bring the strategy alive, and without them we would not be making this money for these brands and these businesses. We need to tap into them more and get their thoughts and—and their opinions on growth and where they think the opportunity for growth is. A lot of the times they won’t wanna say anything, but you know, it’s very important that they do have their voice because, like I said, they are the ones who are on the frontline.
Mark Reed-Edwards: Well, Amy, this was just a really great discussion. I really appreciate you joining me here on The Digital Edge.
Amy Norton: Thanks, Mark. It’s been an absolute pleasure.
Mark Reed-Edwards: My takeaway from my chat with Amy? When growth stalls, don’t chase the next buzzword. Step back and diagnose the real issue using people, process, and tools. Because most brands aren’t short on data, they’re short on actionable insight. Thanks for joining me on The Digital Edge. I’m Mark Reed-Edwards. See you next time.
Guests: Mark Reed-Edwards; and Amy Norton.
You can also stream this episode of The Digital Edge on Incubeta’s Spotify.
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