Strengthening Marketing through Internal Branding Efforts with Branden Cobb

Speaker 1: Welcome to the Future of Teamwork podcast, where we explore cutting edge strategies to keep teams human centered, drive innovation, and empower you with the tools and insights needed to help your team excel and thrive in today's rapidly changing world. Your host is Dane Groeneveld, a seasoned expert with over 20 years of experience in enhancing team dynamics and innovation. Are you a small company needing to understand how fractional marketing can work for you, or does your marketing department need a new approach to exciting your employees? If so, this is the episode for you. Today Dane is joined by Branden Cobb, a fractional chief marketing officer with over 15 years of experience. Branden has worked with brands such as Jaguar Land Rover, HP, and Intel, enhancing their marketing outcomes and distinct projects. He separately achieved driving a company's revenue to 500 million, showcasing his expertise in strategic marketing and leadership across various high profile engagements. Together, Dane and Branden will help listeners understand first, the critical role of marketing and building trust for your brand. Second, the significant contributions of employees and customers in amplifying your team's value through both internal and external marketing initiatives. And finally, how employee self- marketing contributes to your company's image and how businesses can guide employees in differentiating personal opinions from company messaging. So teamwork makes the dream work, and we're here to inspire your next collaborative breakthrough. Gather your team or put on your headphones and let's dive in together.

Dane Groeneveld: Welcome to the Future of Teamwork podcast. My name's Dan Groeneveld, CEO of the HUDDL3 Group, and today I'm joined by Branden Cobb, who's just down the road from in San Diego. Welcome, Branden.

Branden Cobb: Hi, Dane. Thank you very much. Excited to be here.

Dane Groeneveld: I'm glad to have you here. So you're a fractional chief marketing officer, and you and I were just talking before the show about the work you've done bringing a number of brands into the US, and how for you, marketing has been both external and internal when you're sort of coming into brand values, employer brand, communications. We even talked a little bit about gamification. So it's going to be a fun conversation.

Branden Cobb: Definitely. Yeah. I find that in many cases, marketing internally is just as important for team motivation and productivity as marketing externally is for consumer demand.

Dane Groeneveld: No, I believe it. I believe it. In fact, I would say I've probably spent more time marketing internally in my career than externally just in the industries that I operate in. So I'm always fascinated when there's someone who can run both together, particularly in industries where you want your employees to show up in the way that you're telling your customers, your brand presents and sets its values. So there's a good harmony there.

Branden Cobb: Absolutely.

Dane Groeneveld: So tell us a little bit more about your background. How did you come to be doing this work with teams and the research that you're doing? What's the backstory there for you?

Branden Cobb: Yeah, I think as with everybody, COVID kind of shook things up. Initially had to figure out, even with the marketing team I was leading, how we're going to keep running when we're working virtually. And I created a... I've never seen it done anywhere else really, but I created a... Well, basically we would be, our marketing team would be on Zoom all day long, camera's off, microphone off. So you still had your privacy, but at any point in time you could unmute yourself and you would be live almost as if you're in the same room with somebody. So that got me thinking about the new world of business as digital and virtual work starts to occur, and marketing being so much on the edge of tech and employing tools and different things to enable internal communications. I just spotted that companies were, I guess you could say sometimes in need of a senior marketer, but not for a full- time permanent arrangement. So that got me into this fractional work that I've been doing now, which it means that basically you're fractionalizing your week over multiple clients and spending five hours here, one hour here, 10 hours here. And so what that entails is really coming in and setting up marketing teams, setting up the marketing infrastructure, and then enabling companies to go about their way.

Dane Groeneveld: Yeah, I've seen a huge lift in fractional professionals, and even pre the pandemic, it was already happening, because it makes sense, right? Most small businesses, most small teams can't afford someone who's got all of that experience and network and skill, nor do they necessarily have the work scope to keep that person busy full- time. So why not?

Branden Cobb: Yeah, that's it as well. It's not always their capability financially, but also it is, do they have enough work to keep somebody busy there? Or what you see in a lot of small businesses are people that are wearing multiple hats because that's how they fill their whole day. But if you really want that specialist, you may not have enough work just for that person to be doing their specialty.

Dane Groeneveld: That makes total sense. So for you, what's the big difference between being a fractional chief marketing officer or being an agency that the customer just asks to do projects? What do you see differently in terms of how you interact with the customer team?

Branden Cobb: Well, I think definitely it's more one- on- one basis than an agency type of setting. You're going to get very familiar and commit. You're not going to be passed around with a bunch of different people. It's really like you're hiring an individual who's coming in to be a full- time employee, but just... Which creates a deeper understanding because there's less passing communication amongst people that loses meaning as it goes person to person to person. So I think that might be one of the main differences.

Dane Groeneveld: Yeah, as a business owner, that sounds quite appealing, because sometimes when you go to outsource a function, you don't really know how to manage that function. And like you say, if you're getting lots of different people for lots of different tasks, it can be quite difficult to manage.

Branden Cobb: Totally, yeah.

Dane Groeneveld: When you're engaging as a fractional marketing professional, are you coming in and coordinating internal marketing resources or outside agencies or both? How does that play out?

Branden Cobb: Both. Yeah. So my goal is always to set up the company to be stable and continuing to conduct its marketing without the need for a forever fractional person. So that includes building out an in- house team and setting up the resources internally. But that also means especially many times for any company that's expanding their business or launching their business, they need to prove the concept before they really bring everything in- house. So a lot of times you start off with a decent amount of outsourcing. And so I've got all those contacts with the different vendors, different things. So when I'm saying setting up the infrastructure, there is a bit of internal infrastructure and then a bit of outsourcing infrastructure that is set up with that. Yeah.

Dane Groeneveld: Yeah, that's neat, because for a first time CEO or a startup that hasn't really put marketing together before, they don't really know where to start, do they? So having support to blend that hybrid strategy and put the maturity cycle to work must be a good thing.

Branden Cobb: Absolutely, yeah. I think always if you show that your product, service, whatever you're going to market with is profitable and sustainable, then it's going to be more profitable in most cases for you to eventually bring it in- house. But it provides the flexibility to start it at least partly out of house and then work your way towards bringing it in- house.

Dane Groeneveld: So we were talking before the show about the importance of internal communications, particularly as it relates to culture, and you made a great point about trust, really making sure that you're communicating what you can stand behind. Can you perhaps kind of elaborate on that for our listeners, where you've gone in and worked with the leadership team, HR, whatever functions it is to really build on that?

Branden Cobb: Yeah, absolutely. So a lot of times companies have their mission statement or their brand values, and they go out to market with all their content and state who they are as a company and as a brand. But if I would say equally as important is that company needs to behave in ways that align with what they're stating who they are. Because if a company states, " These are our values." But then contradicts those, either internally or externally, that's going to lose trust. However, if a company states, " These are our values." And they actually live up to those values and their actions match what they say, then that's going to build trust. And by building trust internally, you're going to start to create a variety of, I guess, brand ambassadors or people who believe in the company's missions and values, and then that causes them to just naturally promote the brand both internally and externally. And when you've got employees promoting the brand internally and feeling good about it, number one, you're going to retain your employees a lot more. And number two, you're going to be seen as a magnet of a company to attract new talent to come in and want to work for you. So it's really about creating a culture, an environment that seems like this is the place that employees currently who work there want to continue working at. And it also is a company that future employees, you can recruit too, and they want to come work at.

Dane Groeneveld: Yeah, that employer branding was really big in the early 2000s in Australia when I was working in the engineering construction industries, and it was hard to find talent. A lot of companies started doing just that. They really put a lot of messaging out there around their behaviors, their values, particularly around things like safety and teamwork. And you could see it, the companies that did a good job of it that lived by it, they had talent to do the jobs. The companies that didn't, they were struggling to actually execute on some of their construction jobs. So it's a competitive advantage when framed that way.

Branden Cobb: Absolutely. And also, if you get to the deep understanding of communicating to your employees what they're doing, how that helps the world or adds value to customers, it's going to make them feel like they're doing something more meaningful. So we've seen this in a couple of different ways. Number one, it could be like charity organizations. Let's say you're a cashier and you're asking for a donation at the end of the transaction. Well, if you really believe in that cause that you're gathering donations for, it may make what otherwise can be a mundane position or job seem more meaningful, because you're aligning with something you actually care about. And so either that, or there's another concept of when you have customer success stories and you see the value that you've added to people's life, if it's just management telling you that, " Hey, we do good for our customer base." It seems a little biased because your management is, their intentions are to grow the business. However, if you've got customers you're bringing in as part of the marketing department recordings, or quotes and statements from true customers, true people who benefited from what the company's doing, it's going to really make the employees feel good about what they're doing and believe based off what those customers are saying as well. So that all goes into, how does the marketing department gather that feedback? And that feedback too can create continuous improvement so you can continue to improve the customer experience. So the marketing department's very deeply ingrained with all of those elements of just understanding from what the employees are doing all the way through customers and back and forth and making that communication transparent.

Dane Groeneveld: I like that. And there's some really good research out there. I know a conference I was at where Dan Pink was talking, he was referencing a study where the chefs were given iPads so they could see the customers eating and enjoying their food. And over time, they started getting improved scores from the customers for the presentation and the quality of the food, because the chefs could see who they were cooking for and what it meant to those people.

Branden Cobb: That's amazing. I love that concept. And I would imagine that the chef could see when they're really enjoying something when they maybe their nonverbal reaction is something tasted a little sweet or too salty or something, and they could slightly make adjustments, which aren't just so easily communicated between the eater and the chef there. But that's a really... That's awesome getting to see them enjoying that. Yeah.

Dane Groeneveld: Yeah, and I would imagine a lot of us, and you've probably seen this firsthand often in a marketing role, a lot of us get frustrated that our customers don't often tell us the real truth. There's a version of the truth that customers tell us so as not to hurt our feelings, but if you can be really living your values, if your employees can really believe in what they're trying to do, then maybe they're going to be able to build relationships and uncover real, honest, meaningful, timely feedback that helps drive not only the customer experience but the product or the service development too.

Branden Cobb: Absolutely. Yeah, that's spot on. And I think, so marketing, if we're saying marketing, part of their role is opening the communication line between customers and employees, also opening the communication line amongst employees, whether it's creating discussion boards or private social media groups or things where people can communicate amongst each other. It enables a transparency, you feel heard, it's a voice, you're giving everybody a voice. And these are elements that the marketing department can help enable.

Dane Groeneveld: Yeah. So where do you see then... I like that framework of opening communication lines, whether it's with the customer or employee to employee, particularly across departmental functions. Where do you see the role of marketing in an organization sitting when it comes to executive team meetings? Because to that point that you've just touched on, it touches HR, it touches product development, it touches sales, it touches all of your fulfillment operations. How do you create that proximity with all of those different stakeholders and teams?

Branden Cobb: Yeah, so I think number one, continuing to remember the word experience. So your employee's experience and your customer's experience, and what would make for a better experience for them. In many cases, if you're having a top management team meeting, and for the people not included in that meeting, some curiosity what's going on in that meeting, some anxiety or fear of what's possibly going on in that meeting. So trying to create a company newsletter or something that allows a summary to go out. And I mean, in general, I think transparency is pretty good. Sometimes, of course, you have to have some confidential elements going on. But if the marketing remembers and tries to think about every person in the ecosystem's experience and how to improve their experience, then I think some of the decisions or the implementations will just come naturally.

Dane Groeneveld: Yeah. And if you extend on that thinking around experience, because I see a lot more titles out there, Branden, around head of employee experience or head of customer experience or head of community. If you expand on that experience, where does that tend to sort of land in the organization? Does it show up in newsletters primarily? Does it start to turn up in training materials? Where does it kind of infiltrate?

Branden Cobb: So experience is ingrained all throughout. I want to state something that I think experience is one subcategory of marketing, but I don't believe it is the umbrella of marketing. I believe revenue management is the umbrella of marketing, but experience and creating good experiences may help lead to more revenue. So it's an umbrella or it's a subcategory, but it's not the overarching, I would put more revenue interested executive in charge and then an experience slightly below that. But with that being said, experience is going to... I guess it's ingrained all throughout, and that involves how they feel about the brand, how they interact with the brand, the overall culture created, but also events and things. So marketing's going to be creating a lot of probably and organizing a lot of events both internally and externally. And so what's the experience, what's the vibe, what's the feeling employees get when they come to these events? And making it fun, engaging, not just mind- numbing of sitting through listening to something you don't want to listen to, but rather engaging and memorable, where then the employees, when they come to the internal company events, they go online and they share with the hashtag what they're doing at the company events. So now you've got them promoting internally. And again, that's going to help keep up everybody else's motivation and perception of the company, but also it's going to attract possibly people that want to apply or come work for the company as well.

Dane Groeneveld: No, that makes a lot of sense. And we've seen since the pandemic in a lot of teams that events are supercharged now, because with teams working hybrid or remote, there's just so much more value to be had getting together. It's not like, " Oh, they're dragging me to another conference." It's like, " Wow, I get to go and see my team."

Branden Cobb: Yeah. And even in virtual settings, I've seen a lot of teams, obviously they get together for a quarterly, half year, or annual gathering of sorts, and that builds a deeper rapport amongst each other. And that plays out when they go back to working virtually. There's just a more deeper understanding. Because when we're talking about also marketing enabling with technologies and tools of sorts to conduct communication, well, working virtually, there's the concept that when it's a little distance, people are, they're more willing to just say things without thinking how that affects the people that are going to hear it and whatnot. But when you're getting together in person, I guess it holds everybody a little more accountable.

Dane Groeneveld: Yeah, definitely. No, I like that. On virtual team experiences, before the show, we were talking a little bit about gamification. So where have you seen gamification play out in the lens of bringing more connectivity, learning, excitement to teams?

Branden Cobb: Yeah, so actually I organized a company- wide NCAA March Madness tournament event. And that was fun because number one, there were a lot of employees that maybe went to the same schools, they could find a mutual thing to connect on. But then also, even I guess the trash talk amongst schools created a fun environment in a friendly that people could engage with each other, and it created some fun. And then we put up some awards for the winners. So there was an all- inclusive trip for the person who won the NCAA a March Madness tournament, and there were second place, third place awards. And then as you go down deeper into the standings, of course you get company swag, and then that's another further promotion of the company. But what it also enabled us to do was put out weekly, or even, I don't recall if it was biweekly, weekly, but the tournament's not that long. But nevertheless, we put out standings at various points through the tournament. And so that enabled the company to be in communication, keep everybody plugged in into a central feeling good about the company, because they're getting constant communication about the company, but it's not about something that's just nagging them on something they don't want to hear about. It's something that's fun and exciting to look at.

Dane Groeneveld: That's an interesting point. We're all living in a world of inbox overload, and now there's text messages, WhatsApp, Slack, LinkedIn, you name it. We're getting messages in so many channels, sometimes you forget where you saw something or who reached out to you where. If you are bringing people through a gamification event like that, whether it's fun outside of work or it's sales team stats, but if you're bringing them together regularly, how important is it to make sure it's not all business? Do you always have to create a bit of a fun element just so people come back and don't feel like, " Oh, it's just I'm working for the man here again, it's all for them, not for me."

Branden Cobb: Yeah, I think, I mean, there's certainly a balance, because you have to be talking business, that's what we're all at work for. But at the same time, there is a way to make business fun and engaging. So I guess it's a touch, it's a feel. You got to see what the response is and see, and modify, adjust.

Dane Groeneveld: Yeah, because the one problem I've found internally with teams in the past is being consistent with that messaging. You start an initiative where, " Hey, every month we're going to highlight birthdays and some of this good news and then give a business update." But then things change, people get busy, someone leaves the job, and the next thing you know that monthly newsletter kind of dies away. So I would imagine that there must be research out there that talks about the content and the cadence and how you drive better engagement around internal comms.

Branden Cobb: Well, and I think definitely something that's unique to the company and unique to the culture of the company, because probably most companies do some type of newsletter. And those, I'm guessing for... It is important, because it's needed for transparency for those who want to go see what's happening. However, I'm imagining that probably a lot of the newsletters go unread. And so doing something that doesn't just seem like it's just checking the box of business, but it's actually creating something that makes that company special.

Dane Groeneveld: Yeah. Do you think there's a size factor here? I mean, HBR, I think years ago I read an article that said once you get to 120 people in an organization, you start to run into a bit of culture bust, because people don't know each other by name, they don't understand each other's roles as easily. Have you experienced that with any of your projects or teams?

Branden Cobb: Definitely. But I think there can still be very strong subcultures. So whether it's within your team or whether it's within your region or your locality, I think you can still hold a very strong tight bond there just the same way as if it was a small company. But there is certainly a gap or a distance between departments and between localities and things. And so trying to open up those lines of communications. And actually that makes me think of something that goes right along this line. Goodwill CEO. I know her name's Ani, she's a very nice lady. And she recently was quoted saying something along the lines of... The Reuters publication was talking to her about whether customer experience and customer service should be going along with the concept of strategic marketing. And what she basically said was that when you live in silos in your company, it creates a disservice to the customers because they don't live in silos. They come to your company and they experience your brand as one. Their experience is as one. So when you can start to communicate and create a seamless experience amongst your different departments, that's important. So that goes back down into how does marketing help internally? Well, breaking down those silos, of course there's benefits to silos, but being able to share data and information and company- wide databases instead of department siloed databases, and creating those mix and mingle opportunities amongst, where even in an informal setting, maybe your service reps are talking with your marketing department and different things, and you just want to enable, as a marketing department, you want to enable those communications. So again, when your customers, they don't care that somebody's in a different department, they're just experiencing the brand as one.

Dane Groeneveld: Yeah, that's a great point. And that actually ties back into your earlier point on fractional versus agency too. Once you get disaggregated and you're having to deal with lots of people for lots of different things, it is tough as a customer. It's tough as a team member. If I'm trying to get something out of the accounting function and actually they point over to it and say, " Well, it needs to come to there." And then you get to IT and they're like, " But I need HR sign off." You're on a wild goose chase.

Branden Cobb: Well, especially if you're on a phone line and you're getting passed around, and then you have to restart the conversation with each person. But you know what, that goes... When just focusing internally, let's say somebody has a suggestion for any other department, but somebody has a suggestion for marketing, making it an easy process to make the suggestion and a streamlined process where they're not getting passed around or don't know if their suggestion made it to the next link of the communication and everything like that. So again, I think going back to thinking about the experience of each individual and what would make everybody's experience better. And so many times I think we worry about the customer's experience, but we don't worry enough about the internal team's experience.

Dane Groeneveld: Yeah, no, that's a good call out. The mix and mingle opportunity that you talked about there, is that a physical event or have you done that digitally?

Branden Cobb: So definitely there's the physical opportunities, and that's from, I don't know, all kinds of different reasons why you can get people together. But nevertheless, on the digital side, that goes back to where I'm saying a close Facebook group or a discussion board, maybe it's in your company's dashboard that employees sign into and there's a easy to communicate dashboard or good notifications when... Different discussion topics, and people can choose to follow whichever discussion topics they want and receive notifications on those topics. But then it enables people to drop their comment there and people from different departments to be mixing and mingling. So I definitely think there's digital ways to enable mixing and mingling. And you could go back to gamify that too. It could be maybe the comment that receives the most likes or the comment that starts the deepest discussion, there's some type of award there too. So you can be incentivizing that and you can go back to, depending what that award is, maybe the employee feels so proud or so excited enough that they want to share it online and then this becomes a flywheel effect or there's a bit of a circular element to it.

Dane Groeneveld: Yeah. One of our former guests, Luke Williams, he talked a lot about ideas getting better the more people kind of touch them, shape them, contribute. So that concept of yours, digitally encouraging people to drop something in the chat and get people sparked up is a cool way to create some inclusivity in the team and a bit of excitement.

Branden Cobb: Definitely. And I think either providing the training or the knowledge, or otherwise just making sure it's known that people need to engage with others' comments respectfully and also in a way that continues to encourage engagement. So diverse opinions can be very good. And knowing how to criticize somebody without just destroying them too. So it's like constructive criticism I guess, and whether that means you have an education department or something, but just working to think about how to encourage and make everybody find it enjoyable.

Dane Groeneveld: Yeah. And that reinforces those kind of brand and culture statements and behaviors. So it all starts to kind of interweave, doesn't it?

Branden Cobb: Yeah, absolutely. Yeah.

Dane Groeneveld: What's your view, Branden, on the future of marketing within the team? What's going to change in the next five years? We've seen a lot of change just through the pandemic. Is technology going to be a big angle? Are marketing folks going to be spending less time on the technology and more time out in the field? What are you seeing as emerging patterns there?

Branden Cobb: Well, one thing I think is that as everybody ends up having their online image and whether it be their LinkedIn profiles or we go back to Clubhouse, right? So Clubhouse never, it didn't really hang around, but at the point you could... And I mean I guess it's still going. But anybody could hop in, and then you start speaking and it's kind of like you're the spokesperson for the company. So this is good and bad. What that means is that every employee, which has always kind of been the case on the frontline employees anyway, but every employee is a representation of your brand and your company. But now, as everybody has individual profiles and everything like that, basically what I'm saying is, is your internal employee base, I guess, is also representative of your brand. And so you need to be aware of that and how that comes across to your customers. And that could be including having a diverse employee base and being able to connect with customers of all sorts. And there's a lot of a concept of how you build yourself internally will affect the external image.

Dane Groeneveld: Yeah, that's a really good point, particularly on the diversity pieces, that everything's very visible now on a day by day, hour by hour basis because of channels like LinkedIn. And you're right, certain customers are going to connect with certain types of people. So if you want to really be sustainable and growing, there's a lot of value in getting that right. Where do you go on things like social media policies these days? If you're really worried about how your employees are showing up out there, how they're marketing themselves, and by inference the company, how do you create guardrails for that?

Branden Cobb: Yeah. And being in marketing, I was involved with a company of 3, 000 people. And sometimes we had situations where somebody on their personal profile says they work for us, but then they go and they comment on something on the presidential election or something like this, and then it creates people who disagree with them coming back and sending messages to our company telling us that this person is not representing your company the right way. So I think the key is you want people to live who they are and be who they... Give people the freedom. But you also, you do want to make sure your employees know that when they're commenting on any social media or presenting themselves on social media, that unless authorized by your PR department, they are acting on their own. So yeah, they are an employee of your company, but they're not talking on behalf of your company. And that goes back to the Clubhouse issue, or people going on podcasts or anything like that, is that you need to make it clear that these are my own opinions, these are my own, this is not the company's opinions. So I think that's one thing. And then it goes back to really still just building. If you hire people that meet the values and meet the standard that you're looking for, that's part of the brand living who it says it is, is having a core that also embodies the values of the brand too.

Dane Groeneveld: Yeah, I really like that hygiene factor of hiring well to your values, but also giving them a little bit of awareness. One of my old bosses always said, if what you write was to show up on the company newsletter or in the local paper, how would you feel about explaining it to those close to you? And if you feel good about it, then post away, but never claim it's anyone else's opinion but your own.

Branden Cobb: I like that, because it gives a simple thing that people can always remember and think like, " Should I say that? Should I not? Should I?" Yeah. So that's good.

Dane Groeneveld: Yeah. Yeah. No, it is neat. And so we've talked about the future of marketing and some of that direction, which I thought is really cool. What about you personally? What are you excited about, whether it's tools or techniques, but what are you thinking is really going to create leverage for teams that you are getting to go out there and work with in the next few years?

Branden Cobb: Yeah. Well, in addition to having... Number one, working on a fractional base I think is very interesting, because you get to see a variety of situations. And when you think of the concept of AI or ChatGPT or something being as good as all the information it has, it can come up with a cumulative answer based on whatever information it has. Well, when you're in a fractional basis and you're seeing a variety of situations, you're able to come back and provide the right prescription for the right situation or the right symptom, and not just throw a strategy that you think because it worked in the past for you here, it's going to work here. No, you're seeing things play out in a variety of settings. So that's one is I am enjoying all that I'm learning now with the various clients that I'm working with. Secondly, I am engaged in research that's really trying to... In addition to working, I'm a doctoral student at the University of Florida. Still live in San Diego, but I fly out there every two months. And engaged in research that is trying to really understand when you mix this strategy or this theory, this strategy with this strategy or this communication channel, with this communication channel, what does it, in a reoccurring over and over and over again, what result is that creating? So it's not just coming from a... I'm trying to track where it's not just coming from your experience or my experience or anybody else's experience or intuition of, " Hey, we should mix these different communication channels together. We should mix these approaches to employee structure or team events and different things together." But really understanding, when you do mix these elements together, what is the reoccurring result? And so what I think that will enable is just a better attribution or tracking system of knowing the effects that marketing's really doing and not just stating that we believe this is the best. And because it's working or because it's not working, it means it's good or bad, but rather we know with intention what we're trying to do.

Dane Groeneveld: That's really cool. And I personally see that as valuable, because when I look at all the tools that we use in business now, all the channels that we're pushing out through, we're so distributed, it's hard to know what's driving your success. You're like, " I know that thing gives me a bit of success, and that thing gives me a bit of success. But I don't know what the real formulation is that I can rely on in my business."

Branden Cobb: And the synergetic element too, because you may think, " Well, I think this channel is really providing a lot of success. This channel is not. Let me stop the channel." But they may be working together some sort. And so yeah, it's an ambitious project, but it's something that I'm hoping to bring a little more clarity to the marketing field, which will then enable what we're talking about today, which is aligning teams and everything like that as well.

Dane Groeneveld: No, that's awesome, Branden. Well, I've taken away some great points from today, like you shared just then, just the power of fractional, and a lot of people are saying the future is fractional. So that's exciting for the professionals that are operating that way and the teams that have access to them. I loved your points on trust behind brand and the role of marketing in reinforcing that. The opening communications lines amongst employees and with customers, for people who aren't marketing minded and they're looking to really drive their teams forward, that's a really good call to action. So I love the way you shared that. And I thought that whole concept of silos being problematic in terms of providing a disservice to the customer is another great way for people to be thinking about their teams and the wider experience. So lots of really good points, and I'm excited to hear where the research goes.

Branden Cobb: Well, thanks.

Dane Groeneveld: So thanks for being on the show. And if any of our listeners want to reach out and find you either as a fractioning marketing professional or to contribute to or hear more about your research, how do they find you?

Branden Cobb: Yeah, so you can go to our website marketingexec. us, or you can find me on LinkedIn, maybe my name's showing up on the bottom of this screen, and if not, it's B- R- A- N- D- E- N C- O- B- B- B, B as in boy, find me on LinkedIn, add me, send me a message. I'd love to connect and chat.

Dane Groeneveld: Awesome. I'm sure you'll get a few connects there, and good luck with it all, Branden.

Branden Cobb: Thank you very much, Dane.

Speaker 1: Thank you for joining us. Remember that by embracing vulnerability, trusting our intuition, and approaching challenges with compassion, we not only strengthen our teams, but also pave the way for a future where collaboration thrives. If you're hungry for more insights, strategies, and research on collaboration, head over to thefutureofteamwork. com. There you can join our mailing list to stay updated with the latest episodes and get access to exclusive content tailored to make your team thrive. Together we can build the future of teamwork. Until next time.