The ¡Ahá! Moment

When I stepped into a VP of Marketing role for one of the organizations I previously led, the mission was clear: get our communications house in order. That meant aligning all the usual suspects—website, social media, email, PR, content strategy, the works.

I hit the ground running. For over a year, I worked channel by channel, investing in new creative, optimizing outputs, trying to make each touchpoint sing. But despite the effort, something still wasn’t clicking. We were busy—but not moving.

The real ahá moment came when I realized we weren’t struggling with marketing execution. We were struggling with clarity. Our team couldn’t clearly explain who we were, who we were for, or what pain point we solved. We didn’t have alignment. We didn’t have a narrative. We had noise.

It wasn’t a marketing problem—it was a brand problem.

Once we did the hard work of defining our brand strategy—our positioning, our promise, our audience, and our voice—everything else fell into place. The website rewrote itself. The messaging aligned. Our outreach started working.

That shift changed the trajectory of my career—and ultimately led me to co-found Bennett/Co. Because I saw firsthand: if you skip brand, you end up fixing the wrong thing.