Episode 11: Scaling a Customer-Led Organization with Eric Sawitoski

Steve sits down with Eric Sawitoski, an award-winning creative executive with 20+ years of success devising brand strategies and marketing solutions to increase ROI through digital innovations, experiential marketing, and campaign execution.

Eric is the Chief Marketing Officer at WNDR Museum, and a Strategic Advisor at ELAW CREATIVE, and an Advisory Committee Member at Workvana.

Listen in as Eric talks about his experience doing marketing in the pre-internet era and the timeless principles which he found apply to today’s market. He speaks on the difference between reactive marketing (“order-takers”) and proactive marketing (problem-solving which contributes to the bottom line).

Eric and Steve give their thoughts on maintaining a customer-led business no matter the size of the organization. “You don’t build brands for yourself,” explains Steve. Rather, you build it for the customer, and that customer needs to be the one making those big decisions.

Eric closes the conversation by inviting us to ask ourselves: “How are you focusing on your customer so that your offering aligns with what the opportunity spend is? If you don’t have insight into that, you’re throwing spaghetti at the wall to see what sticks.”

Key Takeaways:

• Marketing is something that is best done in lockstep with business strategy.
• There are certain marketing tactics based on an emotional connection: breaking through the clutter or having an affinity for the brand. Those things are measurable, whether through client satisfaction, net promoter scores, or even employee satisfaction scores. The way to get to that rich data and those insights is to build credibility through your marketing organization.
• Whenever your company is faced with a big decision, always ask what’s in it for the customer. If your business has always built bridges, so to speak, try discussing whether or not another bridge even needs to be built for a specific problem. “I’m not saying question everything,” says Eric. “Just be ready to do something unexpected.”
• Marketing should always be geared towards unlocking new insights: new strategies or methodologies that lead to customer success. Just as important is having a structure and a process in place to measure ROI for each new marketing idea you put into practice.

Connect with Eric Sawitoski on LinkedIn.