Episode 153 | Why Smart Marketing Starts with Strategy, Not Tactics with Janell Pittman

If you’ve ever felt like your marketing was missing the mark—or that your team is busy but not actually gaining traction—this episode is for you.

I sat down with Janell Pittman, a fractional CMO with Chief Outsiders and a powerhouse strategist who’s helped major brands like MercyOne and Martha Stewart get real results. Janell brings more than two decades of experience transforming organizations from the inside out, and in this conversation, she explains what marketing really is (and what it’s not).

We talk about why jumping to tactics—like “Should we send a postcard?”—is the last thing you should do, and how starting with insights, strategy, and clear positioning changes everything. Janell also shares what happens when branding is treated as a surface-level effort—and why the most impactful transformations happen when internal culture aligns with external messaging.

She’s smart, humble, and full of practical wisdom. Whether you’re running a business, building your brand, or trying to make sense of marketing ROI, this episode will help you step back and see the bigger picture.

🎧 Listen in to hear how Janell turned branding into bottom-line results—and how you can, too.

About Janell Pittman:

Janell is a fractional executive with Chief Outsiders who helps mid-sized company CEOs transform scattered efforts into focused, data-driven marketing strategies that drive growth. With over 20 years of leadership experience, she’s known for aligning teams and delivering results. Formerly the Chief Marketing and Digital Strategy Officer at MercyOne ($3B healthcare system), she unified 17 brands and drove market share growth. She also led digital strategy at Meredith Corporation, overseeing brands like Better Homes and Gardens and Martha Stewart, and has held roles at Nestlé Purina, PwC, and IBM. Janell is recognized for strategic leadership, serves on nonprofit boards, and enjoys outdoor adventures with her husband and two sons.

Resources:

LinkedIn 

Website

Free Growth Readiness Assessment 

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Transcript

Janelle, welcome to the podcast. Thank you. I mostly got through that. You did it. I did it. I did it. And I'm so thankful, first of all to Karen Gibson A mutual I barely know her.

You know her well, and I love the story that you told about how she treats everyone with such respect. You can fill me in on that a little bit. Before we get started, and for you listening, Karen Gibson's episodes are 1 45 and 1 46, so you've got to go listen to them. They are amazing. So before we get into it, you tell me what you told me before we recorded about being with Karen Gibson.

In Washington? Yes. So my 13-year-old was in DC for a national rocketry competition and I reached out to connect with Karen and she took us to the capitol. It was a lesson in authentic leadership. I got to see her engaged with everyone from people sweeping the floors to big guys with machine guns, and it was clear.

They all felt seen and heard. And that was really the highlight of the trip for me was getting to see Karen's leadership in action. So yeah, it was great experience and Karen is absolutely amazing. She is, and I'm not surprised at all. I told you that she was so warm and friendly and really lovely to me as we got prepared for the podcast, but as we were talking, I said to you, and it's true.

She's a badass. She is a badass. And I, I just felt honored to have her. I feel honored to have you and I want to talk to you about marketing and branding. One of the first things that you said that you would be up for talking about is what do people get wrong about marketing? Sure. So there are a few things and I'm curious how you see the pitfalls as being the same or different when it comes to the personal branding side.

So the first thing that I think people get wrong about marketing is not advertising. Marketing is not a logo. It really is the entire go-to market strategy and everything that surrounds a product or a service, the and the experience. And that starts with kind of three pieces, insights, strategy, and execution.

So the insights piece, that means looking at consumers, competitors, and the company. It means then applying that to the strategy, thinking about. Who are you marketing to? Who are you for what offerings you have, how you solve problems for someone or a company and positioning, and then the execution. That's how you leverage resources, whether that's financial or technical or human, the tactics you employ and metrics.

Most of the time when people talk about marketing or ask me questions about marketing, they'll ask me about a marketing tactic. And you've really missed the majority of the opportunity for marketing to make an impact if you're starting with that execution piece and starting with starting with tactics that hits very close to home.

Because I had a conversation with a consulting client who. Wants to do a pull through strategy for their company and said that he is thinking that he would like to send postcards. And that is the temptation to start with, oh, this is how we wanna, reach our, our moose. Of course we call the ideal target market your moose.

So that's exactly what I said to him, that, that is the last thing we wanna think about. We have to, we have so much work to do before we get to that point. So I love that you put it like that. And as far as personal brand, again, there's the similarity that you said, we're gonna have so much fun, we're because it's more than a logo or a color or a brochure.

And especially the way I like to put it, and this is not original, is that your personal brand is what people say about you when you're not in the room. So your brand for a company obviously is not what you think it is. It's unless people know what it is, absolutely. You have to start with understanding, and I think even in the personal side, who specifically are you working with?

Who's your target or your moose? What do they specifically want? Another challenge that I see is when people define that, who is their moose? On the corporate side, they start with the demographics. So woman aged 50 plus a teenager in high school whatever it happens to be. Even within a demographic, you have massive differences in the psychographics that are shaping.

What is it that the person needs and how then do you shape your product to solve a problem that, that they have. In one of my programs not too long ago, I talked about the fact that some people are happy to stay in a Motel six and some people wanna stay at the Four Seasons. And some people like me stay at both depending on the circumstances.

Do I have my dog with me? Are we in the middle of Nevada somewhere? I like the fact that you said it's not just who I am, what age I am, where I live, all of that. It's much more than that. How do you help customers deal with marketing and ROI? Because I think that's the big thing. People are like, okay, marketing, like you said, it's not advertising.

So people see Super Bowl ads and they're like, oh my gosh, they just wasted $2 billion, or whatever it is. So what, how does marketing differ and how are you able to measure how you impact the results? I. Sure. Again, by starting with those insights, understanding who is it that I'm trying to reach and what do they need that then goes into the strategy, what's the product going to be?

How are we going to position it to them? And then that's where the ROI piece comes in with the tactics. We have a much higher hit rate and much higher chance that we're gonna get a positive ROI when we match those tactics with the specific individual. Even if you think about something like are you going to use TikTok or Instagram or Facebook?

The thing I like to think about when I'm thinking about the person, sometimes you'll use something called a persona to actually help illustrate who your target is. Think about what are they surrounding themselves with, and I don't intend that question to focus on things related to your product.

Really what is their environment? What is their world look like? And then find ways, especially when you're in that brand building awareness phase, just find ways to be there to introduce yourself to them. And then, when you get down into the lower funnel strategies where ROI you really start tracking that's where again, you wanna make sure you are where they are.

You're delivering messages that solve their problems. And then there's a myriad of tools that you can use to actually track ROI. I'd say none of that matters if you don't get the insights and the strategy right in the first place. Exactly and I mentioned postcards as a tactic that we were discussing.

On the other hand, we have another client, Ruth King, and she's a huge fan. She actually has a, her own big business in the HVAC world, and she is a consultant and helps her customers with profitability. Makes them very successful. However, she got a postcard and she is a big traveler. She travels a ton, and there was a postcard in her mailbox that said, QR code here, this is a great suitcase that we think would be perfect for someone like you.

And she bought it. So how much went into their thought process before they found her and sent her the postcard that generated an ROI? And so of course you can connect those two. Yes. So you can't ever say that one way works and one way doesn't, right? Absolutely. And I'd say postcard, direct mail generally is something that people like to beat up on.

It can work. I also responded to a postcard once but it, once that I remember, I'm sure it's happened more than once. But it came to me with a super stressed out, needed to get away, and it came to me with a beautiful picture of a sunset over a golf course. So relaxing. I literally showed the picture to my husband and said, I want this.

And we booked the trip. It can work, but if they had sent a message sent a, the same postcard arriving to the same person that said. Book a trip to Scottsdale, a golfing trip to Scottsdale, Arizona. I wouldn't have responded. So it really does, it does matter the messaging your offering much more than just the vehicle in which it arrives.

Perfectly put. I want to talk to you about the a branding. Branding now branding, which this all works together. It really does. And I want to ask you, how does that cost businesses real money? Sure. I'd say the biggest way that getting branding wrong can cost businesses money is when the brand and the internal culture are not aligned.

'cause ultimately that is going to create a rift that consumers notice. So I think just, going back to the idea of mistakes, seeing branding as only external. Is one of the big pitfalls that people can that people can make. Also, as we talked about earlier, branding is not just a logo or a commercial.

It really is much deeper and should be and can be transformative. When brand impacts everything from, of course, logo is an assign all the way to finance brand really should go that deep right in, in the culture of the business, right? And when it, you come down to it, of course businesses can't run without people.

Even though we've got ai. I am curious how you feel about it if we get to that. But if you don't have your people all on the same page and invested in the success if they're just being forced to go along with someone else who told 'em what to do, obviously that does not work. So I, that is a great way to put it.

What about. A, an example that you have, I'm so curious to hear about this. A time when branding, not marketing, really changed the trajectory of a particular business. I can't wait to hear that story. Yes. So I like to talk about branding as a sign of change, not a change of sign. So the example that I'm gonna share brings, that, brings that to life.

I was working with a complex healthcare organization. They had hundreds of locations and they had been working for decades in very separate silos. But the. Board wanted to face the market as one. So a big disconnect between what the organization was and what the board wanted the organization to be.

Also, I should say that the organization had a operating margin of close to zero that's not good. Exactly. Things I don't know much about all of this, but I know that's not good. Healthcare does have low margins, but they shouldn't be close to zero. Correct. So we started with leveraging insights to understand what it was that drove choice, both for consumers and for colleagues, because again, we wanted to make sure that there was an alignment between external and internal.

We also developed strategy, which differentiated from the competition based on things that were important. To the consumers and to the colleagues. Also, very easy when you're thinking about branding to be like, oh, here's this cool way that we're different. But if that element that you're different doesn't matter to the consumer, it's irrelevant and you're way, you're wasting your money.

So by addressing those things and really tackling the culture first to align around working together as one and to align around putting the patient at the center those branding foundations actually led to a shift that started to advance the organization. As an example, even before any external marketing started the organization jumped into the top decile for quality across the nation.

Based on simply aligning who we wanted to be and putting in operational elements around that. When our advertising did launch, it was proof of the improvements that were happening. So not a change of sign, but a sign of change. And collectively, along with the culture and the strategy work we reversed a four year decline in market share.

We gained that point of market share in less than a year. The organization had its best financial performance ever, and we gained 17 point improvement in patient experience scores, which if you're not in healthcare patient experience scores are very difficult to move because you really do have to fundamentally change how an organization serves its patients in order to see movement.

Very little in the end had to do with marketing, but it did obviously it helped with market share but a lot of other things happened as a result of the internal branding First. This really ties into what we talked to before, understanding who your moose is, what's important to them.

Healthcare is a real sticky wicket right now and a lot of. Discontent among patients. So it starts though, with the culture. I'm fascinated with that because as a sales and marketing consultant, as my myself I think people think of soft skills, like for sales mindset. Oh I don't want mindset.

I wanna know how, what are my numbers, how do I get those more numbers right? Sell more. And it is, you've gotta go back. You've got to start where you're talking about and figure all of this out. One thing I like to talk about too is an acknowledged need. You might have the best, I, I work with a lot of women entrepreneurs, you listening, and a lot of women who are 50 and above is actually the largest segment of.

People starting businesses, women 50 and above. A lot of us have something we love and I pick on candle making. And when I was a kid I had a little business called Candles by K and I love alliteration. So they were both with a K. But you might have the greatest candles in the world. But unless you find a market that values that, as you said, it might be, instead of saying these candles smell good, it might be you're stressed out.

We'll use that example. This candle will remind you of that wonderful trip you took to Scottsdale and you golfed. I love it. So whatever that emotional connection is, I feel like we, my husband Steve Miller, not the rock star, but we've worked together for years. He's the UNC Copyable. He developed that brand and then I jumped on board.

And I'm claiming it 'cause I'm married to him. Why not? He had a column for quite a while called Two Hat Marketing and it was about how we think as a marketer and then we think of as a customer and they're totally different things, right? Even sales I just actually had the most obnoxious door to door sales man.

I'm not gonna say it could have been a woman, but this particular guy was a man so incredibly pushy trying to get me to switch from Orkin and I. It was just so you know, it. Talk about tactical. He was just diving in push, push. I got so mad at him. I actually called our security and said, this is a no soliciting neighborhood.

And he is you have to call the police. I'm like, okay, I'm not that. Yeah, you can spend that much time, but I feel like you, you're right. People jump to those tactics without an understanding. You've accomplished some incredible things and I feel as I've talked to a lot of women on this podcast, women are sometimes more reluctant to be powerful and decisive and, make their voice heard how, and you're not especially big, intimidating type person.

How do you see that? Has that ever been a problem for you? I'm sure you deal with a lot of men. Yeah, I've grown up mostly in male dominated industries. Boy,

I love asking people questions, my guest questions that they say, no one's ever asked me that before. Yeah. You're making this might come under that on, that's good. Yeah, no, that's good. So I'm trying to think through different examples or things that have been pivotal moments in my life that have adjusted how how I've approached leadership.

I'll start with as a consultant. I, in my early career, I think that was a fantastic early training ground because I got to see so many leaders in so many different environments good and bad. I got to try on different things and see how they worked for me. And then, I'd go to a different client.

So it wasn't as if boy, Janelle was like this one day and she's something different the next some things didn't feel like me I quickly abandoned those. And in my opinion, it's good leaders are always adjusting to the needs of the people that they are serving and that they are working with.

That could sound like the opposite of being authentic. I don't see it that way. I see it as you are adjusting within a range that is authentic to you, if that makes sense. I think so you, you want to be true to yourself. I think that's true with so many situations and in sales there is the mirroring technique.

And for me, I don't necessarily focus on that, but I see it happening. I, even, the way I'm talking to you, I feel like, is the way I'm talking to Janelle Pittman and it might not be the way I talk to someone else. So we do adjust. We do. And sometimes I would, I like the point that you said you're still authentic.

You still need to be true to yourself. But there is a range. Who is Kay, who is Janelle? We have a whole, you're a mom. I'm a mom, we are business people. We have all these different roles. I know you're on a lot of boards and you're very involved in philanthropy, things like that. So we have all these different versions of ourselves, but there is a confidence in you also, obviously Karen, and it's a quiet confidence.

And I remember, Karen talked about proving herself in their bonus episode. If you're listening, it's such a fun story. There was a biathlon in Alaska and she was only one of two women. Do you know this story? I do. I love that. I've told this story to my boys. And she happened to grow up in Montana and she happened to love Nordic skiing.

And as you can tell, if you even talked to her for a few minutes, she's very good at everything she does. So they are out in Alaska doing this biathlon. And I know that people, she knew people were judging her. This more small diminutive woman compared to these big dudes. And she didn't say a word, but she came in second.

There was only one guy out of that whole entire group, and she was young, so she instantly got credibility. So there, you can't just really boil it down into one thing. You have to, as you said, be authentic, but also call on the all the different parts of who you can be. I think something that was impactful for me was the first time someone called me bold.

Because I never viewed myself that way. And when I just viewed myself as, doing the right thing for the business listening helping to align, et cetera. But I, being someone else, calling me bold, gave me a lot more what felt like freedom to make truly bold types of decisions. The other thing I think you can't see where I am right now, but I am like just over five feet tall.

People oftentimes will underestimate just they look at my size and just, don't think I'm, they can. Yeah. They make, they have an impression in the room. Yeah. So I think that gives me more, latitude to ask the questions that need to be asked, rather than coming in and putting on an error of being powerful or an error of knowing it.

I come in and ask the questions so that the solutions really are solutions. So I, I use that being underestimated to my advantage. Karen said the same thing, being underestimated. Sometimes being told you can't really motivates you, but in your case, someone saying you are bold, and for me and everyone listening, that's very refreshing because I think that we feel like we have to come on really strong to be bold and decisive and powerful.

Of course there are things that you have to do, and I just interviewed. I interviewed a wonderful woman named Tracy Hooker, and she talked about the words that you use and the way you present yourself really does affect how people perceive you. And so she said, don't say a lot of, I'm pretty sure about this, and I like this.

And I think that, so you don't have to really appear aggressive and in people's faces, but you do these small things and for you, geez, you get results once you had some of those successes under your belt. Same thing with sales, same thing with business, anything that momentum. Same thing with golf. Are you, so you are a golfer?

No. No. Okay. It was the sunset. It had nothing to do with golf. Okay. That's okay too. I'm just always shocked at, and the US Open is coming up this weekend on Father's Day. The momentum. Even the best golfers in the world can just either be on a roll where they cannot miss a put and, or they can be on a roll where they cannot make a put.

So the momentum, what you, what happens helps push you forward. So constantly achieving what you've achieved has gotta be huge motivator. So I am curious. Can I, oh, go ahead. You can talk and then I have a question, but you, this is your show. Hard to know. I believe that. But so one other thing that just came to me that, I think can be underestimated as a technique. My dad likes to say that I'm the type of leader that everyone looks up and realizes they're all going in the same direction. Especially in environments where you have lots of strong-willed people coming in as another strong-willed voice may not work.

There are environments where that is absolutely necessary. You've gotta come in with your vision, establish credibility quickly and move, and I'll do that in the right environment. But I think that ability to come in, get people aligned without even them knowing it so that people just start moving together, you reduce a whole lot of friction and can actually move faster.

So anyway lots of options to show up authentically and get results. This reminds me of some parenting things too, about how you can tell your kid to do something and they fight you all the way, or you can find somewhat creative way to. Make it fun. I used to laugh because my daughter loved Where's Waldo?

So she'd spend hours pouring over those books. Where's Waldo? Then it's time to find your shoes. Oh, mom I wanna find my shoes. So really, people have to feel like they've got choices. And I always think of the term, great leaders don't create followers, they create other leaders.

You don't wanna be the smartest person in the room. Those are the types of vibes I'm getting from you. Because, you know everyone. I'm the boss of me. You've heard that from your kid. Maybe I did. We all wanna be the boss of ourselves, so we wanna feel that way. We really are out of time.

I Do you have anything to say about ai? Because I'm super into it. Sure. I think AI is fabulous as a tool. I don't think AI is replacing people. I think it will augment us, make us smarter and can help us work together in the human world much better. We'll, we don't have time to talk more about that, but I agree.

I I like to say that, you're not going to be replaced by ai, but you'll be replaced with someone using ai. So for all of you, I just talked with a copywriter and I feel like those are the types of jobs. People are like I'm gonna get replaced by ai. She said, absolutely not. I'm so much better.

I could do so much more by content because I have help with ai. However, last week I asked AI something, gave me a wonderful answer. And then it said because father's days on June 16th, having a program on the 17th might not be optional or optimal. And I said, father's day's on the 15th.

Hey, you dummy. How can you miss that? Yeah, it's not foolproof for sure. No, it's not. So as we close out, where can people get ahold of you? I know you're on LinkedIn and your name is spelled a little different, which is probably why you're LinkedIn. You got Janelle Pittman, but Janelle is two Ls, but no e on the end, which I think is a little unusual.

You're a chief outsiders and you also have a readiness assessment that people can get. I will put all of this in the show notes, but do you wanna comment on any of that before we go? Yeah. The Growth Gears assessment is a really fast, easy way to figure out how ready your organization is for growth.

It will ask questions about the things we talked about around insights, strategy, execution, and results, and help to pinpoint where you should be focusing because. It's a lot to try to tackle. And understanding where you are and where your gaps are is really helpful. That sounds very powerful.

So is that is for the leaders of a company, CEO, could it be for any business? How, who is that really? For sure. I think it works best when all the members of an executive leadership team take the assessment without talking to each other, because insights that come from gaps, differences in understanding, are also critical pieces of information.

Perfect. So again, that said the show notes check that out. I'm very interested to, to see that myself. You can find Janelle on LinkedIn. I'll put her company name again in the show notes. And I just wanna say, this has been so fun and I loved our conversation. Thank you so much, Janelle, for being on the podcast.

Thank you. Kay. This was a lot of fun.