Marketing With Purpose Kit: Aligning Marketing with Business Growth
Kelly Struble, VP of Marketing at Just Between Friends and co-founder of Tama Tea, joins the Marketing With Purpose series on balancing brand and revenue. She explains why brand equity compounds over years, and how to scale without hollowing out the brand.
Balancing brand and revenue is the tension every marketing leader lives with, and Kelly Struble has spent a decade on both sides of it. Kelly is Vice President of Marketing at Just Between Friends, a kids consignment pop-up franchise with 150 locations across more than 30 states, and the CEO and co-founder of Tama Tea. She joined host Michele Brasfield on the Marketing With Purpose series to talk about what it actually takes to scale without hollowing out the brand.
In this episode we explore:
• Why brand equity compounds over years while growth goals run in quarters
• The pre-mortem that keeps a launch from breaking across teams
• How one data project uncovered a customer segment the business had been ignoring
• Why intuition is useful for direction and data is useful for correction
• Hiring for culture first, and the no jerks allowed rule
• What lifecycle visibility reveals about where the funnel leaks
Kelly opens on the discipline that makes everything else possible: resisting distraction. Marketing, she says, is full of shiny objects, and scaling on a foundation that was never set is how teams set themselves up for failure time and time again. The friction point she names is not budget or headcount. It is internal patience. Brand equity compounds over several years, while executives are measuring quarters, and the CMO’s job is to translate long-term brand investment into near-term goals leadership can actually see.
That balance runs both directions. Over-invest in brand and revenue initiatives stall. Over-invest in revenue, particularly on the franchising side, and long-term value quietly erodes. Kelly describes it as a constant push and pull, with seasons where one side has to win outright depending on the stage of growth the business is in.
On execution, her answer is a pre-mortem. Before a launch, she walks the plan through operations, tech, and customer service and asks where this will fail. Marketing teams get excited about an idea, and if that excitement does not translate to every other team, it breaks. What holds it together is a clearly stated mission, which at Just Between Friends is helping families say yes, understood the same way by everyone.
The measurement conversation is the most practical stretch of the episode. Kelly is candid that marketing is hard to measure, and that lifecycle visibility, tracking a customer from a first ad through to repeat purchase and average order value, is where strategy sharpens and where the leaks become findable.
For brands working the same problem, the through line is one Zero Company sees constantly: the measurement story and the brand story have to be built together, or the channel data never explains what the audience actually did.
Key Takeaways
• (2:57) The friction is rarely budget. It is patience: “the biggest friction point is internal patience.”
• (2:57) On why the timelines never match: “brand equity compounds over several years. It doesn’t happen overnight.”
• (8:02) Her launch safeguard is a pre-mortem run with operations, tech, and customer service: “before you even launch, thinking about where will this fail.”
• (10:36) The lesson from a data project that surfaced a customer segment they had never targeted: “intuition is really useful for direction, but data is useful for correction.”
• (13:05) On the limits of attribution, she uses the billboard problem, then lands on lifecycle visibility: tracking acquisition cost, repeat purchases, referrals, and lifetime value end to end.
• (15:39) On talent, she hires culture first because “skills can always be taught,” and applies a no jerks allowed rule to hires and vendors alike.
FAQ
How do you balance brand building with revenue targets?
Kelly Struble treats it as a push and pull rather than a fixed split. Brand equity compounds over years while revenue goals run quarterly, so the marketing leader’s job is translating long-term brand investment into near-term goals executives can see.
What is a marketing pre-mortem?
It is asking where a launch will fail before it launches. Kelly Struble runs the plan past operations, tech, and customer service to surface breakpoints early, because marketing enthusiasm that does not transfer to other teams is where launches come apart.
Should marketers trust data or intuition?
Both, in different roles. As Kelly Struble puts it, intuition is useful for direction and data is useful for correction, and when the two conflict the answer is to test rather than debate.
Great marketing does not just sell, it serves. Hear the full conversation with Kelly Struble on the Marketing with Purpose Kit series.
Founder/Executive Marketing
Kelly Struble is the VP of Marketing at Just Between Friends, a kids consignment pop-up franchise that has 150 locations across more than 30 states in the US. She is also the co-founder and CEO of Tama Tea, a beverage company that was founded in 2015 and currently has distribution from the East Coast to California.
She is a seasoned entrepreneur and marketing expert with a diverse background spanning multiple industries, including food and beverage, retail, and home services. She has worked with many companies, from start-ups to Fortune 500, and has a passion for building brands that connect deeply with people.
