Marketing With Purpose Kit: Bringing Purpose and Empathy into Marketing

Purpose as a client filter is what Gareth Bain actually built, whether or not that was the plan. In this Marketing With Purpose Kit segment of The Bliss Business Podcast, host Tullio Siragusa sits down with Gareth, Fractional CMO and Founder of Got Legs Digital Marketing, an award-winning growth strategist with more than seventeen years helping founder-led businesses scale, whose agency has helped fund the donation of over 500 prosthetic legs to amputee survivors across Africa.

In this episode we explore:

• How purpose turns marketing from a push strategy into a pull strategy
• Why the wrong clients and hires screen themselves out first
• Balancing a two-year roadmap against a founder who wants results this quarter
• What cross-team alignment prevents that a good campaign cannot fix
• Where intuition ends and data starts
• Why he replaced KPIs with KMIs

The name is the thesis. Got Legs Digital helps businesses get legs and grow, and it funds prosthetic legs for people who need them, and Gareth is clear that the second half is not a footnote bolted onto the first. “I really wanted to start this ethical agency that was purpose before profit,” he says. What he did not expect was how much work the purpose would do commercially. It became, in his words, “a pull strategy rather than a push strategy,” drawing in businesses that want to align on values. It works as a screen in both directions: on a first call, whether a prospect engages with the mission or immediately asks what the ROI is on the philanthropic side tells him most of what he needs to know about the relationship.

On the tension every CMO knows, near-term revenue against long-term brand, Gareth's answer is a two-year roadmap broken into quarterly objectives, built with the team rather than handed to it. He calls himself the conductor of the orchestra, and the argument for it is not elegance, it is cost avoidance. Launching an AI product into Saudi Arabia, his team brought tech and customer support in from the start, which is the only reason anyone caught that the app needed to run right to left rather than left to right before launch instead of halfway through. That pilot ran across three countries and preceded a large investment round.

He is equally clear about data. “I believe in data. I use data to make decisions. If we're not making data decisions, then we're just guessing.” But the sequence matters: intuition forms the hypothesis, data validates it, then testing refines it. For a bootstrapped health-tech client he ran user testing on the MVP before a dollar of advertising, watching people get confused and say the price was too high, and changed the product before the spend started rather than after.

It is the same order of operations Zero Company works in: get the positioning and the alignment right before you scale the budget, because paid media makes a clear proposition bigger and a muddled one more expensive.

Key Takeaways

• (2:15) Gareth Bain on why he built the agency this way: “I really wanted to start this ethical agency that was purpose before profit. So when we set it up, we kind of had that in mind.”

• (2:15) Gareth Bain on purpose as a client filter: “it's actually become a pull strategy rather than a push strategy from my side. I know I have businesses that want to align with me because of their values.”

• (2:15) Gareth Bain on the tell that sorts prospects: whether they talk about the purpose “or is it like, what is the ROI on that? What is the KPIs? How much money are you going to make?”

• (4:57) Gareth Bain on the scale he thinks the sector is leaving on the table, from his own back-of-envelope math on 1% of EBITDA across roughly 60,000 US digital agencies: “If we could just get marketing agencies to be more ethical, more purpose driven, that's a movement.”

• (6:22) Gareth Bain on the CMO's core tension: a founder “wants results quickly. So you need that short-term revenue, but also he hasn't brought you in there for that knee-jerk reaction. He's brought you in there to build a business.”

• (9:36) Gareth Bain on staying visible during a regional crisis that had halted business around him: “they might not be able to afford your product now or use you now, but they will remember you.”

• (12:37) Gareth Bain on his role across functions: “I often call myself the conductor of the orchestra... it's a living, working document where we will kind of working together towards it and taking ownership.”

• (12:37) Gareth Bain on the Saudi Arabia launch that alignment saved: without tech and support involved early “we would have had an app that was only left to right. Probably like halfway through, we would have realized we needed to make a change here.”

• (15:47) Gareth Bain on sequencing instinct and analytics: “intuition is where it starts. This is what we think. This is our best hypothesis. And then data validates. And then from there we go into testing and relearning.”

• (15:47) Gareth Bain on user-testing a health-tech MVP before any ad spend: “This was confusing. I didn't understand that. The price was too expensive... That was valuable insight that we actually used to influence the business before we launched.”

• (19:24) Gareth Bain on where marketing and sales stop talking: “In marketing, we are measured on results and volume... But sale is measured on quality. How many deals did we close?”

• (22:37) Gareth Bain on KMIs replacing KPIs: “we don't say things KPIs. We have something called KMIs, which is your key moments of impact,” and on the team member who joined because an uncle had lost a leg to diabetes.

FAQ

How does purpose act as a client filter?
Gareth Bain, Founder of Got Legs Digital Marketing, says a visible mission turns marketing into a pull strategy: clients who share the values come to you, and prospects who respond to the philanthropic side by asking only about its ROI reveal early that the relationship is a poor fit.

How should a CMO balance short-term revenue with long-term brand building?
Gareth Bain builds a roughly two-year strategic roadmap and breaks it into quarterly objectives, developed with the whole team rather than handed down, so a founder can see what this quarter delivers and how it connects to where the business is going.

What are KMIs, and why use them instead of KPIs?
Key Moments of Impact. Gareth Bain uses them alongside performance metrics so his team can point to a specific human outcome from a piece of work, not just a number on a dashboard, which he finds does more to attract and hold good people than the metric alone.

Learn more about Gareth Bain and Got Legs Digital at gotlegsdigital.com. Guest profile: Gareth Bain. More from the Marketing With Purpose Kit Series. Read the companion post, The Brands That Matter Most Stand for More Than Themselves.