So what does Cohesion have to do with marketing? I am so glad you asked! Lots!
In this episode, I have Marketing Extraordinaire Zora Artis join me and she is gifting us her wisdom on nurturing a culture of alignment and sharing strategies that ensure your company's vision resonates at every level in order to propel your brand to success.
We dive deep into the challenges and triumphs in crafting a high-performing business through the lens of alignment and cohesion.
We tackle head-on the issues that rapidly growing companies often face—like siloed departments and conflicting objectives—providing practical advice for leadership to keep the ship sailing smoothly.
Hearing from Zora offers a unique perspective on maintaining unity and purpose.
Whether you're a budding entrepreneur or a seasoned executive, the conversation is a treasure trove of actionable insights that can reshape the way you think about and implement brand strategy.
As Australia’s leading Alignment, Communication and Brand Strategist, Zora teaches and advises Executive and Senior leaders to unlock the value in their people, brands and organisations to build high-performing organisations that deliver positive impact and strategic outcomes.
she's been in the business of strategic alignment all her life. her family immigrated three times before she was 13, so she was always the ‘odd one out'. It’s impossible to thrive when you don’t know the language, lack awareness of cultural norms, and question your own identity and value in a place - and it’s no different in organisations. This experience forged courage, resourcefulness, and intuition, setting her up for success in guiding governance, coaching leaders, and uniting teams in enabling alignment.
In her early career as a strategic adviser in agency, brand, and communication, she was frustrated seeing gaps and missed opportunities at the leadership level that hampered work due to misalignment.
This inspired her global-first study with Wayne Aspland, examining alignment, leadership, and communications, and she's never looked back.
Combining an award-winning career with vast commercial and board director experience and her alignment methodology, she now guides clients to optimise simplicity, process, and team contribution. The outcomes are stronger leadership and cultures, clarity, and organisations aligned to purpose and strategy.
Instagram @bec_chappell LinkedIn – Bec Chappell If you're ready to work together, I'm ready to work with you and your team.
How to work with me: 1. Marketing foundations and strategy consultation 2. Marketing Coaching/ Whispering for you a marketing leader or your team who you want to develop into marketing leaders 3. Book me as a speaker or advisor for your organisation 4. Get me on your podcast
So what does Cohesion have to do with marketing? I am so glad you asked! Lots!
In this episode, I have Marketing Extraordinaire Zora Artis join me and she is gifting us her wisdom on nurturing a culture of alignment and sharing strategies that ensure your company's vision resonates at every level in order to propel your brand to success.
We dive deep into the challenges and triumphs in crafting a high-performing business through the lens of alignment and cohesion.
We tackle head-on the issues that rapidly growing companies often face—like siloed departments and conflicting objectives—providing practical advice for leadership to keep the ship sailing smoothly.
Hearing from Zora offers a unique perspective on maintaining unity and purpose.
Whether you're a budding entrepreneur or a seasoned executive, the conversation is a treasure trove of actionable insights that can reshape the way you think about and implement brand strategy.
As Australia’s leading Alignment, Communication and Brand Strategist, Zora teaches and advises Executive and Senior leaders to unlock the value in their people, brands and organisations to build high-performing organisations that deliver positive impact and strategic outcomes.
she's been in the business of strategic alignment all her life. her family immigrated three times before she was 13, so she was always the ‘odd one out'. It’s impossible to thrive when you don’t know the language, lack awareness of cultural norms, and question your own identity and value in a place - and it’s no different in organisations. This experience forged courage, resourcefulness, and intuition, setting her up for success in guiding governance, coaching leaders, and uniting teams in enabling alignment.
In her early career as a strategic adviser in agency, brand, and communication, she was frustrated seeing gaps and missed opportunities at the leadership level that hampered work due to misalignment.
This inspired her global-first study with Wayne Aspland, examining alignment, leadership, and communications, and she's never looked back.
Combining an award-winning career with vast commercial and board director experience and her alignment methodology, she now guides clients to optimise simplicity, process, and team contribution. The outcomes are stronger leadership and cultures, clarity, and organisations aligned to purpose and strategy.
Instagram @bec_chappell LinkedIn – Bec Chappell If you're ready to work together, I'm ready to work with you and your team.
How to work with me: 1. Marketing foundations and strategy consultation 2. Marketing Coaching/ Whispering for you a marketing leader or your team who you want to develop into marketing leaders 3. Book me as a speaker or advisor for your organisation 4. Get me on your podcast
Hello, hello, welcome back to another episode of Marketing Espresso. I am so grateful you have chosen this podcast to listen to. It does not get by me that there are so many podcasts that you could choose to listen to, so the fact that you're tuning into this one means the world to me. What you could do to help me continue producing the podcast and, you know, give me a little bit of excitement about it and see a bump in my numbers is to share it with someone that you know could really benefit from the information that we share in the podcast, whether it be me myself or with one of my guests, or just hit subscribe, because that also makes me know that you're always going to get every episode that drops, or leave me a review. I would love to see that. I always go and check them every other week, and when I get new ones it's so damn exciting. So they're the three things that I kind of ask my listeners to do. If you're new to the potty, welcome. I hope that you get the most out of this episode. Now I'm excited because it's a Tuesday and that means we have a guest on, and today's guest is pretty bloody exceptional. If I'm honest, I think all of my guests are pretty bloody exceptional, but Zora Artis, who is on today is yeah, she's truly incredible and the knowledge that you will hear in this episode I'm sure that you will agree. She has such an incredible background with the wealth of knowledge that she does the research components of the work she does, so it's very exciting to have her on the potty today. She is Australia's leading alignment, communication and brand strategist.
Speaker 1:
Zora teaches and advises executive and senior leaders to unlock the value in their people, brands and organizations to build high-performing organizations that deliver positive impact and strategic outcomes. She's been in the business of strategic alignment her whole life. Her family immigrated three times before she was 13, so she was always the odd one out. It's impossible to thrive when you don't know the language, lack awareness of the cultural norms and question your own identity and value in a place, and it's no different in organizations. This experience forged courage, resourcefulness and intuition, setting her up for success in guiding governance, coaching leaders and uniting teams in enabling alignment. In her early career as a strategic advisor in agency brand and communication, she was frustrated seeing gaps and missed opportunities at the leadership level that hampered work due to misalignment. This inspired her global first study with Wayne Asplund, examining alignment, leadership and communications, and she's never looked back. Combining an award-winning career with vast commercial and board director experience and her alignment methodology, she now guides clients to optimize simplicity, process and team contribution, the outcomes of stronger leadership and cultures, clarity and organizations aligned to purpose and strategy.
Speaker 1:
As I said, it's a real honor to have Zora on the show today and I hope that you love this episode. All her details will be in the show notes, as always. Reach out, say hi to me, say hi to Zora. We would love to have a chat. I hope you love this episode, zora. Thank you so much for joining me today. Oh, can't wait to have a chat. I feel like this has been a long time in the making, because you and I have been in each other's world for way too long and not done this.
Speaker 2:
It has been a while, but it's been so good getting to know you over these years.
Speaker 1:
Yeah, likewise. So for a bit of background, because I didn't do this in the intro, but Zora is someone that I've actually really looked up to since I've known her, because she is an incredible marketer with an incredible history behind her, which we won't go into today. But if you listen to this episode, I 100% tell you go check out Zora's LinkedIn and learn about Zora, because she is incredible. But we will jump into today's topic, which is all about cohesion, because I love this word. You love this word. It's part of your model and the work that you do, and I thought let's just talk about the fact that you know, we see brands all around the world that we think do so so well and we think that it's actually just the marketing behind them or the fact they built this brand, but we don't even think about what's below the surface of that, and a lot of the time, it's cohesion.
Speaker 2:
It is, it is cohesion, it is, it is. And at the center of cohesion, uh, or also, what I would like to say is alignment is unity basically so it's making sure that everyone understands what their role is.
Speaker 2:
Everyone understands what the direction is, so there's shared understanding of where they're going, why they're doing it and what that means and how they can actually contribute to it. So getting everyone together and on the same page, even if they have differing perspectives, is really, really important, and you need to be able to build that cohesion in order to create a healthy organization, so one that's sustainable long-term but also has a really positive culture, and one that is high performing as well.
Speaker 1:
Yeah, a hundred percent, because I think one of the things like I've seen brands really not, I guess, leave the station.
Speaker 1:
They've kind of been stuck at the platform and they've got these really great ideas and it's like they should be doing so well. They should be making all of these sales, doing all of these things. And you lift the lid on the business a little bit and you see that they've just got all of these siloed teams doing whatever the hell they want. And that's kind of, I guess, because what I've seen in my career is businesses grow too quick and before you know it, you have all these people entering the business and coming in, but they're not. They might have the world's greatest onboarding, like best practice onboarding, but what they forget to actually do is, you know, tell the story of the brand, I think, and get people really on board. I think from the second someone sits in front of you for an interview, you want to know that they're going to be on that the same. They're going to be aligned with the brand vision and the brand journey. Is that sort of what you've seen as well.
Speaker 2:
I have seen a lot of organizations where there's a lot of siloed and potentially even fractured teams and the issue with that is a team could be aligned as a team to specific visions and goals for the team, but if that is not aligned to the overarching organisational direction and goals and priorities, then that becomes really problematic. Then you have these sort of free range teams instead of aligned teams and so as soon as you've got these free range teams that could be highly engaged but they're not aligned overall, that becomes a real problem. You've got an issue around misalignment and the problem with that is also that leaders don't necessarily want to change that because they're measured on how well their teams are performing. But if they're not performing to the right metrics and goals, then it's a huge missed opportunity for the organisation overall and for the brands as well.
Speaker 1:
That's a huge point. I've never actually even thought about that. The fact that leaders, obviously they're KPI'd on their team. They're not KPI'd on or they might have one KPI, for example. That goes back to the organization goals, but generally it's it is about the performance of their team or the turnover of their team or whatever it is. They're never actually these strategic aligned goals. Where I've seen it in one business where they had this, they were doing this quite well, like everyone had to report into the same goal metrics, but people were up in arms about it because they're like but my job doesn't relate to that, I'm like, no, but it does.
Speaker 2:
See, that's because they genuinely don't understand how they fit in.
Speaker 1:
Yeah.
Speaker 2:
And it is up to leaders, particularly at CEO level, and then tiers down all the way down to the people leader. It is up to them to actually understand that big picture and how it all fits together. So you know, you've got your overarching purpose, why the organisation exists, which is a pretty fundamental one. The strategy is like you know, what are we going to win at and how we're going to win? How does all that fit together with what you know the individual on the front line is doing?
Speaker 2:
You know, do they actually get it? And if their people, leaders and the managers and their senior leaders don't understand the overarching picture and how it all cascades down and how to have the right sort of conversations, you can't create that unity because they haven't got the clarity that they need. So the conversations and the communication becomes really important to ensure that you've got that alignment and you can create that cohesive team.
Speaker 1:
Yeah, I love that. So what for you, do you think of the like I'm going to use the term because, like, everyone's using it these days what are the red flags Like? What other than, obviously, for me, the thing that comes up as a marketer and as someone that used to have to deal with sales teams all the time, the thing that always came up with was lead, quality and conversion and obviously, sales, right, lead, quantity, quality, conversion, sales. Obviously, you would know a whole other bunch of markers that come up that are like we don't have cohesion, we don't actually have alignment across the entire business. We've got teams that are aligned, but there's all this mismatch happening. What do you think kind of shows us the key things? That are like little red flags.
Speaker 2:
It's around priorities, what the priorities are Generally.
Speaker 2:
There's a lot of, there's some data. I don't have all the facts in front of me, but there is a fair bit of data that shows that sales and marketing teams are often misaligned. And that becomes really problematic, clearly because you know the marketers are doing their job to try and ensure that, you know, the pool of potential leads is right, you know, for the salespeople to be able to convert them. And if they're not targeting the right people, if they're not putting out the right messages, if the brand isn't meeting or delivering on the promise, all of that sort of stuff, and the salespeople are doing something else, you're going to have all these missed opportunities. So your bottom line is going to be heavily impacted. Engagement is going to be impacted because people, whether they're in marketing or sales, they're going to get peeved off with each other and with what they're doing marketing or sales, they're going to get peeved off with each other and with what they're doing. And then, overarchingly, you know the people they report into aren't going to be, you know, very happy either.
Speaker 2:
So you're going to have lots of issues around that. So they really need to make sure that they've got, you know, a shared understanding and shared meaning of the goals and the priorities for sales and marketing and brand overall, and that needs to align back to whatever the business issue is that they're trying to work to.
Speaker 1:
Yeah, I think that was a key thing and like I joke about this all the time sales and marketing misalignment. Like you know, I went on a date with a sales manager a couple of months ago and I was like well, I just don't think this can work.
Speaker 2:
The marketer and the salesperson, not combining.
Speaker 1:
I've never seen it happen before, so I don't see how this could be a relationship that's going to be any good.
Speaker 2:
That's an analogy I've never used.
Speaker 1:
But it's definitely like I feel like I. That's where I've always felt myself personally when I've been in, like you know, head marketing roles and things is this sales have always come at me and I'm always like whoa guys, like can we just get along, like for one minute, and it's a huge struggle. And like I get the sales team's frustration right Because they're like just, they're doers, they're the doers right, and obviously us marketing people yes, we're the doers to some extent, but we're also the dreamers. You know, like we want our brand to grow. We want it to grow in a certain way. We want the sales team to fit into it like to what we're trying to achieve as well and be happy with what we're doing.
Speaker 1:
But there is always, I think, that constant struggle, and the other one I always felt was like with customer service teams and marketing, because that was like we were like oh, here's the message that we need you to deliver. And now, why Like? And I think this fundamental why is actually really important and that I think that purpose right, that that organizational purpose and actually getting everyone on that journey that in itself is like such an important thing to get done, I think.
Speaker 2:
And you you mentioned earlier, you know when you're onboarding people. Often you find that that onboarding process, which starts before any people actually apply for the job, by the way, it starts earlier, when they're in the market and they're checking out your website and they're talking to people who might know your brand, all that sort of stuff. So you want to make sure that the brand experience is right even before they start with you. So, yeah, I love that. That's really important. So making sure that the experience people have once they are on board is the right one. So you have to spend time defining what that is. So you need to have that level of cohesion across the experiences.
Speaker 2:
So you know your employee experience, the enablement side of digital, and also then you know that with customer experience, because I think it was Richard Branson that said something along the lines that if you want to have happy customers, make sure you have happy employees and that's paraphrasing, that's not word for word.
Speaker 2:
So you know making sure that you've created the right experience for people within the organisation is going to help with customer experience and, in turn, what that brand experience is. So you build if you do it right, and at the centre of that is the alignment of you know, promise, purpose, values and vision, and leaders have to embody that and constantly reinforce it. If you do all that really well, then you're going to create this brand experience which people can't copy or other organizations can't copy. So if you can create the right type of experience across the board and this is a bit of utopia here but if you can make the effort to do it, you're going to be much more sustainable in the long run, because people can't copy that, they can copy product but they can't copy an experience, because it depends on your people.
Speaker 1:
Yeah, and they can actually even copy, like your marketing strategy, really, because they can be like yep, like I know how much they're spending on Facebook ads, I know what they're doing on Google, I know like they can literally match you. And you're right, like people say, like you know people will be like what is like what's the most important thing in marketing and I think you've actually just touched on it it is a hundred percent the experiences you create for people and that is brand and it your brand and your marketing is actually not at the core, I believe, at the core of your business. I think you're leaving. I think you're not building a sustainable business, because none of these brands that we see built that are solid brands that actually stand on their own two feet and they don't even really need marketing budgets, let's be honest because they're just known as a brand.
Speaker 1:
You know your apples, your Coca-Cola, to an extent like Rolex, like all of these incredible brands, they've been built because of an experience or a uniqueness to them and they've gotten it right, like there are brands out there that people like line up to try and work at because they know the experience is so incredible, you know, and it is so different to what anyone else is offering, or but it's just, it is created from this core brand piece that I think it doesn't matter the size of your business. This this starts from the day. It's just you in a garage, actually, it's it's yeah, in the garage, exactly it's.
Speaker 2:
it is about being clear on the positioning. What are those associations that you want people to have in their mind when they encounter your brand? And that has to be reinforced through every single touch point, every single channel that they're experiencing your brand in, whether that's face-to-face, digitally, whether it's through social, whether it's through salespeople, whether it's through operations, written communication all of that is going to be experienced through that. So you do have to have this overarching clear positioning for the brand, and that includes the experience.
Speaker 1:
Yeah, I love that. I think that's so helpful. So, if someone's seen all those red flags and they're like, oh God, like how do I? Because I think the thing as a business owner too is, especially if I mentioned that example like you've grown quickly, right, because what you've got to offer, you have a huge market for it and you've just ballooned because you've built a good brand, potentially, and you're known in the market, or you had good backing, whatever it is. You've got all these people on board and maybe you haven't quite got that brand, that experience bit, right, right, how do you start to turn the ship around if you've built a bit of a behemoth? That's completely misaligned. What's one tip you could give someone?
Speaker 2:
Well, so you need to make sure that you've got the commitment at the CEO level for alignment. And alignment is not a tick-the-box exercise, a once-off exercise. It's a continual effort by people within the business. So you need to be recognising the red flags. You need to be comfortable to acknowledge that there's a problem and a lot of people.
Speaker 2:
What I find with alignment in particular is that leaders aren't necessarily comfortable looking in the mirror if there's a misalignment issue and the reason they're not comfortable is because it potentially reflects on them and they don't necessarily want to address that or prioritise that, whereas those that are comfortable and have that growth mindset and know that they can do better and it'll have a benefit on the bottom line it definitely has an impact on the bottom line as well as talent retention and acquisition and all of those sorts of things they're the ones who are actually going to say, yeah, let's diagnose the issue, let's have a look at it, what's the misalignment gap that we have? And then you talk about it. You actually look at what the issues are and talk it through with the right people in the room in a respectful way, understand all the different perspectives in there and build a bridge and work out what is the action to take, and that diagnostic and then that dialogic process, that conversation is really critical to making sure that you end up with an action plan that people can commit to and own and actually do, rather than just going ahead and engaging a consultant or whatever and getting a diagnostic, getting a report and then go, oh great, okay, we now know that we've done that, we'll keep going on to the next priority. It doesn't work that way. It's a continual process.
Speaker 1:
Yeah, I love that. That's excellent advice. Well, thank you so much for joining me today. Now I'm going to put all your details in the show notes. But how can people find you if they want to deep dive into a little bit more of the Zora genius that you are, the Zora genius.
Speaker 2:
They can find me on LinkedIn. It's pretty straightforward, Zora artists. And they can also find me online at artistadvisorycom Amazing.
