Customer Experience & Marketing
Specialists in building loyalty, shaping brand perception, and turning customer relationships into competitive advantage
Speakers Associates represents 260 speakers on Customer Experience & Marketing, including Arnt Eriksen, Peter Fisk, Mark Ritson, Purna Virji, Tom Goodwin, Kayleigh Fazan, Blake Morgan, Marc Saltzman, Liv Marks and Chris Endersby.
Most brands and most professionals are not boring. They are forgettable, which is worse. The question is not how to add more messaging into a saturated market, but how to identify the specific traits that make a company, a product, or a senior leader the one buyers actually choose to remember and recommend.
Most marketing budgets are run as a performance machine that can be measured, with brand work tolerated as overhead. When growth slows, the brand half is cut first and the performance half stops working. Leaders need to defend why both layers exist, on grounds a CFO will accept.
Most consumer businesses that scale lose the thing that made them work in the first place. The discipline that turns a single idea into a chain, then a chain into a public company, then a public company into something worth holding privately, is rarely taught and rarely survived. Founders who have run that full arc, in person, with their own capital at stake, are unusual.
Most organisations spend heavily on brand expression and almost nothing on what the brand actually feels like to a customer in the moment of contact. The gap between the promise on the website and the conversation at the till, the call centre or the renewal email is where loyalty quietly leaks. Closing that gap is a leadership and culture problem, not a marketing one.
Leadership teams know disruption is constant. The harder question is how to make decisions today that hold up against a future they cannot yet see. Most foresight work stalls in the slide deck, never reaching the operating choices about products, talent, and customers where the value actually sits.
Brand trust has collapsed faster than most marketing functions can rebuild it. Customers, employees and investors now treat corporate claims as suspect by default, and the playbooks that worked when trust was assumed produce diminishing returns. The harder question is what an authentic commercial proposition looks like when audiences arrive sceptical, and how to plan brand and innovation strategy when the operating environment keeps shifting underneath the plan.
A heritage industry built on horsepower and showroom theatre now lives or dies by what creators post on a phone screen. Marketers in cars, watches, hospitality and lifestyle goods are spending more on influencer-led content than ever, with less idea of what actually drives a sale. The gap between a sponsorship line item and a credible audience relationship is where most brand budgets quietly leak.
Attrition has stopped being an HR problem and become a strategic one. Engagement scores fall, top performers leave, customer loyalty thins, and the usual response, more perks, more comms, more pulse surveys, fails to touch the underlying issue. The work is rebuilding the reason people commit to an organisation in the first place.
Most large companies now talk about purpose, but the operating reality stalls inside marketing, legal and finance. Boards want a credible answer on how a mission can sit at the centre of a product, a brand and a P&L without becoming a slogan. The harder question is how to build a business where purpose is a growth engine rather than a cost centre.
Customers and employees rarely behave the way strategy decks predict. Brand teams optimise messages, pricing models test cleanly, CX programmes look complete on paper, and the actual revenue, retention and engagement numbers still drift. The gap is the human one, and most commercial functions have no disciplined way to close it.
Workforces are exhausted. Engagement scores have stalled, attrition is expensive, and the people meant to deliver the customer experience are running on empty. Leaders need a credible read on what restores commitment, energy, and service quality in a workforce that has been asked to do more for longer.
Most organisations know what they want to look like; far fewer understand how entrepreneurs actually build a brand from nothing with limited capital and no existing market. The practical question is not a chief executive’s question. It is an operator’s: how do you negotiate supplier terms, design an experience, and finance growth when the idea is still a sketch and the competitors are ignoring it.