The Briefing:
Infrastructure doesn’t always feel like a marketing word. But it should.
Because sometimes the most powerful lever a marketer can pull isn’t a message or a campaign—it’s a system. A system that sees the customer sooner, follows them farther, and connects their journey across all the silos we’ve let calcify.
Let’s start with a real one.
When I was working at BraunAbility, we faced a challenge: different customer entry points across different systems. The company had acquired United Access, a large dealer group. But our data—and our visibility—stayed fragmented. Customers shopping for mobility solutions online might browse one site or the other. One path, one profile. The brand wasn’t unified in market—or in system.
So we started there.
We brought the two websites together under a single Adobe CMS. That alone gave us a shared view of the journey.Then we layered in Salesforce CDP, which extended visibility even to anonymized behavior—giving marketing the tools to act earlier and smarter.
This was about marketing, not manufacturing.It was about reach. And it worked.
Now imagine what comes next.
The ownership structure at the time included Mölnlycke and Permobil—companies focused on clinical care and personal mobility, respectively. Mölnlycke’s patient positioning products. Permobil’s wheelchairs and seat cushions. BraunAbility’s accessible vehicles.
Personal care at the clinical level.
Personal mobility at the individual level.
Household mobility at the transportation level.
If you connect those dots, you don’t just unify web platforms. You unify lives.You imagine a data network that begins at the hospital—and stays with the individual from recovery to independence. From chair to car to community.
But for that to happen, you need imagination. And you need fluency.
Even well-formed ideas will falter if the audience can’t see the shape of what you’re building.
Big Rock Sports is a distributor that serves thousands of independent hunting, fishing, and shooting retailers. When I arrived, one of the clearest opportunities wasn’t in their front-end marketing—it was in their operational blind spots.
They couldn’t forecast cleanly.Why? Because they had no consistent visibility into what was selling downstream.
The fix? Provide—not just unify—a POS platform for their retail partners.Give dealers tools that simplify selling while giving Big Rock insight into real demand. Use that to forecast smarter, reduce returns, and optimize the warehouse.
That’s phase one.
Now imagine phase two.
Big Rock already runs pick-and-pack logistics for thousands of SKUs. What if they leveraged that strength to scale a retail storefront engine across their network? Marry the data to the delivery. Give their independents a chance to win in the same way DTC brands do—without surrendering to them.
Own the infrastructure. Own the insight. And everyone wins.
Closing Thoughts:
It’s easy to dismiss data infrastructure as IT’s job. Or as a back-end cost center.But when marketing stewards the system, you don’t just gain clarity—you gain control.
The truth is, strategic marketing interventions often start with structure.And the value of that structure compounds.
But here’s the catch:Ideas like these don’t just need imagination. They need buy-in.And buy-in requires fluency.
If the room doesn’t understand the technology—or the potential—you can’t fault them for missing the vision. And if only one voice sees the future, it won’t carry far.
That’s the real opportunity:To build systems that serve the business today.And inspire belief in what comes next.
That’s how you build a moat.In stages. With story. With strategy.
And with people who can see what you see.