A challenger cognac brand wanted to become the category leader in the US. As part of its leadership team, I knew we had opportunities to expand distribution, add products to the lineup, and raise prices selectively. But even after accounting for those moves, the growth gap remained. Our revenue targets were growing faster than our operating budget every year.
We couldn't spend our way to the goal, so we had to get better at producing growth.
That meant changing the question. Instead of asking what campaigns we should run next year, we asked what we could build today that would make growth easier tomorrow.
Find the Growth You're Missing
Imagine your business has a five-year revenue ambition. Now project where it will end up if you maintain roughly the same products, pricing, investment, capabilities, and trajectory you have today.
The space between those two futures is your growth gap, and closing it requires growth from somewhere. I think about it in three ways: Sell More, Charge More or Create More.
Sell more by increasing penetration, retention, distribution or adoption. Charge more by increasing what consumers believe an offering is worth. Create more by developing new sources of revenue through products, services, markets, channels, audiences or business models.
Most businesses need some combination of all three, but identifying the opportunity is only the start. The more important question is what the business needs to build to capture it repeatedly.
Stop Starting From Scratch
For the cognac brand, cultural relevance became an important part of the answer.
We had been executing celebrity events, but we needed those moments to matter beyond the people who were in the room. An event could generate attention that night, but what could we do to extend that attention, create commercial opportunities, and make people who weren't there wish they had been?
We changed how we worked.
We established standards and guardrails, stocked event assets in warehouses across the country, and identified on-call staff who could execute events without us. Instead of rebuilding the operation every time, we created a system that made execution easier.
That gave us more room to focus on the questions that could make each activation more valuable: How could we drive local sales? What would motivate a celebrity to post organically? What would make the event newsworthy and worth talking about?
Over time, our cultural relevance scores increased, and the brand became the category leader. But the bigger lesson was how we got there: we built a better way to turn cultural moments into business opportunities.
The same principle applies to customer acquisition and pricing. Better distribution makes a brand easier to find. Better experiences can increase retention. Community and advocacy can help bring in new customers. And when a brand builds emotional value, cultural relevance or a stronger sense of identity, consumers have more reason to choose it and potentially pay a premium.
The goal isn't just to win the next sale. It's to make the next sale easier to earn.
Make Room for Better Thinking
Sometimes selling more and charging more still aren't enough. The business needs entirely new sources of growth. That requires learning from launches, understanding which problems consumers care enough to solve, and making the next innovation better informed than the last.
AI is making it faster and cheaper to produce campaigns, content, and analysis. But more output doesn’t automatically mean more growth. The opportunity is to use that capacity for what still requires human judgment: recognizing unmet needs, understanding culture, and connecting ideas in ways that create commercial value.
When I led Duke & Dame Whiskey, I looked for ways to connect the brand to conversations consumers were already having, rather than just producing more holiday cocktail ads.
One opportunity came from Starbucks’ seasonal holiday drinks. We knew consumers enjoyed our salted caramel whiskey with coffee, so I saw a chance to bring the two together. Working with the brand’s founders, I developed three cocktails using Starbucks’ holiday drinks and prepared to bring them to market as soon as the seasonal flavors launched.
We launched the cocktails into the market the same day the Starbucks flavors dropped, and we were doing live demos online and on TV shows just a week later.
The opportunity wasn’t just to make content faster. It was to recognize a cultural moment, connect it to something consumers already enjoyed, and act while the conversation was happening. That’s the kind of advantage technology should help create: more room for people to spot the right opportunity and do something meaningful with it.
What Remains When the Spend Stops?
The best marketing investments do two jobs: they create an outcome today and build an advantage for tomorrow. That advantage might be brand equity, powerful customer insights, better distribution, stronger community and relationships, or the knowledge to make smarter decisions next time.
Before approving your next campaign, initiative or investment, ask two questions: What result will this deliver today? And what will it build that makes the next result easier to achieve?
If your marketing can answer both, you're doing more than producing a result. You're building a growth system.
