Why SurveyMonkey’s Marketing Leader Says Your Foundation Is Broken

Marketing teams love a shiny object. A new AI tool? Download it. A trending meme? Brief the designer. A social platform is suddenly “where the audience is”? Somebody call legal and make sure the brand can say “slay” without causing a shareholder incident.

But Katie Miserany, SurveyMonkey’s Chief Communications Officer and Global Head of Marketing, has a less glittery and far more useful message for modern marketers: if your foundation is broken, more tactics will not save you. More content will not save you. More AI-generated “thought leadership” with the emotional texture of hotel oatmeal will definitely not save you.

Her argument lands because it is both simple and deeply inconvenient. The problem with many marketing organizations is not that they lack tools, channels, dashboards, or enthusiasm. The problem is that they lack discipline. They have not clearly defined what they stand for, who they serve, what customers actually need, and how every campaign should reinforce that truth. So they sprint from one idea to the next, mistaking motion for momentum.

In other words, your marketing foundation is not broken because you are not doing enough. It may be broken because you are doing too much without a clear reason.

The Real Meaning of a “Broken Marketing Foundation”

A broken marketing foundation is not always dramatic. It does not arrive wearing a villain cape and knocking over your CRM. It usually looks normal from the outside: campaigns are launching, newsletters are going out, paid ads are running, social posts are scheduled, and somebody is definitely making a 47-slide deck called “Q3 Learnings.”

The trouble appears when you ask basic questions. Who exactly is this campaign for? What customer problem are we solving? Why should this message come from us? What does success mean beyond “engagement”? What should people remember after seeing this five times?

If the answers are vague, your foundation is wobbling. If every department describes the brand differently, the concrete is cracking. If your team chases every trend because “we need to be part of the conversation,” congratulations: you have built a marketing house on a trampoline.

Miserany’s core point is that B2B marketing strategy requires more than cleverness. It requires a rooted understanding of customer needs, a consistent message, and the self-control to ignore opportunities that look exciting but do not support the business. That last part hurts. Marketers are naturally curious. We see a trend and think, “Should we do something with this?” Often, the smarter question is, “Should anyone care if we do?”

Lesson One: Stop Committing Random Acts of Marketing

One of Miserany’s clearest warnings is against scattered, opportunistic marketing. The temptation is understandable. News cycles move fast. AI makes production faster. Every platform rewards speed. And marketing teams are often under pressure to prove they are “in the moment.”

But speed without strategy creates noise. It gives teams the thrill of activity without the compounding value of a strong brand narrative.

A useful example comes from SurveyMonkey’s own experience around the TikTok ban conversation. The team saw an opportunity to survey people about a hot cultural and business topic. It made sense on the surface: timely issue, public curiosity, data-driven company. But before their work could fully land, TikTok released its own study and naturally became the center of media attention. The lesson was not that SurveyMonkey should never respond to trends. The lesson was that relevance alone is not enough. Ownership matters.

Before jumping into a trend, marketers should ask: Does this topic connect to our core brand? Do we have a perspective that only we can credibly offer? Will this strengthen our relationship with customers? Or are we just running into the town square yelling, “We, too, have a PDF!”

Why Random Marketing Feels Productive

Random acts of marketing are dangerous because they feel responsible. A competitor posts daily, so your team posts daily. A rival sponsors an event, so your team wants a booth. A founder sees an AI-generated video on LinkedIn, and suddenly everyone is discussing whether the company needs a mascot with cheekbones.

These moves may create output, but output is not the same as strategy. Strong marketing foundation work forces prioritization. It asks teams to choose the few stories, audiences, and customer problems that matter most. That choice can feel uncomfortable because it means saying no to things that might work. But a brand that says yes to everything eventually sounds like it believes in nothing.

Lesson Two: Build the Foundation Before the Fireworks

Miserany’s time working on campaigns connected to workplace equity offers a powerful lesson: the planning phase is not a delay; it is the work. Many teams treat planning as the boring prequel before the exciting campaign launch. But in high-performing marketing organizations, planning is where the campaign earns its right to exist.

When teams invest in the foundation first, execution becomes easier. Messaging becomes clearer. Creative decisions become faster. Internal debates become less personal because the team has already agreed on the strategy. Instead of asking, “Do we like this?” the team can ask, “Does this serve the foundation?” That is a much better question, and it produces fewer meetings where everyone politely says “interesting” while silently losing the will to live.

One of the most practical ideas from Miserany’s approach is the creation of a shared messaging source of truth. In her example, the team used a central document that defined how the campaign should speak. If the approved language used one word, the team did not casually swap in a synonym because it “felt fresher.” Consistency was treated as a strategy, not a creative limitation.

Repetition Is Not Laziness

Marketers get bored with their own messaging long before customers even notice it. This is one of the industry’s great tragedies, right up there with naming every webinar “Unlocking Growth.”

Customers are busy. They do not attend your internal meetings. They do not lovingly analyze every campaign variation. They may encounter your brand in fragments: a search result, an email subject line, a podcast mention, a retargeting ad, a sales deck, a product page. If each fragment says something different, the customer has to do the work of assembling your meaning. Spoiler: they will not.

A strong marketing foundation makes repetition useful. It allows a company to repeat the same core promise in many formats without becoming robotic. The language may adapt by channel, but the strategy remains recognizable. That recognition is how brand memory forms.

Lesson Three: Know What Customers Actually Want From You

One of the sharpest ideas in Miserany’s view is that brands do not need to be cool; they need to be useful, credible, and memorable in the right way. SurveyMonkey is not trying to behave like a streetwear brand, a celebrity gossip account, or a mysterious beverage company with a neon budget. Its value is rooted in helping people ask better questions, collect feedback, and make smarter decisions.

That matters because many brands suffer from identity envy. They look at companies with louder cultural relevance and assume they need to become more entertaining, more provocative, or more “human,” which often means writing social posts like an intern trapped inside a brand guideline document.

But differentiation does not always come from being louder. It often comes from being more precise. SurveyMonkey’s advantage is not that it can comment on every conversation. Its advantage is that it helps organizations understand what people think, feel, prefer, and need. That is a powerful lane. The discipline is staying in it.

Customer Research Is Not Optional Decoration

Customer research should not be something marketers do after leadership has already fallen in love with an idea. It should happen before campaigns, before positioning decisions, before product messaging, and before the team spends three weeks debating whether the button should say “Get started” or “Start your journey.”

SurveyMonkey’s broader platform story reinforces this point. The company helps businesses gather customer feedback, employee input, product preferences, event responses, and market research. Its own marketing philosophy mirrors the product’s promise: do not guess when you can ask.

That does not mean every decision requires a 90-question survey. Please do not send your customers a survey that feels like applying for a mortgage. It means teams should build habits around listening. Test concepts. Validate assumptions. Ask prospects what language they use. Learn what customers value before deciding what the brand should shout from the rooftop.

AI Makes the Foundation More Important, Not Less

AI has changed marketing production dramatically. Teams can generate drafts, variations, outlines, ad concepts, summaries, images, and research prompts faster than ever. That speed is useful. It is also risky.

When a team has a strong marketing foundation, AI can help scale good thinking. It can turn a clear message into multiple channel formats. It can help analyze customer feedback. It can reduce repetitive work and give marketers more time for strategy and creative judgment.

But when the foundation is weak, AI simply accelerates confusion. It produces more content with less meaning. It amplifies inconsistent positioning. It gives teams the false comfort of volume. Suddenly the brand is publishing at machine speed while customers quietly wonder, “What are these people trying to say?”

This is why data foundation, customer insight, and brand positioning matter so much in the AI era. AI can remix, expand, and optimize, but it cannot decide your company’s purpose. It cannot replace hard choices about audience, value proposition, trust, and voice. If your strategy is foggy, AI will not clear the fog. It will generate 40 versions of the fog in different tones.

Scaffolding: The Difference Between a Tactic and a Campaign

Miserany also uses the idea of scaffolding, which is a practical way to turn one promising tactic into a more complete marketing system. A sponsorship, for example, is not automatically a strategy. A booth is not a strategy. A single webinar is not a strategy. A celebrity cameo is definitely not a strategy, although it may briefly make the finance team blink in Morse code.

Scaffolding asks: What surrounds this idea? How does it connect to the customer journey? What stories can we tell before, during, and after the activation? How can sales use it? How can customer success extend it? How can content, events, email, social, and product marketing reinforce the same message?

In the example of a potential Formula 1 sponsorship, the exciting part was not simply putting the brand near a fast car. The business value came from what could be built around it: a conference presence, a webinar, a nurture campaign, customer stories, and useful content. That is the move from “cool thing we bought” to “integrated experience we designed.”

Fewer Things, Better

Scaffolding also protects teams from fragmentation. Instead of launching ten disconnected ideas, a team can build one strong campaign with multiple connected expressions. This creates efficiency because the same foundation supports many assets. It creates clarity because the audience hears a consistent story. It creates measurement discipline because the team can evaluate a campaign ecosystem rather than isolated sparks.

For small and midsize businesses, this is especially important. Most SMB marketing teams do not have the budget, staff, or time to chase every opportunity. They need leverage. A strong idea with scaffolding can outperform a dozen random tactics because each piece supports the next.

What a Strong Marketing Foundation Actually Includes

A strong marketing foundation is not a mystical brand aura. It is a working system. It should be practical enough for a new hire to understand, useful enough for sales to apply, and clear enough for leadership to defend.

1. A Specific Audience

“Everyone” is not an audience. It is a panic attack in a spreadsheet. Even if many types of people can use your product, your campaigns need focus. Define the highest-priority segments, the buying committee, the decision triggers, and the problems that make customers seek a solution.

2. A Clear Customer Problem

Great marketing does not begin with “Here is what we sell.” It begins with “Here is what our customer is trying to solve.” The more clearly you understand the customer’s pain, the more useful your messaging becomes.

3. A Differentiated Point of View

Your point of view explains why your brand deserves attention. It should connect your expertise to a meaningful customer belief. SurveyMonkey’s point of view centers on asking, listening, and making decisions with feedback rather than assumptions.

4. A Messaging System

A messaging system includes positioning, value propositions, proof points, tone, approved phrases, and examples. It prevents every team from inventing its own version of the company. It also keeps AI-assisted content from wandering into generic-land, where every brand is “empowering teams to unlock seamless innovation.”

5. A Channel Strategy

Not every message belongs everywhere. A strong foundation defines where the audience is, what each channel is meant to do, and how channels work together. Search may capture intent. Events may build trust. Email may nurture. Social may create familiarity. The point is integration, not channel hoarding.

6. A Measurement Model

Marketing needs both brand and performance metrics. Clicks, leads, pipeline, conversion rates, customer acquisition cost, retention, awareness, preference, share of search, and customer sentiment all tell part of the story. The key is connecting creative work to business outcomes without pretending every valuable brand effect shows up instantly in a dashboard.

Why This Matters for B2B Marketing in 2026

B2B marketing is under pressure from every direction. Budgets are tight. AI is raising expectations for speed. Buyers are more informed. Content is everywhere. Executives want measurable growth. Customers want relevance and trust. In that environment, weak foundations become expensive.

A company with unclear positioning spends more to explain itself. A company with inconsistent messaging loses memory. A company without customer insight builds campaigns around internal assumptions. A company chasing trends burns team energy that should be spent deepening strategic advantage.

Meanwhile, the brands that win are often not the loudest. They are the most coherent. They know what customers value. They repeat the right message. They build campaigns that surround the buyer with helpful, consistent proof. They use AI as an accelerator, not a replacement for strategy.

Experience-Based Takeaways: How to Fix a Broken Foundation

From real-world marketing work, the fastest way to diagnose a broken foundation is to ask five people in the company to explain the brand in one sentence. If you get five wildly different answers, you do not have a messaging problem. You have a foundation problem wearing a fake mustache.

The next step is to gather the raw material. Talk to customers. Read sales calls. Review support tickets. Study win-loss notes. Look at search queries. Ask prospects what nearly stopped them from buying. Ask customers what they would miss if your product disappeared. The best positioning language often does not come from a brainstorming session. It comes from customers describing their world in plain English.

Once you have that material, create a simple foundation document. Do not make it 80 pages unless your secret goal is for no one to read it. Include the audience, problem, promise, proof, tone, approved language, forbidden clichés, and example messages for key channels. This becomes the team’s “well”the place everyone returns to before creating campaigns, ads, landing pages, event themes, sales decks, and AI prompts.

Then pressure-test the foundation with actual work. Take one upcoming campaign and rebuild it from the foundation outward. If the campaign idea does not connect to the customer problem, cut it. If the channel plan is scattered, simplify it. If the message sounds like any competitor could say it, sharpen it. If the only reason for doing something is “the CEO saw it on LinkedIn,” gently place that idea in the ceremonial parking lot.

Another useful practice is the “scaffold map.” Put the core campaign idea in the center of a page. Around it, map every supporting touchpoint: research report, landing page, webinar, sales enablement, executive post, customer story, nurture sequence, paid media, event activation, partner angle, and follow-up offer. Then remove anything that does not help the customer take the next step. This keeps the campaign integrated rather than inflated.

Finally, build a review rhythm. Strong foundations do not mean frozen foundations. Markets change. Customers evolve. AI changes how people search, compare, and buy. Review your positioning quarterly and your deep customer research at least annually. The goal is not to rewrite the brand every Tuesday. The goal is to keep the foundation strong enough to support new rooms.

The most important experience-based lesson is this: clarity feels slow at first and fast later. Teams that skip foundation work move quickly in the beginning, then lose time in revisions, confusion, misalignment, and underperforming campaigns. Teams that define the foundation upfront may appear slower for a few weeks, but they gain speed every time a decision becomes obvious.

Conclusion: The Foundation Is the Strategy

SurveyMonkey’s marketing leader is not arguing for boring marketing. She is arguing for marketing that knows why it exists. That is a much higher bar.

A strong foundation does not kill creativity. It gives creativity something solid to climb. It helps teams say no to distractions, use AI responsibly, repeat messages until customers remember them, and turn isolated tactics into integrated campaigns. It reminds marketers that the goal is not to be everywhere. The goal is to be meaningful in the places that matter.

So if your team feels busy but not effective, loud but not memorable, active but not aligned, the problem may not be your content calendar. It may be the slab underneath the whole operation. Fix that, and the rest of the house gets easier to build.