Champions Adjust: Four Lessons for Marketing Leaders in a Moment of Rapid Change
- Apr 10
- 6 min read
Updated: Apr 13
Marketing leaders today feel pressure from every direction. They need to move faster, prove more, and keep pace with a market that keeps shifting beneath them. AI only accelerates that change.
Julie Bernard, currently serving as Interim Chief Marketing Officer for Authority Brands where she is also a board member, has spent years in executive leadership and strategy roles across a wide range of industries, with deep B2B and B2C expertise in AI, retail, and mobile, applying an approach that blends analytics, insights and human connection. While this moment may feel new, she argues that the best marketing leaders still win by doing a few fundamentals exceptionally well: they understand people. They use data to drive action, not stall it. They tie their work directly to business outcomes. And when the ground shifts, they adjust.
Let’s hear more from her insightful interview with Scott Kabat, CEO and Founder of 621 Consulting.
1. Marketing Still Starts With How People Feel
The tools may change fast, but the core of marketing doesn’t. People don’t just buy products; they buy who they believe they are, how they want to feel, and what feels relevant to their world, not just product function or service utility.
Bernard learned that early in her career at Saks Fifth Avenue, where the brand was never just about the details of a product. It was about what those details meant to the person buying it. “Nobody really needs an $8,000 suit,” she said. “What they’re buying is the feeling that comes with it…the confidence of wearing something meticulously crafted, the knowledge that it was shaped by human hands over hours, not mass-produced, that the lining is hand-stitched, not glued. It’s not the suit itself; rather, it’s all about what it represents when they wear it.”
That lesson stayed with her as she later moved into B2B senior leadership roles. Bernard finds that too many teams jump straight to messaging and miss the emotional center of the story. They get fixated on “the deck” instead of the connection. B2B buyers may evaluate software instead of luxury goods, but they still ask some version of the same question: what does this do for me?
In fact, in B2B, that question often carries even higher stakes. “You’re not just selling a platform, a software solution, or agentic capabilities. Instead, you’re speaking to someone’s reputation, their ambition, their risk tolerance,” she says. “They’re asking: will this make me successful? Will this move my business forward and how quickly will we realize that tangible impact?”
Different category, same human truth.
2. Data Only Matters If It Leads to Impact
“I’m trying to get us all to stop talking about data,” Bernard says. “It’s thoroughly uninspiring in and of itself. Data is messy, inelegant, infinite, ever-changing, and abundant. It’s critical of course, however it’s not the ultimate asset we should focus on. The real value lies in the insight we uncover, the actions we take, and the impact we deliver.”
What’s more interesting, she says, is what teams do with the insights they derive from data. Bernard’s framework is simple: what, so what, now what, and ultimately, what impact.
“What” is the observation. “So what” is the interpretation. “Now what” is the action. “Impact” is the outcome that proves it mattered.
In one mobile advertising case, the what was clear: contractors were making large bulk purchases at a big-box home improvement retailer, but rarely buying the smaller, fill-in items needed to complete jobs. Location-based mobile data showed that once on-site, they were instead visiting nearby hardware stores.
The so what: there was a significant, untapped revenue opportunity in those ancillary purchases.
The now what: the retailer launched a program to deliver those smaller items directly to the job site, eliminating the need for contractors to leave and source them elsewhere.
The impact: increased basket size, higher customer lifetime value, and a stronger share of wallet because the retailer removed friction at the exact moment of need.
“In fast-moving environments, data should speed up decisions, not slow them down,” she says. “The goal is not perfect information. It is enough signal to form a hypothesis, test it, learn and scale.”
That is also where she sees AI becoming genuinely useful - not as a replacement for judgment, but as a way to find patterns faster and shorten the cycle between insight and action.
3. Early Alignment and the Right Metrics Build Marketing Credibility
In moments of rapid change, marketers do not get the luxury of choosing between experimentation and accountability. They need both.
As an SVP at Macy’s, Bernard ran a high profile test tied to driving more store visits per year from a portion of the customer base. The upside was huge. But when the first test performed well, the CFO did not believe it. So, they ran it again.
What changed the second time was not the ambition of the work. It was the process around it. Bernard brought the CFO in earlier, aligned on what success would look like, and built shared confidence in the methodology before the results came in.
“Credibility is not something marketers earn after the fact by spinning results,” said Bernard. “It is something they build before the test is ever run by aligning on what matters and being transparent about what does and does not work.”
She focuses on metrics in these conversations, especially what matters to a CFO. That means tying marketing efforts to margin, profitability, revenue, growth...good ol’ fashioned cash in the bank metrics.
“In the end,” Bernard says, “marketing experiments are only powerful when they’re accountable experiments. You can’t have one without the other.”
4. AI’s Real Disruption is the Speed of Change
“We are in the wild, wild west days,” Bernard says of AI. “In 20-30 years, people will look back on this moment as bigger than Tim Berners-Lee’s invention of the world wide web as we know it..”
The pace of improvement is what’s truly disruptive, she says, and it’s why leaders need a different mindset now. “Be prepared to be unprepared.”
That does not mean outsourcing strategy to AI or assuming the tools can do the thinking for you. In fact, Bernard is clear that judgment matters more, not less, as the tools get better. AI can help detect patterns. It can act as a collaborator. It can push on an idea and help teams move faster. But it should not replace the human ability to decide what is responsible, useful, or worth doing.
That matters because the ethical line gets easier to cross as capabilities expand. “Just because you can doesn’t mean you should,” she adds. This tension is going to grow.
The marketers who stand out will be the ones using AI with greater creativity and more discipline.
“And let’s be real here too. Everyone is talking about AI like it’s a solved game, but the reality is far messier. Most people haven’t fully tapped its potential. The reality is that most marketers are learning as they go, still finding their footing - navigating a pace of change that would unsettle anyone, and feeling the pressure of moving faster than ever. There’s a lot of AI confidence theater: everyone seems to have it figured out, which makes people hesitate to ask fundamental questions. Meanwhile, the skills they’ve spent years mastering are rapidly losing leverage, efficiency gains are immediately absorbed into higher expectations, and the economic consequences are uncertain. And yet, this moment is also a huge professional and commercial opportunity. Marketers who focus on insight, creativity, judgment, empathy and human connection will thrive.”
In Times of Change, Champions Adjust
At a time when new tools, channels, and expectations are constantly reshaping the role of marketing, it’s easy to assume everything has changed. But Bernard’s approach suggests otherwise.
The fundamentals still hold. Understand your customer. Act on what you learn. Prove impact. And stay adaptable as the context shifts.
The marketers who do this consistently won’t just keep up, they’ll lead through it.
As Bernard puts it: champions adjust.
This is an unprecedented moment for marketers. We’re here to help you make sense of it – you can explore some of our past CEO and CMO perspectives on the 621 Consulting Blog:
