Marketing Without Listening Is Just Promotion

Marketers love to say they “listen to the customer.” CX teams actually do, every day. But too often, those insights never connect, and when that gap exists, it shows.

Marketing builds strategies and messaging based on assumptions, outdated personas, or data in a vacuum. Meanwhile, CX teams are collecting real-time feedback about what customers need, expect, and experience every day. When those two groups aren’t aligned, the brand promise and the customer reality start to drift apart. And customers feel it before the business does.

If your marketing and CX teams don’t speak the same language, or worse, don’t speak at all, what you’re sending out is just noise. Not strategy.

The Divide: Why These Teams Drift Apart

Even in well-run organizations, CX and Marketing often operate on different planes:

  • Marketing is focused on acquisition, positioning, demand

  • CX/CS is focused on retention, satisfaction, loyalty

  • One is shaping perception. The other is responding to reality

Even if both teams are high-functioning, they’re rarely planning together, and when that happens, things get disconnected fast:

  • Campaigns make promises the experience can’t fulfill

  • Creative misses real customer friction points

  • Brand tone feels aspirational while support teams are handling frustration

  • Messaging is optimized for performance, not aligned with feedback

“When CX and Marketing don’t speak, the customer becomes the translator, and that’s not their job.”

A Real-World Example

A SaaS company promotes “effortless onboarding” as the core message in a new campaign.
But CX has been flagging integration issues for weeks. Support tickets have spiked.
Still, the campaign launches.
New customers sign on, and immediately hit friction.
The marketing team celebrates early click-throughs.
The CX team braces for impact.
And the brand loses trust before the relationship even starts.

This is what misalignment looks like in real time.

What It’s Costing You

The disconnect between CX and Marketing isn’t just a structural issue, it’s a revenue one.

  • 86% of buyers are willing to pay more for a great customer experience (1)

  • Over 50% of customers switch brands after just one bad experience (2)

  • 89% of businesses say they expect to compete primarily on customer experience in the next year (3)

  • Companies that invest in CX see $700M+ in additional revenue over three years (for $1B+ companies (4)

But beyond the stats, there’s the internal cost:

  • Budgets get spent on messaging that doesn’t reflect customer reality

  • Marketing and CX work on the same problems in silos

  • Campaigns perform on paper, but don’t move the business

  • Your brand looks good … until the actual experience doesn’t

What Good Looks Like

When CX and Marketing are aligned, your brand gets sharper. Your messaging gets real. And your teams work smarter. Here's what that looks like:

Messaging grounded in real feedback

Personas, content, and campaigns reflect what customers are actually asking, not just what the brand wants to say.

Shared journey mapping

Pre-sale and post-sale touchpoints are planned together. What Marketing promises, CX delivers. And both teams are equipped to understand where breakdowns occur — and why.

Collaborative insight loops

CX insights are shared regularly, not just when there's a problem. Marketing joins support calls. CX joins campaign briefings.

Stronger brand trust

When messaging and experience match, the brand isn’t just memorable, it’s consistent. And consistency builds trust.

How to Fix It: A Simple 3-Step Alignment Path

You don’t need to merge departments or rebuild your org chart. You just need to align what matters:

1. Listen together

Unify Voice-of-Customer (VoC) programs so CX and Marketing are using the same data, and interpreting it together.

2. Plan together

Involve CX in campaign planning and Marketing in journey mapping. Bring the insight up front, not after launch.

3. Act together

Build messaging, measurement, and optimization practices that are co-owned. CX shouldn’t just see the campaign once it’s live.


The Bottom Line

Marketing shouldn’t speak for the customer. It should speak from them.

And when CX and Marketing finally start speaking the same language, what gets built is more than just alignment … it’s momentum.

Our Perspective

At CLINTONSCOTT, we work with companies to close the gap between brand and experience, starting at the strategy level.

We help teams:

  • Realign messaging to reflect customer feedback

  • Build integrated insight loops between CX, Marketing, and Sales

  • Facilitate cross-functional planning and rollout

  • Create frameworks that connect marketing execution to customer outcomes

Because it’s not just about communication. It’s about building systems that make alignment the default, not the exception.

Want to explore how better alignment could shift your marketing?

 

Sources

(1) “32 Customer Experience Statistics You Need to Know in 2025”, SuperOffice, April, 25, 2025, https://www.superoffice.com/blog/customer-experience-statistics/

(2) Bishop, Court, “92 Customer Service Statistics You Need to Know in 2025”, Zendesk, January, 15, 2025, https://www.zendesk.com/blog/customer-service-statistics/

(3) Scatena, Melissa, “Customer Experience Statistics: What the Numbers Reveal for CX in 2025”, ONRAMP, December 19, 2024, https://onramp.us/blog/customer-experience-statistics

(4) Riback, Brian, “Feedback Loops, Not dashboards, Drive real CX Insights”, CMSWire, July, 2025, https://www.cmswire.com/customer-experience/feedback-loops-not-dashboards-drive-real-cx-insights/

Feel free to share this with your social networks! 

Clint Allen